I saw a neighbor boy practicing his jump shot into some tree branches in his front yard. I had a portable basketball hoop in the back from when I moved in that was just taking up space. So, I walked over and offered him the hoop for free. I saw him, his sister, parents, aunts, uncles, even a grandparent or two, all take a couple of shots at the hoop over time. It felt good to know his family got so much use out of it.

critical_fail1

I was nine years old, waiting for the school bus in Wisconsin during the winter. I had a thin coat, no hat or gloves. A woman driving past saw me and stopped, giving me a blanket from the back of her car. I remember thanking her, but being confused. I told her that I didn't know how I would give it back when I was done borrowing it. She hugged me and said not to worry. I still have that blanket.

saintdelft

I worked at Starbucks. One morning around 6:30, a customer came in and I asked how she was doing. "Oh its already crazy and I haven't even started," she replied. To make her day a little easier, I gave her her coffee order for free. A few days later, I was having a terrible morning. It was only 6:30, and everything was already chaos—but it quickly turned into the best day ever.

She came in as usual and saw that I was having a bad day. A couple hours later, she came back with a gift bag for me. Inside was a nice bottle of vintage. It’s amazing how someone's small gesture can make the day just a little bit nicer!

cuihmnestelan

I work for a non-profit organization downtown in a large city. There are a lot of homeless people who live on the sidewalk directly outside of our front door. There are less than 25 of us in that office, but several of my coworkers have saved people who were in medical distress due to substance addictions. I have literally seen them do CPR on people whose hearts had stopped.

None of them are medical people, but many have had CPR training. I’ve worked in that office for over a year and so far, none of the people who needed saving have succumbed on our watch. I once saw a co-worker, along with our receptionist, work on a guy for 10 minutes before he came back. I can’t express how amazing my coworkers are.

sykopoet

I was selling my bike online when I was a teenager for $30. A buyer contacted me, so we set up a location. The buyer ended up being two kids on a single bike; one was balancing on the pegs when they rode into the parking lot. The kid with the bike bought my bike for his friend so that they could ride together. It was the most wholesome thing I’ve ever seen, and I couldn’t keep the grin off of my face as I watched them ride away together.

SchrockyBalboa

I donated stem cells to a complete stranger. It’s a very impersonal experience because of the anonymity of it, so I didn’t know anything about the patient I was donating to, and she knew nothing about me. But then I received a heartbreaking message. I received a letter from her that really hammered home to me how much of an impact I had had on her life.

For me, it was a cheek swab I did in college four years ago, and then a random email saying that I had matched with someone. It was eye-opening to read her letter. Of course, it was a profound experience donating lifesaving stem cells to someone, but not knowing where those cells were going after the procedure had left me feeling a little empty, so I was grateful for her letter.

In 6th grade, I witnessed an incredible act of kindness. I was on the bus, 2 stops away from my stop on the way home from school. There was a man just lying on the sidewalk outside the bus, which had stopped. I noticed the bus driver wasn’t on the bus; I looked outside and saw our bus driver, being the nice lady she is, rush out of the bus, check his pulse and call an ambulance.

The bad part was that some people on my bus were saying cruel things, suggesting that the man was an addict, and that it was no use trying to help him. The next day, our bus driver heard the nasty rumors and decided to set us straight. "The man from yesterday actually went into diabetic shock". She basically saved him twice. You never know a person’s story until you ask.

BeebBeebLettuce27

I'm epileptic. Once, during a school assembly, I had a seizure, and it was pretty bad. When I woke up, the first people I saw were my English teacher smiling and telling me it would be okay, and my health teacher, who had apparently been the first person to run and get me help. I was in a super emotional state after the seizure, and I began to cry and say, “I'm sorry".

I was hushed by my teacher and helped down the bleachers. My health teacher, my English teacher, my choir director, and the school counsellor all stayed by me until I got into the ambulance. Later on, my English teacher also ended up sending me a very nice video of her and all of her family wishing me well. I was so grateful for all of the support!

alienartissst

My parents once bumped into a lady while they were traveling and got talking to her. She told them her horrific story. Her house had just burned down, her husband was gone, and she had no family or friends locally. She was outside my parents’ hotel bawling, standing around her car with her kids and not knowing what to do.

They had made it out of the burning house with nothing except the clothes they had on. The kids had no shoes, she was in a nightgown and wasn't sure what she was going to do for several days until she could contact distant people and get help. My parents had a car full of stuff from their travels, including clothing they had bought for my nieces and nephews.

They let her kids pick through it for shoes and shirts, gave them all the food in the cooler they traveled with, handed her all the travelers' checks they had on them, and then dad went inside to pay for a hotel room for a week for them.

ImmediateMountain9

I was 16 and driving over to my girlfriend's house on a rainy Saturday afternoon. There was a man biking in front of me and when he went to get onto the sidewalk, he completely wiped out. I pulled in to the closest driveway and saw that his bike was mangled and his arm was bleeding. I threw his bike in my trunk, gave him my old sweatshirt for his bloody arm, and drove him home.

When I dropped him off, he gave me his card. It turned out he was a dentist at a local research hospital. Well, fast-forward to when I was 19, and the same man took out my wisdom teeth for free as part of a "research experiment". Not sure if there was actually an experiment that they needed wisdom teeth for, but just goes to show that good things happen to good people.

salty_snacky

I worked at a museum that ran a summer camp, and I was in charge of the little kids. I had a kid in my group that came from a wealthy family. He brought a massive Megazord Power Rangers toy one day to play with. Then that kid did something so beautiful it made me cry. Another kid in my group tripped, scratched his knee, and started crying.

The first kid stepped in while I was taking care of the blood, and after noticing that the crying kid had a wolf on his T-shirt, asked, "Do you like wolves?" The crying kid answered while sobbing, "Yeah...a lot". Then the rich kid proceeded to snap the right leg of his Megazord off. As we watched, he transformed it into a purple wolf.

He gave it to the other kid and let him keep it just because he liked it. The kid stopped crying and cracked a smile. They became best friends from that point on.

Daviernex

I was talking to some random guy in the bar one night, and he mentioned that he was having surgery the next day and didn't have someone to pick him up afterward. He was just grabbing a bite to eat at the bar before his cut off time when I arrived. His girlfriend had just broken up with him and moved, and his backup driver fell through.

The poor guy just needed a hand. I ended up driving him there, sitting with him before he went in, calling his parents when he got out, sitting with him in recovery, picking up his post-op medication, driving him home, and making sure he was okay before I left. Seemed like no big deal at the time. Never saw him again, and that's okay.

nevermind-stet

My family and I were homeless when I was about to turn 13. My youngest brother is also severely autistic. We were standing in line for lunch at the local soup kitchen, which opened at 11 am. We had arrived at 6 in the morning, and were decently close to the door—there were only about 20 other people in front of us at the time.

My father had just returned from taking my youngest brother for yet another walk around the block, as he had begun fighting and biting himself in frustration. After another few minutes in line, it was clear that he had more than reached his tiny 9-year-old limit and had begun to lose it. People were staring at the fuss he was making.

There were a couple of guys who were dressed in ratty t-shirts, jean vests covered in patches, and plenty of veteran memorabilia, mostly from Vietnam. Each of them had either an old, dirty backpack or a trash bag, which held all of their personal belongings in the world. One of the men, in a wheelchair and missing a leg, saw my little brother’s frustration.

After hearing my mother apologetically explain yet again that he had severe autism, the man rolled up to the five of us—two parents and three young kids, all sunburnt from the Florida sun with no place to call home—and unhooked his one treasured possession. He had a little stuffed monkey that was hooked onto his steering portion of the wheelchair. It was the only clean thing about the man.

He gave it to my little brother, and my little brother immediately hugged it and cuddled with it, calming down. I'll never forget the man’s words: "He looks like he could use it more than me". It was his one and only real, treasured possession and he gave it to a little boy that was crying. Now, I'm in a position to give back, and I do whenever I can, but I don't think I could ever repay that single gesture.

aaerlevsedi

My dad ran into an old high school friend that he hadn't seen in years. He learned that the man had cancer, that he had no family except a son in college in another state, and that he was basically dealing with his condition all by himself. So my dad started taking him to his appointments and out to lunch, just to keep him company and help him through.

He even organized how to take his crazy number of prescriptions, since it was confusing to figure out when to take them when they all had different times and requirements; apparently there were about 18 of them in all. Then, when his friend succumbed, my dad helped his son do all of the end-of-life arrangements. My dad is my hero. He is such a giving person and I strive to be like him.

LaeliaCatt

My husband and I adopted a Great Dane and named him Paxton. He quickly became the equivalent of our first child. Pax went everywhere with us, including family holidays like Christmas and vacations. Pax was more human than a lot of humans I've met. He would actually hug me when I was down, loved everyone, even cats, and slept with his stuffed frog for years.

Paxton passed suddenly last year of a heart attack. We came home to find him on the floor of the living room. My husband and I were devastated. We can’t have kids, and Pax was our baby. In the 18 months before Pax passed, I had also lost my mom, my grandmother, and uncle. I think something in me broke. I couldn’t function. I took a week off work.

When I returned, I had an envelope waiting for me on my desk. Its contents made me burst into tears. It was a thank you card from the local animal shelter. My co-worker had donated $150 to them in Paxton’s name. I was floored. I knew he was a dog, and didn't expect anyone else to get that he had been like a child to me. That one gesture was so kind and needed. She will never know how much that meant to us.

WishingRadiance

I was biking to school on a pretty busy street, and while waiting at a stoplight, I had a seizure. I fell off of the bike onto the side of the street. Next thing I knew, I was safe on the sidewalk and there were a dozen homeless people crowded over me, comforting me and getting help. It was very embarrassing, but they were so sweet. Not sure what would have happened if they hadn’t been there!

ftnverified

I absolutely love doing adopt-a-family programs during Christmas. I don't have kids of my own, so I love the opportunity to buy gifts for kids in low-income families. My favorite family of them all was single mom who'd just turned 18. Her son was three and she'd moved into her very first apartment. She had nothing but two bare mattresses on the floor, one for her and one for her son.

She was working a job and was trying to save up for things for the house. Her wish list was heartbreaking. She wanted blankets for them both, a pan to cook with, and a Spider-Man toy for her son. That's it. I was single at the time, and supporting myself, so I only had a couple hundred to spend, but I was determined to make it go as far as possible.

I got her a complete comforter/sheet set, a pillow, and a full set of cooking pans. Then I found the coolest thing for her son: it was a fitted sheet that turned his bed into a Spider-Man tent! It was awesome! I found a big Spider-Man stuffed toy for him as well. I also found a huge book with over 100 full-length bedtime stories. I got the usual boring stuff of course, clothes for her son and a gift card for a holiday meal. But then I found the ultimate deal.

It was a clearance TV/dvd combo for less than $100! I knew money was tight for them, so I included a note in her Christmas card letting her know that she could rent her son videos from the library for free. I would have given anything to see their faces; I hope that it made her first Christmas on her own a little more happy.

coffcat

Sometimes when my sister is sleeping or napping, I plug her phone in to charge so that when she wakes up, it’ll be 100%.

Fancyliving228

I had some extra laminate flooring from a renovation I was doing. An elderly neighbor saw it and offered to buy what I had leftover. I hesitated, because it wasn't really leftover, I had other plans for it. It was about a thousand dollars worth of material. I told her if she could hire our neighbor to move it for her, she could have it for free, since I knew my neighbor needed the money. She agreed and redid her living room with it.

freud_sigmund

It was my first job in the field of conservation, and my boss was really tough, but secretly was a kind man. I had a six-month-old son and I was a 20-year-old single mom. I had just found out some bad news, and I was really sinking financially. My son's dad was dipping in and out. I wasn't emotionally mature enough for a relationship at the time. I had too much on my plate. One thing after another.

I was also the only woman on a crew of seven men, working to plant trees, fix United States Forestry Service roads and restore habitats for ten hours a day. I was too girlie to relate to the guys, but too manly for my girlfriends. Nobody understood. I felt hopeless. One day I cried on lunch break; it was all stacking up and I was cracking under the pressure.

After work the next day, as the other crew members filtered out of the work trucks, my boss said to me, "Just wait for a second". I was irritated, because I thought he was going to ream me out for my work performance, which he frequently did, for everyone. Instead, he waited until everyone was gone, pulled out his wallet, and took out a bunch of cash.

He said, "I don't know how much is here, because I just grabbed a handful. But I want you to take every dollar in my wallet and help get yourself out of that hole you're in". It's been almost a decade since then, and my life has been completely turned around. I'm deliriously happy now. That gruff, sour old forester made a big change in my life, one that reached far beyond that moment of desperation and generosity.

iron_annie

I broke my foot while bouldering a week into my semester abroad. I had never been out of the country before, so I was absolutely panicking. A total stranger came right over after I fell, recorded important information for the paramedics, and spent the next ten or so minutes while waiting for the ambulance asking me questions about my studies and my research after I mentioned that I was a student. His kindness was able to calm me down even though I was absolutely freaking out.

bakeseal

One of the smartest people I ever met married one of my good friends from high school. She had dabbled in coding games for fun, but had no IT experience. She was working minimum wage at a sandwich shop, which I thought was a shame, because she hated it and could do so much better. I was a manager at an IT consulting firm at the time.

I knew if given the chance to work in IT as a developer, she would do great. So I pushed my company to hire her as an intern. Without any code camp, relevant college classes, or experience, I was told that our company could never hire her. So, I helped her start small user group, put together a resume, and prep for an interview.

Then I went back to my company and forced the issue. I had to use a number of favors just to get her an interview. Then I basically cashed in all of my political capital, and said if she wasn’t successful, I would be accountable for it. They gave her a chance—and she did wonderfully, just as I knew she would. That was five years ago.

Today, she is a java developer making over $80k a year with full benefits. She loves her job, and my good friend doesn’t work much because his wife makes so much money. Unfortunately, pushing so hard was a contributing factor to the company letting me go a year later. I found a new job, so it worked out for me too. I don’t think she realizes what it cost me to get her in, and it’s probably better that way, but knowing I gave her a chance to change the trajectory of her life makes me smile.

dgreenleaf83

I was in a car accident when I was four years old that left me in a coma. But that wasn't the worst part. My sister, who was also in the car, succumbed to her injuries the next day. I was unconscious when my sister’s funeral was going to occur, which meant I would be left alone at the hospital. My preschool teacher offered to sit with me and hold my hand at the hospital, so that my parents could attend my sister’s funeral without having to worry about me being alone. It is the kindest gesture anyone has ever done for me.

natgoeshome

When I turned 18, I was struggling immensely with my mental health. One day it all got too overwhelming and I left the house, thinking I’d end up at the train tracks. My mind was in an absolutely terrible state. I got to the park and just couldn’t keep walking, so I sat on a bench and manically wept so hard that I couldn’t feel my body, and I was shaking uncontrollably.

My mum was calling me to try to find me, but my phone was about to die. Many strangers walked straight past me, or threw me a look of disgust. Then one lady, who lived on the street next to mine, stopped and sat beside me. She just sat and hugged me. She eventually called my mum and told her where I was before my phone finally ran out of battery.

Then she stayed with me until my mom arrived and took me for a long drive to calm me down. I still see the woman around when I’m back in my hometown. I don’t know if she remembers sitting with me, but I do, and her presence that day meant a lot to me. I’ve always wanted to let her know that I appreciated it a lot and will never forget it.

memevangelion

After school one day, I was supposed to have practice, but it got unexpectedly canceled and nobody told me until it was too late. My school days ended at 3:10, and busses left at 3:20. It was like 3:18, so I scrambled to grab my stuff and find my bus, which changed places frequently. I couldn’t find my bus, and all of the busses started leaving.

Now, I could have just walked home, but it was raining and I had a ton of stuff with me to bring home. My old bus driver, who drove another bus, saw me stranded and crying. So, she pulled over and lingered so that I could hop on. She waited with a bus full of kids waiting to go home, for a kid who doesn’t even belong on her bus anymore. That is one of the nicest things anyone has ever done for me.

everyone_hates_lolo

When I was enlisting into the army, my recruiter picked me up to go over some paperwork in his office, which was close to the downtown area of my city. On the way there, we passed a homeless woman sitting on the side of the road. Without even a second thought, my recruiter whipped the car around and pulled through a nearby drive-through.

He bought a huge meal with a large cup of water, and raced back to where the woman was sitting. The look on her face when he pulled up and handed her the meal through the window was something I will never forget. He didn't have to do something like that, but he did it out of the kindness of his heart. He's one of the best leaders I know, and I try to emulate him in everything I do.

Leoprrrd

I was at a convention standing in line to get David Tennant's autograph. I was so excited that I unfortunately caused a seizure. After I woke up, I was so embarrassed. I was wheeled back beyond a curtain that was behind the autograph booth. A moment later, David Tennant's agent came up to me and asked me what color pen I wanted.

I was confused, but I said black. After he said that, he explained that David wanted to come back to make sure I was okay. I was still pretty embarrassed, but of course I agreed. The first thing he said to me was a joking, “What are you doing falling down on me?” Then we had a full conversation. Eventually, he asked my name, and autographed the book I had brought. I was so excited that I forgot to be embarrassed!

alienartissst

I had a breakdown in the middle of one of my college classes. I had been depressed for several weeks, feeling like I wasn’t good enough to be in my major. Really I just felt worthless. I was doing a performance-based test in front of the whole class, and I was doing terribly. I was really angry with myself for not being better.

My professor interrupted me midway through and asked, “Do you want to try it again at the end of class?” I nodded, went back to my seat—and immediately started crying uncontrollably. I couldn’t help it or stop. I ended up excusing myself to the bathroom so that I wouldn’t cry in front of the class and embarrass myself further.

I performed again at the end of the class, and my professor was really patient with me and gave me feedback. The thing that really got me was before he dismissed the class, he wrote something down in the binder I had open in front of me. When I read it, I've never felt so touched. It said, “You are a strong, smart musician, and you have a bright future ahead of you. I believe in you, and I’m here for you".

I cried even harder after that, but in a good way. I had never had a teacher care about me that much, or show me so much compassion. That one message genuinely turned around my entire year and made my sense of self-worth improve exponentially. I still think about it all the time, and I’ll be forever grateful to that professor.

MusicalMal

I worked at Apple and had a homeless gentleman come in and ask for a job. Even though he tried on several occasions, he couldn’t get a job, unfortunately, because he had no phone and no home. He eventually got into a halfway home, and a bunch of us at the store got together and got him a cheap phone and a SIM card, paid for six months. He eventually got a job and isn’t homeless now!

applejackrr

It was the first day of isolation here in Michigan, and there was a line in the grocery store that wrapped around the building. I spent 90 minutes waiting to check out. Eventually, I was next in line, but the lady in front of me had a problem with her card: it was denied. After a few failed attempts, the cashier asked her to step aside and call her bank.

They set her groceries aside. She only had necessities, nothing fancy; jugs of water, rice, macaroni & cheese, everything generic brand. As I was checking out, she was sitting on a bench trying to get through to her bank without having any luck at all. So I asked the cashier to check out her groceries with mine, which she did.

As I checked out the cashier told the woman, who was still waiting on the phone, that she was good to go. She was confused, and the cashier told her that I had paid for her groceries. If I had lifted a car off of this woman, she couldn’t have looked any more grateful. I once rescued a claustrophobic woman who was trapped in an elevator, and her look of gratitude didn’t even compare to the look of appreciation I got from this woman at the grocery store.

She said thank you and asked my name. I told her, said something cliche about needing to stick together, and we went our separate ways. It was only $80, it wasn’t a big deal to me. But, in that moment, on that day, when things were falling apart and people felt scared and powerless, after waiting so long, and not knowing what to do, my small act of kindness had been a big deal to her. I was so glad I was able to help out, even that little bit.

DerekPaxton

When I was in seventh grade, I was getting yelled at by some mean people at lunch one day. I had been tormented for years and was getting tired of it. After the mean kids went away, I just sat down on the floor where I was and ate my lunch, stifling tears and sniffles. A group of sixth-graders came up to me and asked what was wrong. I told them what had happened and they offered to have lunch with me. I accepted. Then we just started having lunch every day.

feeddahippo

I had recently moved to a foreign country, and one day I was riding my bike and epically crashed. I ripped a hole in my leg and couldn’t make it to the hospital. I also didn’t know how to call the country’s emergency services. I flagged down a car and when they saw the leg gash, they told me to get in. They not only drove me to the hospital, but they also held on to my bike all day, and then once I was done and back at home, brought it over to me. Complete strangers and the kindest people I had met in a while.

caiatrid

It was Christmas Eve and I found out that a friend of mine had literally no one to spend Christmas Day with. I lived far away and had a family of my own, but I wanted to help him somehow. I was browsing Facebook and suddenly saw a friend of ours post that he had room for a spare person on a trip. I told my first friend to go grab his passport and pack to go away for a few days, and then sent him to Amsterdam on Christmas Eve with some spending money. Dude was in tears.

fract00l

When I was 17, my mom signed us up to deliver presents for one of those giving tree places. The lady who she was taking presents to lived in a tiny town in a rural part of our state that was about an hour and a half from where we lived at the time, but also just happened to be close to where we had lived when I was little.

I tagged along with her because she asked, and I didn’t want her to have to drive all the way out there alone on Christmas Eve. I didn’t want to go though; I hated the tiny town we were going to. I was a moody teenager in a perpetual bad mood, and I thought I had better stuff to do. Anyway, we got out there and found the place.

It was a tiny, one room shack in among tiny one room shacks behind what used to be a little hotel on the side of a rural highway. We knocked on the door and this little woman, probably in her mid-late 20s but so careworn that she looked closer to 40, opened the door. She invited us in and we offloaded the goods, like three bags of presents. Her three kids were peeking at us from behind a curtain, and she had them come out to say thank you.

She was beaming, couldn’t stop thanking us. The kids were ecstatic. They weren’t getting presents at all until we knocked on that door. It was like 10pm Christmas Eve, and we had basically saved Christmas for them. As we left I was quiet until we got in the car. Then I turned to my mom and told her that I was glad she had brought me.

She started crying her eyes out and just grabbed me and hugged me tight. I offered to drive home and she agreed. On the way she told me that when I was little, we had been in that family’s position. We had gotten gifts from that same giving tree organization for years. I knew we had been poor, but never realized how poor. I still consider that my best Christmas. I have no idea what I got that year; but I remember giving those kids and their mom a good Christmas, and that’s so much better.

AdumLarp

I work at a veterinary clinic, and was helping a client when he noticed that our euthanasia candle was lit. They asked if someone was saying goodbye, and I sadly nodded. His next act brought tears to my eyes. He handed me his credit card and said he’d like to pay for them. Trying not to lose it and burst into tears completely, I ran his card through and thanked him.

He waved his hand saying that he’s been in that position plenty of times, knew how difficult it was, and wanted to help. He wished to remain anonymous and left with his pet.

allisynWinchester

There was a man on the train I was on giving grief to the ticket attendant because he had incorrectly purchased a ticket and she had asked him nicely to buy a new one. Long story short, he asked for her full name and said he wanted to write a complaint. I felt bad for her, because she was just doing her job and had done nothing wrong.

I left my spot and went on a mission to find her. When I did find her, she looked absolutely miserable. I asked her nicely if she had any spare paper and a pen, and she brought it to me. I then wrote a recommendation from myself to her boss saying that she had been a great host and was doing a great job. The smile on her face was beautiful.

su-reddit

I went to pump gas today. The card reader was broken, so I went inside to pay. As I opened the door, I saw a mother holding her daughter’s hand saying, “come here honey,” as she inched towards the cashier. She then pulled out a crumpled dollar bill and some change and told the cashier, “$1.47 on 3 please". When it was my turn, I added another $10 to her pump.

I tried to do the deed unnoticed, but her $1.47 worth of gas ran out before I could enter my $10 worth. This resulted in me going outside and telling her to try the pump again. She knew it was me, and was very thankful. I can’t help but wonder if the exchange was meant to be. How often is a card reader broken at a gas station forcing you to go inside?

Had that not been the case, I wouldn’t have been presented with the opportunity to help. Before the mother left, she told me that she hopes someone does something nice for me in return. Though that would be appreciated, the only thing I truly hope for in return is to be presented with more opportunities where I can be of help. I have yet a single regret: Only adding $10.

Ksteeeze

My brother and I were driving home to my parents’ house, and it was about a five-hour drive from our college. We came up a hill in a fairly rural area and I saw something weird on the side of the road; a motorcycle abandoned on its side. My brother said it was nothing, but I stopped anyway because I had an eerie feeling. I soon found out I was right.

It turns out that a 65-year-old man had crashed his motorcycle and was unconscious in the ditch. Since there was a hill right there and he was on the other side of it, he was pretty hidden and no one saw it happen. He was ten minutes away from his house too. I stayed with him until the ambulance came, and then checked in on him a few weeks later.

He had some broken ribs and was a little beat up, but he made it just fine. I think about him a lot and hope he’s enjoying his retirement and is staying away from motorcycles.

tinytinyspaghetti

At one point in my life, I was struggling so much financially that it was difficult to even gather up a couple of dollars to put gas in my gas-guzzler car. Consequently, I rarely had more than 1/4 tank, even in the winter. One day, I miscalculated, and I ran out of gas in the middle of town. I remember carefully walking on snow and ice to a nearby phone booth carrying my nine-month-old baby in his snowsuit.

I only had a handful of phone numbers memorized, and nobody I called answered the phone. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t even have enough money for a bus. Out of desperation and feeling completely humiliated, I approached a stranger and asked for a couple of dollars so I could walk to a nearby gas station and buy some gas.

He told me a couple of dollars wouldn’t be enough, because they’d want deposit money for the gas can. I’m sure my face fell as I fought back tears and muttered, “Thanks anyway". He looked at me a moment, and then said, “I’ll be right back. You stay here". He left for a few minutes and came back with a full gas can. As he poured the gas into my tank for me, he told me the location of the gas station where he got it.

He then said, “I’m counting on you to return this gas can". He drove away once I assured him that I would. When I got to the station about a half-mile away, the attendant told me that my “friend” had given him $40 and told him that it was so I could fill my gas tank and that he was to give me the change. It was like a miracle to me, and I started crying all over again.

Tehannalives

I was walking down the beach in Morocco on holiday in December when I saw this couple walking the opposite way to me. It was a chilly day, so the women had her hands in her pockets and she was all snuggled up in a big scarf. She started scrunching up her face and titling her head, and was clearly about to let out a big sneeze. Her partner noticed that she was about to sneeze and before I knew it, he had whipped out a tissue and covered her nose before she even had to take her hands out of her pockets. It was the most wholesome, purest and kindest thing I’ve ever seen.

cleopatra9876

An acquaintance of mine with two kids had his car repossessed. I only found out after a mutual friend of ours was gossiping about it. I decided to give the guy my second car, since it was just sitting in the garage gathering dust. He used it for two years until he got his dad's old car. I let him sell the car and keep the $600 bucks he got for it. For years before, I had people ask me why I was keeping that second car and I just kept saying, "just in case".

freud_sigmund

I was at a store and there was a woman with two very small kids checking out. She had a bunch of groceries and a couple of toys for the kids. She went to pay and discovered that she didn't have her wallet, so she told the cashier that she would put everything back. Her little girl, who was only about 2, started to cry uncontrollably.

The rough-looking man in front of me, who looked like he could have been homeless, went up to the cashier and told her that he was going to pay for everything. When the lady protested he said, "I don't want your little girl to cry. This is my good deed for the day". I almost cried too, as did the lady who was trying to buy her groceries.

KathAlMyPal

Years ago, I was going to a family get together and I was told I needed to bring dessert. So, I went to the store and was looking at the cake mixes for an awkwardly long time, not knowing what to get. A lady walked up beside me and began scanning the options as well. After several minutes, I said jokingly, “Are you having a tough time deciding too?”

She replied yes, and explained that for the past fifteen months, she had been watching her diet and exercise and that she lost 100 pounds. I replied, “Wow that’s incredible—you should really be proud of yourself!” She replied with a shrug. I stopped her and said it again, because I really meant it. She started to cry. I asked why she was crying, and she said that her family and friends weren't very supportive of her efforts.

I said, “Well I'm very proud of you!” and asked if I could give her a hug. She said yes, so we hugged right there in the middle of the aisle. Then, she said thank you and we parted.

Hoosier61

About 8 years ago, I had lost my job and was on social assistance. One day I went into my pharmacist to have my prescription filled. I miscalculated the total and I was about ten dollars short, but it was all the money I had to my name at that moment. Embarrassed, I was fiddling in my purse looking for coins when the pharmacist stopped me and said it was okay.

They just gave me the medication, no charge. A few weeks later I got a job, and upon receiving my first paycheck, I paid them a visit with a big box of chocolates and a thank you card. I tried to give them what I owed for my medication, and they refused it. What they did for me meant so much at such a dark time and I’ll never forget it.

Hapennydub

My dad was working in construction in New York City in the early 90s. It was December and it was raining, so there was nasty slush everywhere. He saw a homeless guy outside the train station on his way home. The poor man was wearing no jacket, and had shoes with holes in the bottom so large that you could see his wet socks through them.

Dad gave him the boots off his feet, the jacket off his back, two extra pairs of socks he had packed with him, and a $20 gift card to a local chain restaurant that he had received for his birthday but hadn’t used yet. We picked my dad up at the train station, shoeless, socks soaking, with no jacket, shivering uncontrollably.

Despite all that, he was smiling and waving at us as we pulled up. We were poor growing up, so he had a lot of compassion for people who were struggling. He knew, as you will if you’ve ever had to buy them, that good work boots and a good winter jacket aren’t cheap buys. He saw someone who needed what he had more than him and gave it, just because he could.

An older gentlemen tried to ship an envelope to his “grandson” from a shipping company I worked at. The way he acted and the things he said threw up too many red flags in my head, so against company policy, I opened the envelope after he left and found 5 figures in cash inside. I called the authorities and told them to get in touch with the man to try to figure out what was going on.

As it turns out, someone had called the older man and said his grandson was in the hospital and if they didn’t send the money, he wouldn’t get a surgery that was badly needed. The older man couldn’t get in touch with the grandson by phone, so he panicked and sent the money to the address the fraudsters provided. We were able to stop it from happening and get the money back to him. He was so grateful; he said that the money was basically his life savings.

The news ran a story on the situation, and apparently it’s a scam that happens to a lot of older people. We started a club to reach out to nursing homes to try to educate people about the scam. A lot of people were not aware of anything like that happening, so hopefully we prevented some people getting scammed. A lot of good came from me just being nosey!

Yoinkie2013

My neighbors asked to borrow my truck one day. I told them no because I could not trust my truck due to the tires being bald. The next day, my neighbor called and said that he was getting new tires for his vehicle, and that I could have his old ones, since he knew I needed them. He told me to just show up at a certain tire shop and they would put them on for me.

When I got to the tire shop, I was shocked when they put on brand new Goodyear tires. I asked what had happened to the used tires I had been expecting to receive, wondering if there had been a mistake. The shop owner smiled and confessed that the “old tires” were just a story to get me in the shop. My neighbor had bought me a full set of new tires instead.

jorcam

I had been working as a server for a while, and one day I was working with a co-worker who was pretty new. They'd sent most staff home because it was late. Then disaster struck. As it always seems to happen at those times, we got super busy. My co-worker was struggling and got a terribly rude table. They didn't seem to understand that they weren't the only customers in the restaurant or that we were understaffed, and it took a turn for the worse.

They made her cry and have a meltdown. We've all been there, so I took over the table and, after they left, put $15 on the table so that she would see she had received a "tip" from the table. I never told her that I was the one who put money on the table for her. Seeing her confidence grow from that was what I was hoping for. I got my wish.

When she picked up the tip, a grin broke across her face and she said, "Wow! I must not be as terrible of a server as I thought I was! Maybe I'm getting the hang of it after all".

MaxtheCatismyFav

My dad is a retired junior/senior high school art teacher. Every single morning for well over a decade, he packed an extra lunch and put it in a place in his classroom where a student whose family was struggling could take it without making a big deal of it. Eventually, when the older student graduated, one of his younger siblings started taking his class.

The kid would already know he could take the extra lunch bag without having to face talking to my dad about it, or being embarrassed in front of the class. I used to ask why Dad packed two lunches while I was growing up, and he would just say, “I sometimes get extra hungry". My mom later told me the truth. He is such a quiet, humble, and extremely generous man.

saudadedabahia

When my wife gave birth to our firstborn, the woman she had shared a ward with while in the early stages of labor had a stillbirth. After giving birth, rather than spending time bonding with her newborn, my exhausted wife handed me our son and spent the next three hours comforting and consoling the poor woman. Something about the bond of mothers seemed to connect them.

The woman and her husband have since become close family friends and had two beautiful children after that—they still credit the support my wife gave them in the period of time after the stillbirth, especially in those three hours, with helping them get through their grief. It was the kindest act I've ever seen, done by the kindest person I've ever met.

ElCapitan2020

Sources: 1, 2

For all that Catherine was doomed to tragedy, her childhood was charmed. Her mother and father were no less than King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, a royal power couple of the time. The pair gave their daughter lessons in cunning, courting, and statecraft…and she’d need all of them to survive her husband King Henry VIII.

From a young age, it was clear that Catherine was going to be a looker. She had long auburn hair, bright blue eyes, and a cherubic face. People actually called her “the most beautiful creature in the world," and one courtier noted, "There were few women who could compete with the Queen in her prime." Once that “prime” ended though, it was quite a different story.

Catherine’s path to King Henry VIII was almost as dramatic as her actual marriage. For one, she started out betrothed to his brother, not him. That's right, her ambitious parents arranged her engagement to Henry's older sibling Prince Arthur, the heir to England. But it gets creepier. Catherine was just a toddling three years old at the time.

Even people in Medieval times thought that three was a little young to get hitched, so everyone did the patient thing and…waited until Arthur turned 15, which is obviously the exact age all boys turn into emotionally-responsible men. When the clock struck “teen,” Catherine carted herself off to London to meet her groom. It did not go as she planned.

The teenagers had become pen-pals over the long years of their childhood betrothal, corresponding in Latin to get over their Spanish-English language barrier. Throughout these long letters, they built up hopes about each other and developed desperate, teenage crushes. Except their first impression couldn’t have gone worse.

Catherine’s first meeting with her Prince Charming was kind of a disaster. The young lovers tried to converse in Latin, their own private language of love…and found out that they had different pronunciations. So different, in fact, that they couldn’t even understand each other. Like it or not, though, the wheels had been set in motion.

Prince Arthur and his Spanish princess officially married on November 14, 1501 in a stately, lavish ceremony that fit their ranks as royals. Right before the wedding, Catherine’s new beau even promised his parents he would be a “true and loving husband” to his wife. Little did he know, immense tragedy was around the corner.

Catherine of Aragon and Arthur posted up near Wales to wile away their teenaged honeymoon. Mere months later, their celebrations turned to terror. The fatal "sweating sickness" was ravaging the area at the time, and they both fell desperately ill, likely with the sickness. But that was just the beginning of the nightmare.

Bedridden and delirious, Catherine spent the next days fighting for her life. When she pulled through, it was an absolute miracle—yet the young princess didn’t come out unscathed. Though she survived, she awoke to find that her young husband had not. At 16 years old, Catherine was a widow…and this was dangerous in more ways than one.

The minute she became Arthur’s widow, Catherine’s position was incredibly precarious. Her father-in-law, King Henry VII, was anxious to keep her dowry dollars, and sending her back to Spain meant giving a full refund. What he suggested next was utterly disturbing. The 45-year-old monarch wanted to marry her himself. Ew.

Eventually, Catherine’s parents protested so much about a creepy old man marrying their teen daughter that the king relented. Yet this only put the poor girl on a much darker path. The old king’s replacement suitor was his younger son, the future King Henry VIII. With a marital lead-up like that, how could it get worse for Catherine? **nervous laughter**

In fact, even Catherine’s betrothal to Henry VIII was an absolute nightmare. Their marriage was delayed, partly because Catherine was five years older than the growing Henry, but mostly because her stingy father was super slow in handing over the rest of her dowry. In the meantime, Catherine sat waiting in London—and the conditions were brutal.

The old King Henry VII posted Catherine up in Durham House in London, but this was anything but the royal treatment. Alone in a foreign country, Catherine was practically penniless in the drafty manor, and had to not only support herself but also her ladies-in-waiting. But then the English royal family had to go and make it horrific.

During this time in limbo, relations between England and Spain deteriorated, and many started betting the marriage wouldn’t go through at all. Then Prince Henry dealt her a crushing blow. In 1505, the literal minute he turned 14 and had a say in the matter, Henry refused to marry the Spanish princess. Catherine had to think very fast to keep her crown.

Catherine and her father came up with a brilliant solution to stay in royal favor. Daddy Ferdinand suggested that instead of royal bride, Catherine become the “Spanish Ambassador” to England, making her Europe's first female ambassador in the process. It worked, and Catherine got to stay in England and win Henry back...even though he 100% wasn't worth it.

The entire time she was in this purgatory, Catherine’s father-in-law King Henry was constantly trying to test and manipulate her. Well, he gravely underestimated the girl. Catherine was one smart cookie; as she wrote to her father, “I choose what I believe, and say nothing. For I am not as simple as I may seem." Her cunning eventually won her the crown.

Throughout the entire ordeal, Catherine of Aragon remained astoundingly single of purpose about becoming the Queen of England. Devout and stubborn, she felt it was her destiny to rule, and took everything Henry and his father threw at her—which was heck of a lot—with a shrug. As we’ll see, this steeliness only grew throughout her life.

Catherine’s marriage to Henry was actually unimaginably scandalous for the time. Because she had already been married to his brother, they had to get special dispensation from the Pope for the union. Even then, the royals only got a reluctant go-ahead...and only after Catherine made a extremely controversial confession.

Henry and Catherine's petition to the Pope hinged on a single claim: Catherine’s assurance that she and Arthur had never consummated their union. As they were both scrawny, nervous teenagers too busy trying to survive the sweating sickness to get it on, this may very well be true. Either way, it would still come back to haunt Catherine.

After seven long years, Henry finally “stooped” to marry Catherine. Still, he picked a good time to do it. When the now 23-year-old Catherine walked down the aisle on June 11, 1509, Henry had been newly crowned king. Accordingly, Queen Catherine had her own lavish coronation just a handful of days later. The good times did not keep rolling.

The one area where Henry wasn't horrific was in the looks department. In his best years with Catherine, he was a strapping, auburn-haired athlete who loved hunting as much as he loved his Humanist education. Still, King Henry VIII was only a 17-year-old teenager when he married Catherine, and his immaturity started to show.

Just two months after her wedding and crowning, Catherine was overjoyed to find herself pregnant. But her excitement soon turned into a profound sense of loss. Five months later, she went into premature labor and gave birth to a stillborn girl. The young couple were filled with grief, but sadly, that was just the first in a series of cruelties.

Catherine had a child who “disappeared.” After she suffered her first of many miscarriages, her stomach remained puffy, probably from infection. Yet this caused her doctors to believe that she had been carrying twins and one had survived, even as Catherine continued to menstruate. So she had yet another indignity ahead of her.

It’s not a stretch to say that pre-natal care was…experimental in 1510. So, armed with the tragically false hope that she had another baby on the way after her miscarriage, Catherine went into seclusion again for the royal birth two months later. Of course, no child arrived, and the young Queen was crestfallen all over again.

Around this time, Henry wasn’t helping marital matters one bit. He took mistresses even early on in their marriage, and at the absolute worst times. In 1510, right around the time Catherine was suffering the misery of her first stillbirth labor, Henry took up with either Elizabeth or Anne Hastings, two beautiful nobles in his court. Thanks, hubby.

Soon after her "twins" ordeal, Catherine was pregnant again—and this time things were different. She gave birth to a healthy baby boy, christened Henry, on January 1511. At the sight of a living baby, and a boy at that, the young royals breathed a sigh of relief and popped open the bubbly. And then the other shoe dropped.

In February 1511, Catherine experienced a sudden and vicious shock. Her baby Henry passed after a mere 52 days on this Earth. Contemporary sources indicate the child suffered from a digestive issue, but this knowledge could have hardly soothed Catherine’s grief. Not to mention her husband was getting antsy for a healthy male heir…

Despite the ravages of their personal life, King Henry VIII gave Catherine almost unprecedented political power around this time, making her his Regent in 1513 while he went to France on campaign. This was no mere rubber stamp, either: Though Henry was fighting on one border, Catherine quickly found herself alone and defending England against a different enemy.

While Henry was away in France, Scotland saw an opening and started invading England, assuming Catherine of Aragon was a weak woman and ruler. Did Catherine back down? Heck no, she became a warrior queen. She helped raised armies, made banners, and marshalled allies. Then Catherine pulled off her most spectacular feat yet.

In September 1513, Catherine famously rode north in complete armor and regalia and gave an inspirational speech to her men, showing them what a queen she was. But most people don’t know the best part. At the moment Catherine went full Boudicca on her enemies, she was actually seven months pregnant. And that wasn’t all…

Just to prove she was not a woman who got the vapors, Catherine sent her husband Henry the torn, bloody coat of King James IV of Scotland, who had perished in battle with her men. In a stunning move of statecraft, Catherine also suggested Henry use it as a banner in his own battles on the continent. But this wasn’t even Catherine’s bloodiest idea.

As it turned out, Catherine originally wanted to send Henry much more than a coat-tail—she wanted to cart over King James' entire rotting corpse. The torn coat was just a consolation prize, since she realized that Englishmen were too “weak-bellied” to handle it—that was her exact word. Yet Catherine paid a high price for her valor.

Perhaps fuelled by all the stresses she was under, Catherine went into premature labor again on September 17, 1513, just days after rallying her men. It was another boy, and it was another stillbirth. Then next year, the same unbearable tragedy happened again. This made her fourth failed pregnancy in five years, and the queen was desperate for a win on the homefront.

In 1516, Catherine finally got a break…sort of. That winter, she gave birth to her one child who would survive into adulthood, the future Queen Mary I of England. After half a decade of trying for a healthy child, you’d think King Henry VIII would be happy with a live daughter. Instead, his response was utterly disturbing.

Henry was dejected at the thought that after a string of stillborn sons, he now had a healthy daughter to feed. In fact, he even consoled Catherine by saying that since this one was a girl, it meant a better chance for a boy the next time. No, Henry didn’t understand basic laws of probability, but he also didn’t understand basic human decency, either.

Around this time, Henry had been seeing yet another mistress, this time the cheeky good-time gal Bessie Blount. Though Catherine seemed to permit most of his dalliances, this one drove her mad. Not only did Henry carry on the affair for three long years, Blount even gave birth to a healthy boy, Henry’s illegitimate son Henry FitzRoy.

Catherine’s final pregnancy happened 1518, and it was absolutely heartbreaking. By now, the Queen was in a frenzy for a living son, and even made a pilgrimage to a shrine to beg God for a healthy boy. It was not to be. She gave birth to a fragile daughter who lived only a few hours. Some say that at this point, Catherine’s fate was sealed.

When the 1520s rolled around with no male heir in sight, Henry and Catherine’s relationship was fraying at the edges—and then Catherine made a fatal error. In 1522, the queen got a viper in her nest when she hired the now infamous Anne Boleyn as her lady-in-waiting. Within three years, things had spiralled completely out of control.

Boleyn was a double threat to Catherine's crown. First, the bewitchingly beautiful Anne refused to sleep with Henry without a ring. But there was something even more sinister. Catherine was now past her childbearing years, whereas Anne was 11 years younger than Henry, and he still desperately wanted that heir. He'd stop at nothing to get it.

Hot under the collar for the withholding Anne, Henry started thinking of every excuse in the book to drop Catherine like a hot potato. And when I say “the book” I mean The Bible: According to Henry, their union was cosmically cursed, all because he had broken God’s law when he married his brother’s widow. This did nothing to help their growing estrangement...

Anne Boleyn didn't underestimate Catherine’s intelligence. Once, Henry got into a tiff with Catherine that ended with her verbally annihilating him. Henry tried to lick his wounds with some soothing from Anne, but even she told the king, “Did I not tell you that whenever you disputed with the Queen she was sure to have the upper hand?” Drag him, Anne.

Catherine was aghast at Henry's attempts to deny their entire marriage. She knew she was the rightful Queen of England—she’d ridden pregnant into Scotland, for God’s sake—and was incensed at the tom-foolery. She also swore, literally to her dying day, that she’d really never consummated that first union with Arthur. But then Henry took it to the next level.

Henry VIII knew it was going to be a political and religious mess to disentangle himself from Catherine, so his first totally degrading angle was to convince his wife to go obediently into a convent, where she could spend the rest of her days rotting in relative comfort as a celibate nun. Catherine’s response was legendary.

After hearing about her king’s brilliant plan to dump her in a nunnery, Catherine took big exception to the proposal. She reportedly snapped, "God never called me to a nunnery. I am the King's true and legitimate wife." Gonna take that as a hard no. So, from Henry’s idiocy and Catherine’s stubbornness, “The King’s Great Matter” was born...

This “Great Matter” dragged on for years as Henry tried to get the Church to let him bed Anne Boleyn under the approving eye of God. Today, everyone knows it ended in revolution, with Henry taking over as Head of Church, annulling his own marriage, and starting the English Reformation. But few know the cruel personal toll it took on Catherine.

Henry was truly a guy to cut and run. In July 1531, he left Catherine on a hunting trip and never came back. Practically overnight, he made the decision to move the court with him, while leaving Queen Catherine and Princess Mary behind. In a letter, Catherine complained that he didn’t even wake her up to say goodbye. And then Henry twisted the knife in.

Catherine never saw Henry again after that moment, but the King didn’t waste time with a silly thing called “remorse." Instead, he doubled down. He banished Catherine from his court, and then installed Boleyn in her old rooms. Catherine later said of the trials, “It is enough to shorten ten lives, much more mine.” And there was more to come.

For the next four years, Catherine moved from castle to castle on the outskirts of English society, and her habits grew more and more disturbing. By the time she was at Kimbolton Castle, she imprisoned herself in one room of the house, leaving it only to attend Mass and denying herself almost all sustenance. Oh, there’s one more chilling detail.

During this time of exile, Catherine’s self-hatred seemed to know no bounds. Besides forced starvation and confinement, the once-and-former Queen took to wearing a hair shirt, a coarse and uncomfortable garment that was meant to “mortify” the flesh, AKA torment the wearer, irritate their skin, and promote repentance. Um, repent for what??

Once Henry dropped all pretense of loving or cherishing his wife, the gloves really came off. When he banished Catherine from the castle, he also banished her from seeing or even talking to their only daughter Mary, a cruelty Catherine could hardly bear. In fact, she often risked treason charges and secreted out letters to her beloved girl.

King Henry VIII was a piece of work in person, and he was also a piece of work in his letters. Not content to let Catherine live in any kind of serenity, Henry frequently wrote nagging missives to her, demanding, wheedling, or whining at her to recognize Anne Boleyn as the true Queen of England. Sometimes he even tried a more immoral tactic....

Henry wasn’t above bribery in these letters either, and offered both Catherine and his daughter Mary better living quarters and lives if they would just acquiesce to his man-child demands. But hey, Catherine of Aragon was spending her days in a freaking hair shirt at this point, what did she care? She staunchly refused.

Why did so many of Catherine’s pregnancies fail? The possible reason is utterly tragic.  In recent years, some have argued that Catherine suffered from anorexia. During her young widowhood, uncertainty and poverty made Catherine frequently ill and depressed. This physical trauma may have led to future fertility problems.

Catherine was as tough a broad as they come, and despite the immense pressure against her, she never stopped referring to herself as the true Queen of England. She also demanded that her servants do the same, addressing her with all the glory of her rightful rank. Henry, however, came up with more disrespectful names for his ex…

After denying her the crown, Henry sealed the deal by insisting on calling Catherine the “Dowager Princess of Wales.” Sure, that sounds kind of respectful, but it gets a whole lot more insulting once you realize that this title pointedly turns her into merely Prince Arthur’s widow, and makes no reference to her previous title of "Queen."

In less than 10 years time, Catherine had staggered through a lifetime of pain, and her health was never the same after the initial shock of Henry’s annulment proposal. By 1535, she felt herself growing weaker and weaker with a strange malady (more on that later). Knowing the end was near, she reportedly penned a last letter to her husband—and its contents were heartbreaking. 

Catherine’s purported final to letter Henry functions as a last will and testament, an accusation, and an absolution all in one. In it, she forces him to remember his wrongs toward her, but also writes, “For my part, I pardon you everything, and I wish to devoutly pray God that He will pardon you also.” But it’s the last lines of the letter that hit hardest.

In her closing lines, Catherine directs Henry to take care of their daughter Mary, but ends with a tender show of her own affection for him, even after all these years and all his petty attacks. As she wrote, “Lastly, I make this vow, that mine eyes desire you above all things.” In true fashion, she signed the letter “Katharine the Quene.”

Like her husband, Catherine did not age well. By her 30s, her famous youthful beauty had withered. Catherine had understandably gained weight and had visible markers of stress from endless failed pregnancies; a Venetian ambassador courteously described her as “somewhat stout.” Less kindly, King Francis I once outright called her “old and deformed.”

In 1533, for all of her valiant fighting, Catherine’s jig was up. That year on May 23, Henry finally got the Archbishop of Canterbury to say their marriage was null and void. Five days later, he was officially declared married to Anne Boleyn shortly after they tied the knot in a secret ceremony. Catherine was now a forgotten Queen.

Oddly enough, Catherine and Arthur’s wedding night was the only public royal bedding of the English in the 16th century, with courtiers following them into the chamber before leaving them alone to do the "deed." An eyewitness also says Arthur boasted the next morning about having been "in the midst of Spain," though this might have been teenage bravado. When it comes to their "consummation," we will probably never know the truth.

Years into their estrangement, Catherine was still sewing Henry’s shirts for him, even though he was now basically living with Anne Boleyn. When Anne found out, she was understandably upset. Henry, however, thought it was NBD because Catherine had always made his shirts. Why let a little thing like emotional adultery stop a good thing like free needlework?

Catherine had an immense and world-shaking amount of fertility issues, but it might be even worse than we imagined. Debate rages about how many pregnancies and miscarriages Catherine had, but the highest estimations say she could have had up to nine pregnancies, with only one leading to the viable brith of Queen Mary I.

In case you need any more proof that Henry was totally in the wrong, even his own sister Margaret was on Catherine’s side, and mostly wished her brother would shut up and stop embarrassing himself. Obviously, he did not.

Though Catherine of Aragon wasn’t exactly Henry’s favorite at home, the English people absolutely loved her from the moment they set eyes on her. Even her own enemy, Henry VIII’s courtier Thomas Cromwell, had to once admit, "If not for her sex, she could have defied all the heroes of History." I heartily endorse this fact.

By the early age of 40, Catherine had already gone through menopause. Perhaps if she'd been given a little more time, she could have saved her marriage and her crown.

Married to Henry for 23 years, 11 months, and 19 days, Catherine is ultimately the longest-serving of Henry VIII’s six queens.

In 1519, Henry caused an international scandal thanks to his love for Catherine and a beard-growing pact gone wrong. At the time, Henry and the King of France had an alliance and agreed not to shave until they finally met in person. However, Catherine did not dig her husband’s “au naturel” look and told him to shave it off. Henry obeyed…to his great regret.

This act became a scandal to the French, since it appeared that Henry symbolically snubbed them for Spanish interests. Fortunately, the ShaveGate drama cooled, and the King of France’s mom publicly assured the two monarchs’ “love is not in their beards, but in their hearts.” If only the other international hoopla between Henry and Catherine had ended so sweetly.

Throughout the "Great Matter," Catherine’s popularity with women was sky-high. Reportedly, an angry mob of “seven to eight thousand women” even tried to seize Anne Boleyn in Catherine’s name. Though probably exaggerated or untrue, the tale’s popularity testifies to Catherine’s appeal as the “spurned woman” against Anne’s “other woman.” They were the Jen and Angelina of their time!

Catherine of Aragon's ghost supposedly haunts Castle Lodge, Ludlow, where the young bride stayed in her first, brief marriage to Arthur, Prince of Wales. Visitors report seeing an apparition of a teenaged girl in Tudor-era clothing. She floats through both the halls and the nursery that she never got to fill, perhaps longing for more hopeful times.

Catherine was among the most well-educated princesses of Europe. Taught by the famed cleric Alessandro Gerladini, the Spanish Princess mastered multiple languages, from Spanish and Latin to French and Greek. In addition, Catherine was schooled in arithmetic, law, classical literature, genealogy, history, philosophy, and theology.

When Catherine arrived in London for her first marriage, she did it in legendary—and revolutionary—style. Among her retinue were a group of African attendants, including the famous trumpeter John Blanke. Though grossly considered “luxury servants,” they were nonetheless the first recorded Africans to ever enter London.

On January 7, 1536, Catherine passed at Kimbolton Castle after a bizarre illness. King Henry’s reaction was legendarily cruel. He and Anne Boleyn dressed up in celebratory yellow, though some claim this was a nod to the Spanish color of mourning and was actually a deferential act. Either way, Catherine wrought one final vengeance on the pair from beyond the grave…

Fate’s a funny, twisted thing, and Catherine’s rival Anne Boleyn soon found that out. On the day of Catherine’s funeral—which was not fit for a Queen of England but for a mere Dowager—Anne miscarried. In a tragic irony to end all tragic ironies, that stillbirth also ended up being a baby boy. Watch out for karma, it’ll get you.

The end of Catherine’s life may seem tragic, and it is. But it was also a glorious moment of girl power. Even though King Henry banned any of Catherine’s supporters from seeing her while she was on the brink of death, her best friend Maria de Salinas refused to let her go alone into the dark night—even if it meant risking execution.

Salinas spent her New Year’s in 1536 traveling nearly 60 miles on horseback to make it to her friend’s barred door. Then she came up with an ingenious plan. To get in, Maria lied and told guards she had “lost” the paperwork that gave her permission to enter. It worked, and Maria saw her lifelong buddy into the next life. Get yourself a girlfriend who will commit treason.

Catherine’s demise was utterly mysterious in its time. While preparing her body for burial, her embalmer noticed the corpse was in perfect health—save for her heart, which had turned black. The ghastly and seemingly fatal condition, coupled with Catherine’s premonitions of her own demise, led people to some dark rumors about her end…

After witnessing her strange condition, those loyal to Catherine and disloyal to King Henry VIII and Queen Anne started whispering that the Royal Couple 2.0 had poisoned Catherine in a chilling act of self-service, leading the “Dowager” to die poetically of a broken heart. Modern historians, however, believe a much different story.

Most experts today believe that rather than foul play, Catherine passed of cancer of the heart; sometimes it can turn the heart black. Nonetheless, it's still tragically poetic given the circumstances of Catherine's life and her queenship.

Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30

Puyi had a charmed life from the moment he was born on February 7, 1906. Not only was he the nephew of the current Emperor of China, but his parents Prince Chun and his consort Youlan were also well-to-do movers and shakers within the Chinese court. But in the blink of an eye, the little Puyi suffered a lifelong trauma.

In November of 1908, Puyi’s uncle passed without an heir, leaving the Chinese throne up for grabs. The powerful Dowager Empress Cixi elected Puyi—who was still less than three years old—as the new emperor. For many people, this promise of power and opulence would be a dream come true. Yet the way Puyi found out was utterly brutal.

When Puyi became a boy emperor, it was more like a kidnapping than a coronation. Without any notice or warning, palace guards marched into Puyi’s home and informed his parents he was the new ruler…and that he had to go to the royal residences in the Forbidden City immediately. And that’s not even the worst part.

This was shocking news: It tore the little boy from the only life he had ever known, and then baptized him into one he barely understood. Puyi immediately started screaming at the guards as they tried to pick him up, crying out that he didn’t want to leave his mother and father. His parents’ reactions, meanwhile, were gut-wrenching.

Puyi's parents barely registered their son's emotional breakdown; after all, this was his duty. Accordingly, they watched silently as the guards stuffed the toddler into a palanquin and brought him to the Forbidden City with only his wet nurse, Wang, accompanying him from his old world. It was the beginning of both a fantasy and a horror story.

When Puyi actually entered the Forbidden City, his life went from bad to terrifying. The Dowager Empress Cixi demanded to see him, even though she was on her deathbed. As Puyi later recalled, when he stared at the elderly Cixi’s “emaciated and terrifying hideous face,” he burst into tears and started crying for his nanny. Cixi’s reply gave awful insight into Puyi’s future.

Like his own parents, the Dowager Empress stayed stone-faced about Puyi’s mental anguish. In fact, she was totally confused about why he was upset in the first place, as if it was bizarre that a two-year-old would be at all miffed about his own kidnapping. Curling her lip, Cixi only said, “What a naughty child. Take him away to play". Is it any wonder Puyi turned out so badly?

Less than a month after Puyi entered the Forbidden City, he had his official coronation ceremony. This was yet another nightmare. Although his father Prince Chun was there to carry him out on the ancient Dragon Throne, the sound of drums terrified Puyi so much that he started bawling again. The only comfort his father could give was: “Don't cry, it'll be over soon". Well, it wasn't.

Besides the early trauma of his reign, Puyi was also spoiled rotten. Every day, his ceremonial eunuch servants would prepare him meals full of every imaginable delicacy, and he would receive swathes of custom-made, unique clothing, since an emperor never wore clothing more than once. Yeah, this coddling was a recipe for disaster.

As Puyi grew up, his lavish world somehow became more controlled, not less. He didn’t see his own mother for seven full years, and in that time his only confidant or even friend was his old wet nurse, Wang, who became all but his adoptive mother. As it turned out, Puyi was in desperate need of an authority figure, because his dark side had started showing...

At some point during his time as Emperor, Puyi cottoned on to the fact that he had absolute power, and it corrupted him in the most horrific ways imaginable. He went mad with it, and took a particular interest in humiliating his eunuchs whenever the opportunity arose. First, he had them beat for even the smallest infractions…but his tastes soon grew bloodier.

Puyi adored watching his eunuchs get flogged, and he spent many hours of his reign observing the “delightful” event. Whenever he grew bored of this entertainment, he also loved to fire pellets from his air gun at them. Yep, there’s no two ways about it: Puyi was a sadist. And the situation was even more terrible than most people know.

Around this time, the boy emperor found a way to marry his mean streak with childish pranks, another of his favorite pastimes. During one incident, he wanted to feed one of his eunuchs a cake made with iron fillings, all because, as he said, "I want to see what he looks like when he eats it". Thankfully, his wet nurse talked him down…this time.

Although films like The Last Emperor downplay Puyi’s bad behavior, his dark appetites terrorized the palace for years. After all, he was the supreme ruler, so no one could tell him no. Oh sure, his advisors begged him to stop, but as Puyi noted, "Flogging eunuchs was part of my daily routine. My cruelty and love of wielding power were already too firmly set for persuasion to have any effect on me".

Sadly, if you think that’s the beginning and end of Puyi’s bad habits, you’re very, very wrong.

In 1922, Puyi was 16 years old, and the palace decided it was high time for him to marry. Despite, you know, him having the emotional intelligence of a gnat. The various Dowager Empresses around the Forbidden City set about finding a bride for him, and their methods were the exact opposite of romantic. Indeed, they were downright chilling.

Puyi's engagement didn’t involve him writing his bride chivalrous love poems. God no. Instead, the Dowagers went through all the best families in the land and collected photographs of their daughters. Then they put the series of snaps in front of Puyi and asked him to choose his wife. No, really. And then it got excruciatingly awkward.

While looking at the spread of women in front of him, Puyi’s gaze caught on one woman in particular, and he pointed her out as his number one choice. When the Dowagers recognized the woman, their blood must have run cold. The prospect, Wenxiu, was actually just a 12-year-old girl, and the Dowagers quickly convinced Puyi to pick again. I really wish he hadn’t.

Eventually, Puyi landed on the slightly more age appropriate Gobulo Wanrong, who at only 16 years old was already turning out to be a stunning beauty. The Chinese court moved fast, and announced Wanrong and Puyi’s engagement in the national papers almost immediately after his decision. But Puyi may have come to regret this…

For the last few years, Puyi had grown obsessed with the “modern” West: He loved Harold Lloyd films, cut off his long "queue" of hair, and liked to ride his bicycle around the Forbidden City. But there was one particular obsession that Puyi just couldn’t shake, and as his wedding date approached, a strange desperation came over him.

The center of Puyi’s Anglophilia was the University of Oxford, the alma mater of his beloved British tutor, Reginald Johnston. To the emperor, culture began and ended with the school, and he was intent on becoming an Oxford student. Within months of getting engaged to Wanrong, Puyi’s determination to see this dream through reached a fever pitch, so he hatched an infamous plan.

Puyi woke up on the morning of June 4, 1922 intent on escaping the Forbidden City and meeting his destiny as a college student. He even planned to print an open letter to his people renouncing his title. In fact, he was so proud of this plot that he went and told Reginald Johnston everything, asking the tutor to call him a cab and come with him. Well, this backfired.

Johnston had half a brain in his head, so he was horrified at the folly of Puyi’s pipe dream. He crushed Puyi’s hopes with one incredibly simple move. He refused to call a taxi for the emperor. Puyi, sheltered as he was, was aghast at the idea of going into the streets of Beijing alone, and he gave up his mission immediately. Instead, he had to face that very ill-advised walk down the aisle…

On October 21, 1922, Puyi and Wanrong’s lengthy marriage process began. The displays included lavish “betrothal presents,” as well as a ceremony where Wanrong kowtowed to him six times to show how subservient she was (ugh). As befitting a royal, the events were full of only the finest food, décor, and guests. Except this only made Puyi’s behavior that much more embarrassing.

As we know, Puyi's horrendous childhood had rendered him pretty much incapable of emotional maturity, and he really showed it on his wedding day. He later confessed that seeing Wanrong walk into his Imperial wedding was one of the first times, “I felt at all curious about what she looked like". Oh, and it doesn’t stop there.

If Puyi’s new wife thought she was his one and only, she was in for a nasty surprise. See, although Puyi had to abandon his idea of making the 12-year-old Wenxiu his Empress, he didn't completely give her up. Instead, Puyi decided to take Wenxiu as his secondary consort…and marry her on the same day as he wed Wanrong. Yikes.

As if Wanrong, Puyi, and Wenxiu’s wedding wasn’t tense enough, their wedding night was even more so. After the ceremonies, the trio went to the Palace of Earthly Tranquillity, where for centuries emperors had consummated their unions. Wanrong and Wenxiu laid down on the mattress—and that's where things took a very strange turn.

Get this: The moment that Puyi took in his two nubile brides, he ran right out of the room. To this day, historians can’t be sure what exactly drove Puyi to flee, though many point to the teenager's bedroom immaturity as well as his host of other immaturities. However, as we’ll see later, there might have been a more scandalous reason for his disgust.

While Puyi was already pretty suspect as husband material, he started to make strange demands of his wife. After having grown up basically alone, Puyi was a little too delighted to have a companion in Wanrong. The immature man-child loved to bust in on her private meetings, play pranks on her, or just telephone her incessantly. Then again, there was a tender side to their relationship...

In the months after Puyi's teenage double wedding, the Forbidden City became something like a royal playground. People often witnessed Puyi and Wanrong racing their bikes through the avenues, and the emperor even turned some of the palace grounds into a tennis court so he could play whenever he wanted. But it wasn’t all fun and games.

Unsurprisingly, Puyi’s wives Wanrong and Wenxiu developed an intense rivalry with each other—and it got very high school, very fast. Upon hearing about Puyi’s preference for Wenxiu, Wanrong sent the girl scads of scathing letters. In retaliation, Wenxiu wrote back criticizing all of Wanrongs typos in the messages. Meow.

Puyi was completely unequipped to deal with this domestic unrest, and his reaction was cold-blooded. Despite his initial favoritism of Wenxiu, Puyi dropped her like a hot potato once she moved into the Forbidden City. He rarely visited her apartments and left her desperately alone during the long nights. But soon, he had even bigger problems.

In truth, Puyi's life had began to crumble around him before his marriage. He hadn’t truly been in power since a government coup in 1912, and although loyalists made some attempts to give him back his influence, Puyi was now merely a figurehead. It wasn’t exactly a good place for a megalomaniac like Puyi to be, and it showed…

Let's be real: Puyi didn't like thinking about other people's needs. Indeed, to avoid having to pay attention to his wife Wanrong, he encouraged a dark habit in her. When she started taking opium to help with headaches, Puyi pushed her along because the substance made her more “manageable". Boy oh boy, would this have tragic consequences in the long run.

By the 1920s, Puyi’s Forbidden City was becoming, as Wenxiu once put it, a “macabre grave". For one, Puyi’s eunuchs had been slowly pilfering priceless items from the complex, rendering it emptier and emptier. Puyi soon exiled them, and this made the city even more hollowed out. Not that Puyi would be there for much longer...

The revolutionaries must have smelled blood in the water, and they dealt Puyi a crushing blow. The government suddenly changed its mind on the whole “letting Puyi remain a figurehead” thing and stripped away his titles. When they booted him out of the Forbidden City, they gave him and his wives just three hours to leave.

It was a head-spinning upheaval for a man used to people waiting on his every command, and I can’t say Puyi handled the transition well...

As newly private citizens, the Imperial throuple moved to a well-appointed villa in the city of Tianjin called the “Garden of Serenity". It was supposed to be a fresh start, but the cracks started to show immediately: Wanrong and Wenxiu were bored out of their minds and started to compete even more violently for Puyi’s affections, forcing him to buy them identical gifts. Besides that, dark rumors were spreading…

Puyi and Wanrong were supposed to be a picture perfect royal couple, except there was one big thing missing. Even though everyone had expected them to provide an heir for the nation, Puyi and his Empress Consort never had any children together. Indeed, some historians believe that they may have never even consummated their union. And their unhappiness started to show...

Just after her royal exile, Wanrong’s opium use grew rampant, so much so that people couldn’t fail to notice. Wenxiu even believed the substance was responsible for Wanrong and Puyi’s barren union, sniping one day when she saw Wanrong smoking, “Why should you take opium? You’d better stab at your belly". And more drama was coming.

Around this time, Puyi and Wanrong began to have explosive fights, and they didn’t bother hiding it from their servants. At one point, the household butler heard them having a screaming match in the garden for hours, which included Wanrong calling Puyi a “eunuch,” likely a put down about his bedroom prowess. Except Wanrong wasn't actually the one Puyi had to worry about...

In 1931, Puyi went through his worst betrayal yet. Wenxiu had long been dissatisfied with her civilian existence, and that year she completely up and left the former Emperor. She abandoned both Puyi and Wanrong to pick up the dysfunctional pieces of their relationship themselves. Forever after, Puyi called it “the treason”—and his rebound was drastic.

Just before his imperial downfall, Puyi had been in contact with the Japanese, and oh man did they get his number. The delegates noted that Puyi was not only vain, he was also malleable, and from that moment on they resolved to make use of him for their own ends. In 1931, that time finally came, and they offered Puyi a throne as a puppet king in Manchukuo.

Vain, malleable, and now going through a horrific divorce, Puyi said yes. It would be his worst mistake.

Puyi decided to set out for Manchuko—but it was a journey riddled with horrors. First, his wife Wanrong was set against the whole idea in the first place, which doesn't inspire any confidence in me. But more than that, he had to evade Chinese officials who branded him a traitor by hiding in the trunk of a car to escape Tianjin. Hmm Puyi, you think this is a bad idea?

When Puyi finally did make it to Manchukuo, it was a disaster from the very beginning. The Japanese strictly controlled him and limited his powers, just to make sure he knew who was boss. When Wanrong finally followed him, they even refused to let the couple visit each other at first. Then they really hit Puyi where it hurt.

Puyi was salivating to become the Emperor again and reclaim his Dragon Throne, but the Japanese would do no such thing. Instead, they called him the “Head of State” and then the “Emperor of Manchukuo,” titles that aggravated the glory-hungry Puyi to no end. But again: He wasn’t the boss here, Japan was. And let me tell you, this got mortifying.

Against Puyi’s will, the Japanese made the capital of Manchukuo the industrial city of Changchun, a place Puyi despised because it was the opposite of "luxury". Since the city didn’t even have a palace, Puyi had to move into the old Salt Tax Administration building, earning it the nickname “The Salt Tax Palace". I mean, from Puyi's point of view, yikes.

In case you’re wondering, everyone was screaming at Puyi to get the heck out of Japan’s sham state and stop being their puppet; his father Prince Chun even travelled over personally to give him the same advice. But, Puyi being Puyi, the cheapest and gaudiest displays of power simply enthralled him too much. Still, something had to give.

Eventually, Puyi grew desperately unhappy in the Salt Tax Palace, and he started taking it out on everyone but himself. The Japanese rarely allowed him to leave his home, so he spent his days flogging servants or, if he was feeling particularly cruel, denying them food—and all this for minor infractions like “irresponsible conversations". Yet, as always, he was cruelest to his wife.

If 1924 was the year Puyi’s lush existence in the Forbidden City evaporated around him, then 1931 was the year the same happened to any hope for happiness in his marriage. Wanrong was desperately depressed in Manchukuo, and she tried to flee the territory several times by begging random emissaries to secret her out. When this failed, she let out her frustration in other ways.

One day, Puyi’s relationship with Wanrong went from lukewarm to acidly bitter. His wife proved this in mortifying ways. She would often perform mocking impressions of her husband for the servants, imitating his jerky movements and wearing a version of his signature glasses. In short, it was all careening out of control—and heading toward a tragic end.

In the middle of this misery, Puyi retreated further into his fantasies. In fact, he was so self absorbed, he probably didn’t see Wanrong’s treachery coming. Besides hitting the opium harder, his lonely wife started a series of affairs with two of Puyi’s aides, a man named Li Tiyu and another named Qi Jizhong. The way Puyi found out about this was shocking.

In 1940, Wanrong received news she couldn’t hide from her husband: She was pregnant, and the child was most definitely not Puyi’s. Nonetheless, Wanrong was determined to keep the baby. She went to Puyi, demanding that he either recognize the child as his, or else let it live outside the royal grounds in anonymity. Puyi did neither.

Instead of helping out his wife in any way, Emperor Puyi committed one of the most horrific betrayals in Chinese history. The moment the baby, a little daughter, came into the world, the Emperor ignored Wanrong’s wishes entirely. Instead, he had his aides snatch the girl from her mother’s breast and then kill the newborn. And he wasn’t finished.

According to one version of events, Puyi never even told Wanrong about the true fate of her baby. Right after she gave birth, he whisked her away to the hospital without her daughter. When she came back, he lied and said that he was having an outside nanny look after the newborn. Thing is, this option is so much better than what really might have happened…

Other sources claim that instead of keeping the truth from Wanrong, Puyi mercilessly let it all hang out. The Empress’s response was gut-wrenching. Riddled with grief over the loss of her innocent child, some people say Wanrong gave in completely to opium, existing in a numbed state for the rest of her life. Except…Puyi made sure that life wouldn’t last much longer.

Although it seemed like the once-royal couple couldn’t sink deeper, there is yet another detail to their tragedy. They simply couldn't leave each other. Puyi considered divorcing Wanrong, but was afraid of the civil unrest it might cause. Wanrong, for her part, also considered leaving countless times, but simply couldn’t give up her aristocratic life. And so they met their dark fates as husband and wife.

In December 1941, WWII took off, and the world around Puyi ignited in conflict. Following the lead of the Japanese, Puyi declared war from Manchukuo on the United States and Britain. However, because nobody recognized Manchukuo as a true state, he spent most of these years out of the international fray. Until, that is, the very end—when everything exploded.

In 1945, Puyi reaped what he sowed...and the results weren’t pretty. The enemy Soviets violently invaded his new kingdom, forcing the Last Emperor of China to abdicate his throne...again. But this only put him in more danger. The Soviets were out for blood, and Puyi knew he needed to flee. Still, this is where his story goes from eyebrow raising to operatic levels of tragedy.

It took Puyi a breathlessly long time to decide how to escape. For endless days, he stayed holed up in the Salt Tax Palace with Wanrong, his new concubine Li Yuqin, and other family members. Nonetheless, most of his aides and servants had already fled to save their own hides, while Puyi's personal minder took his own life with a cyanide pill. When Puyi finally did pack his bags, his nightmare began.

Late in the night of August 11, 1945, Puyi took the sorry remainder of his court and boarded a train out of the city along with his most valuable possessions. It was a grim journey: At every station, Japanese colonists clamored for the safety of the train, begging and weeping to be let on. At every station, guards turned them away.

Meanwhile, all Puyi heard was news of Japan’s defeat at the hands of the Soviets, until the Emperor of Japan finally announced the surrender. The game was up—but that’s exactly when Puyi got the most dire news yet.

As a goodbye present, Soviet forces had bombed many of the train stations across the countryside, leaving Puyi stranded and his train low on coal. With that, he returned to Changchun with his tail between his legs, and began plotting a different escape route via airplane. To get on, he’d have to commit an unbelievable act.

See, while Puyi eventually found a way to charter a flight out of the crumbling country, there was just one enormous problem. The flight couldn't fit everyone, and his advisor convinced him he would need all of his men and none of his women. So, if you can believe it, Puyi cruelly left his wife Wanrong behind. Their goodbye was infamous.

Wanrong accompanied her husband to the airport to say farewell, and Puyi, never one to relish in emotional moments, really outdid himself that day. As he abandoned his wife in a hostile country, he later snidely remembered that she spent the time “blubbering". It would be the last they’d ever see each other—and Wanrong’s fate was nearly unspeakable.

In January of 1946, Chinese guerrillas picked Wanrong up and threw her behind bars. To make matters worse, Wanrong was still addicted to opium, and only had a preciously small stash left. After months in an isolated cell, the former Empress of all China started experiencing harrowing withdrawal symptoms, becoming increasingly frail and unfettered to reality. And yet somehow, it only got worse.

In the last days of her life, Puyi’s sins hung heavy over Wanrong’s head. Because everyone knew she was the former Empress, Wanrong’s cell became a public arena for people from miles around the country to drop in and watch her like a zoo animal. This was mortifying enough, but then she suffered a complete mental breakdown…

For days on end, Wanrong would hallucinate her better years as Puyi's consort, thrashing around and demanding more opium, clothing, food, and baths. Her most tragic utterance, though? One day, Wanrong was so delirious, she began keening and screaming for her long-lost daughter that Puyi had killed. The end was near.

Wanrong’s end was as ugly as they come. On June 20, 1946, she finally expired from malnutrition and the effects of her withdrawal. When Puyi heard about Wanrong’s passing, his response was so disturbing it’s impossible to forget. When someone told him the news a full three years later, he was reportedly emotionless.

It’s undeniable that Puyi was a horrific husband and all-around terrible person to Wanrong, but despite his coolness at her passing, there are traces of a bottomless, unfathomable remorse inside him for her. In an interview for his memoir Emperor to Citizen, he absolutely refused to discuss the slaying of Wanrong’s newborn child.

When Puyi left Wanrong in the dust that day, he earned whatever karma came for him—and it didn’t take long. Literally while en route to his freedom, the Soviet Red Army stopped Puyi’s plane, detained him, and kept him prisoner in a small Siberian town for years. But what went on inside those walls was probably surprising…

Although Puyi was now under Soviet control, he still couldn’t relinquish the idea that he was a supreme ruler. The Soviets kept him in relative comfort in a sanatorium, and even allowed him to have servants. Well, they gave an inch, and Puyi took a mile. He demanded his fellow inmates call him emperor, and was infamous for slapping his servants if they angered him in any small way.

Puyi had fallen far and fast from his days as a boy king, but there was an ironic twist to his fate. At the time of his Soviet captivity, China was desperate to extradite him so they could execute him for high treason. The Soviets stubbornly refused, which almost certainly saved Puyi’s life. When Puyi finally did return to China, it began the last and strangest chapter of his life.

In 1949, the Soviets finally struck a deal when Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party came into power, sending Puyi back to his native land after years of exile. By now, instead of executing him, the communists had a different plan: They wanted to convert the Emperor of China into a comrade to prove their political worth. Most bizarrely of all—it worked.

Puyi eventually did convert to communism, but it took an immense toll on his body. In order to “remodel” him, Chairman Mao’s men threw the emperor into yet another prison, and this one was no cake walk. For the first time in his life, people expected Puyi to take care of himself, which included basic tasks like brushing his teeth and tying his shoes, which he had never done before. And that wasn’t all.

There was no one left in Puyi’s life to kowtow to him anymore, and his other inmates frequently ridiculed him for how useless he was. Besides this, his guards forced him to face all his wrongdoings as a ruler, confronting him with the families and landscapes he had helped destroy in his despotism. However, they saved their most brutal attacks for his private life.

Puyi never fully faced a reckoning for his hand in Wanrong’s fate, but the Communists did track down his old concubine Li Yuqin—one of the women he had left alongside Wanrong—and allowed her to get a bitter revenge. In a one-on-one session, Li screamed at Puyi for treating her as a mere object. Serves him right, to be honest.

These years of Puyi’s life wrought a change on the emperor that no one could have predicted. From cruel and flippant, Puyi became remorseful and overcome with grief. He had spent a good long while apparently learning from his errors. And when Puyi went into the public a decade later, people couldn’t believe their eyes.

In December 1959, Puyi left his “remodelling” camp and lived in Beijing as a completely normal citizen. Astonishingly, he even got a job as street sweeper. Still, people can only change so much. On the first day, he lost his way and had to tell people, "I'm Puyi, the last Emperor of the Qing dynasty. I'm staying with relatives and can't find my way home".

As an average citizen, Puyi also made a heartbreaking homecoming. One of the first things he did was return to the Forbidden City, this time as a tourist instead of an emperor. While there, he helped lead his fellow tourists around, showing them different exhibits, which were actually just his own possessions he hadn’t seen in years. As uncanny as this was, more was around the corner.

In 1962, Puyi married again, this time to hospital worker Li Shuxian, Perhaps the most miraculous thing about their relationship is that it was perfectly normal, and they stayed with each other until Puyi passed. Puyi supported himself as a literary editor and worked on his memoir, which would become From Emperor to Citizen. Still, there was one piece of his old life Puyi could never shake.

Until his dying day, Puyi was incredibly clumsy. As one observer put it, he "invariably forgot to close doors behind him, forgot to flush the toilet, forgot to turn the tap off after washing his hands, had a genius for creating an instant, disorderly mess around him". Quite plainly, Puyi had never learned to pick up after himself, and the habit stuck.

Despite Puyi’s difficulties adapting to normal life, he did have a side to him few people got to see. In his later years, he was fundamentally kind, and he actually liked to take care of people when they fell ill. One day when he knocked over an old lady and injured her, he made sure to visit her in the hospital until she got better.

As proof of how much hope they had for their future—and how far they had to fall—Puyi and Wanrong took up the Westernized names “Henry” and “Elizabeth” when they were first expelled from the Forbidden City. Why hopeful? Because Puyi intended to be as great as King Henry VIII, and he wanted Wanrong to be like Queen Elizabeth I.

By 1966, with the coming of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the tide turned on Puyi, and the younger communists began to show him scorn. Yet the former emperor always did know how to make a well-timed exit: On October 17, 1967, Puyi passed at the age of 61 after suffering kidney cancer and heart complications. At one point in time, he would have received a lavish burial; now, he got a simple cremation.

Puyi's bedroom relationships with Wanrong were suspect at best. As one of his eunuchs reluctantly confessed years later, he would only visit her room once every three months, and would "leave early in the morning on the following day and for the rest of that day he would invariably be in a very filthy temper indeed". Likewise, whenever the eunuchs witnessed Puyi with Wanrong in a private moment, their physicality “lacked passion". So what was going on? Well…

Even people closest to Puyi believed that he had desires for men; as one eunuch said in a veiled reference, Puyi preferred the “land-way” to the “water-way” when it came to his romances. This must have been an incredibly difficult situation for Puyi to be in during the early 20th-century…but that doesn’t make his next moves forgivable.

When Puyi got to show his true colors in the bedroom, his worst tendencies came back with a vengeance. He was still the power-hungry little boy he had always been. Puyi openly admitted that he was sadistic in his relationships with women, and this extended in awful ways into his relationships with men, too. He frequently employed teenage pageboys, and one of the members of his court claimed he often mistreated them.

Sources: 1, 2, 3

Long before he was James Bond, he was Thomas Sean Connery. At first, friends called him “Tommy,” but he eventually chose to go by his middle name, Sean. More remarkable was his other nickname, “Big Tam,” which friends gave to him because of his size. At 12, Connery was already towering over his peers. By the time he was 18, he had reached his full height—a sturdy 6’2” tall.

Sean Connery was born to a working class family in Scotland—his father was a factory worker and truck driver and his mother was a cleaning woman. Young Sean also rolled up his sleeves and got to work and help the family. Before he was even 16 years old, he got his first job, as a milkman in his hometown of Edinburgh.

Connery never stopped working after that. However, it was a long and bumpy road before he found his calling…

Connery was definitely a ladies’ man—and he got started very early. The actor revealed that he lost his virginity when he was 14 years old to an older woman who was working for the ATS (Auxiliary Territory Service), a woman’s branch of the British Army that operated during WWII. She might have had an influence on him in other ways, too…

Connery had been too young to enlist and serve his country during WWII, but that didn’t stop him from joining the Royal Navy the moment that he turned 16 years old. He jumped right into the culture, immediately getting two tattoos. One tattoo was a tribute to his family, while the other read “Scotland Forever". Most people have an awkward teenage phase, but Connery was already a 6’2” tall tattooed lothario at 16…life isn’t fair.

Connery threw himself into his new life as a Navy man, training at the gunnery school and working with an anti-aircraft crew. Three years in, and Connery was totally dedicated—until it was suddenly all ripped away from him. He began suffering from a painful duodenal ulcer, and the Royal Navy discharged him as a result. Still just a teen, he kept searching for his place in the world.

After the Navy discharged him, Connery returned to Edinburgh, where he worked as a truck driver, lifeguard, coffin polisher, and as a model at the local art school. It made sense, as Connery spent most of his spare time working on his physique. He was a bodybuilder in those days, and even entered competitions. He never made it far, because one of his other passions got in the way…

Most of the American bodybuilders that Connery faced in competition refused to participate in any other physical activity that would affect their muscle mass. However, like many Scots his age, Connery couldn’t be torn away the football field. He played with a couple of teams, and he must have been good, because one day, a life-changing offer arrived at his feet.

When he was 23 years old, the manager of the Manchester United football team offered Sean Connery a spot on the legendary club—a dream come true for any young footballer in the UK. However, Connery’s elated reaction soon turned to doubt. It would be a lot of money for a poor kid from Edinburgh. However, Connery also knew that footballers tended to peak at 30.

He made the difficult decision to turn it down…but he did have a plan on the backburner.

While he was still part of bodybuilding competitions, a friend told Connery that a production of South Pacific was holding open auditions nearby. He got a job as a chorus boy and as the production continued, he moved his way up through the ranks. Connery began to see it acting as a viable career, but his road to fame was not without its ups and downs.

Connery’s time appearing in South Pacific brought him some financial independence, access to other roles, and a slew of new friends…and it also brought him love. He began to date a beautiful dark-haired woman by the name of Carol Sopel—but their fairytale romance was doomed to a heartbreaking end. Sopel was Jewish, and her family didn’t approve of Connery.

They told him to stay away from her, and the relationship ended as quickly as it began—and his problems didn’t end there.

Growing up poor in Edinburgh, Connery had seen his fair share of trouble—but that all amounted to nothing compared to the one terrifying encounter that made him a local legend. One night at a pool hall, some members of the infamous Valdor gang attempted to take his jacket. When he stopped them, their reaction was utterly chilling. Six of them followed Connery home in the dark—but they had no idea what they were in for.

Connery realized what was happening. He made the quick decision to take the group on, even though he was all by himself. He took each gang member down one by one until he was the last man standing. It was enough to earn him the respect of the notoriously violent gang he’d taken on, and he gained a reputation among locals as a “hard man".

When Connery wasn’t singlehandedly fighting off a gang of attackers, he was ardently studying the works of Shakespeare, Ibsen, Tolstoy, and Proust, all in hopes of becoming a serious actor. He also took elocution lessons to shake off the working-class brogue. Despite all his hard work, Connery still struggled.

In the 1950s, Sean Connery was hustling. He was appearing in stage plays, bit parts in movies, and small roles on TV, while also babysitting on the side to make ends meet. As time went on, filmmakers gave him larger roles that reflected his rough-and-tumble presence and working class background, playing truck drivers and boxers.

Finally, his big break came. Producers cast him opposite starlet Lana Turner in Another Time, Another Place—but behind the scenes, things weren’t always so smooth.

While making the film in England, Connery took it upon himself to show Turner, an American, around London. Turner’s boyfriend, gangster Johnny Stompanato, began to suspect that the pair were having an affair, so he flew from Los Angeles to London to check in on them—and things quickly got out of hand. An enraged Stompanato threatened Connery with a gun. Big mistake.

What happens to people who threaten Sean Connery? Well, historically, it hadn’t really gone well for them, and this time was no different. When Stompanato came at Connery, the Scotsman immediately disarmed him and knocked him down. Producers banned Stompanato from the set of the film, and soon after, Scotland Yard officers arrived to personally take him to the airport.

The UK authorities then deported Stompanato. The lesson? Don’t mess with Sean Connery.

Compared to many of his fellow actors, Connery was quite rugged and rough. This often worked in his favor with the ladies, but when he met photographer Julie Hamilton, it had the complete opposite effect. She confessed that she thought he was appalling—until one moment, and piece of fabric, changed it all. Once Hamilton saw Connery in a kilt, she changed her tune, declaring him the most handsome man she’d ever seen.

Bet not a lot of other men get that reaction when they don the Highland regalia.

Connery had been in love with Hamilton for months. Finally, she opened her eyes and realized that she felt the same way. They moved into a small apartment in London together and met each other’s families. Hamilton supported Connery as he struggled to become a serious actor—but the relationship was far from one-sided.

In 1960, Hamilton fell ill, and the diagnosis was dire—she had tuberculosis. At the same time, producers had approached Connery with an incredible offer. They wanted to give him a star-making role in the Charlton Heston film El Cid. Faced with a difficult decision, Connery made a heartbreaking choice. He turned down the part in order to care for Hamilton as she recovered.

Luckily, the studio decided to give him a second chance, and the decision didn’t derail his career.

Everyone expected Sean Connery and Julie Hamilton to get married—until one day, when it all fell apart in an instant. As Hamilton later revealed, she was in bed with Connery when he offhandedly remarked, “What incredible eyes Diane has got". At the time, he was working on a teleplay with (married) actress Diane Cilento.

Hamilton immediately knew something was wrong, and confronted the actor.

Connery confirmed Hamilton’s worst fears, admitting that his love for her had faded. She walked out. Their relationship ended then and there, much more quickly that it had begun—but their story wasn’t over yet. Years later, the exes ran into each other. By then, Hamilton was married and had a child, a son she named Jason.

In an off tribute to how Hamilton had supported him when he was a struggling actor, Connery made a vow to her. He said that he would one day name his own child Jason.

While falling for Diane Cilento presented its own problems—for one, she was married—it also had an unexpected side effect. Cilento was the one who introduced him to producer Harry Saltzman, who was hoping to bring the beloved character of James Bond to the screen for the very first time. However, it wasn’t as easy as simply meeting a producer and landing the role of a lifetime. Connery had to work for it.

First off, Bond creator Ian Fleming was at odds with the film producers over who to cast. While they envisioned Cary Grant, he would only commit to one film, and they wanted to create a franchise. Then, the filmmakers created a “Find James Bond” contest, even going so far as to declare a winner, before realizing he didn’t have the acting chops for the role.

It was then that they began to consider Connery—and he came up with a plan to make a lasting impression.

When we think of 007, we think of dark, well-tailored suits, coiffed hair, and debonair manner—but when it came time to audition for Bond, Sean Connery went rogue. He showed up in rumpled clothes and acted in his typical rough manner. Somehow, it worked. The producers cast him for the first-ever Bond film, Dr. No. The role would go on to change the entire course of his life.

Connery had already spent years refining his working-class accent, and when producers cast him as Bond, they gave him a crash course to round it all out, hoping to make him a “dapper, witty, and above all cool” gentleman. The UK already had Bond mania, but it was important to the filmmakers that they create an absolutely unforgettable introduction to the 007 character.

This was how they ended up coming up with the iconic scene where the character of Sylvia Trench asks the agent for his name and Connery answers: “Bond…James Bond".

When Dr. No became a huge hit, Sean Connery was flying high in more ways than one. Just before studios relased the movie, Cilento obtained a divorce from her first husband. Soon after, Cilento got pregnant, and Connery proposed to her. With so much fanfare over Bond in the UK, the pair organized a secret wedding in Gibraltar—but it didn’t exactly go as planned.

At the time, political tensions were running high in Gibraltar—and it nearly led to disaster for the young couple. Connery and Cilento traveled there separately, and border officials detained Cilento when they found an error in her passport. By the time that they released her, she’d missed her ferry to Gibraltar—and it looked like she’d miss the wedding ceremony too.

Luckily, she finally made it over to Connery, and the pair got married…but it wasn’t necessarily happily ever after.

After Connery and Cilento’s son was born, Connery made good on his promise to his ex-girlfriend Julie Hamilton. He named the boy Jason. With her husband cast in one of the biggest roles out there, Cilento chose to let her own acting career take a backseat in order to support Connery and raise Jason. Connery had them both on set with him for From Russia With Love, the next Bond film, which became a massive hit.

While Ian Fleming was initially unsure about Sean Connery—he wanted Roger Moore—Connery eventually won Fleming over. Before his passing in 1964, the author began to change the character slightly to reflect what Connery had brought to the role, most notably giving the spy more of a sense of humor.

While the success of the Bond films made Sean Connery a superstar, it also stirred up anxiety and fear. Even before producers had given him the part, Connery had worried that taking on five films as Bond would cause him to become typecast. Cilento had convinced him to do it anyway. It was a decision she’d come to look back on with deep remorse.

In 1965, Cilento announced that she was leaving Connery and taking their son and her daughter from her first marriage with her. Connery’s reaction was utterly cold-blooded. He packed his bags and left the family home before Cilento could. On the set of the fourth Bond film, Thunderball, they reunited—but things were never really the same again.

Many who worked on the film said that they heard the couple getting into loud fights on set. Things didn’t get better when they returned home. Connery was now a mega-star, and Cilento’s career was floundering. They were very competitive with each other, but they still stubbornly tried to keep the marriage going. It was only a matter of time.

The Bond films were such huge hits that they did give Sean Connery quite a bit of leverage in Hollywood. He first used this power to force his studio overlords to get him a part in the Alfred Hitchcock film Marnie. With just two Bond movies left in his contract, Connery began to breathe a sigh of relief that he might have a career beyond Bond.

But you know what they say—just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in again (different film franchise, but it still applies).

Long before there was Tom Cruise, Sean Connery opted to do many of his own stunts for the Bond movies—but on the set of Thunderball, it nearly cost him his life. In one scene, Connery was supposed to swim through a pool of sharks. Connery immediately expressed his reservations.

As a result, filmmakers constructed a specially-built plexiglass partition for the actor, so that he’d be separated from the sharks. There was just one problem. They didn’t have quite enough plexiglass. As a result, one of the sharks slipped through into the area where Connery was swimming. He quickly jumped out of the pool, narrowly escaping a bloody fate.

Connery had started out the 60s on top of the world, newly married and cast in a star-making role as Bond. But by the turn of the decade, he was frustrated and he wanted more out of life. Not only was his career unfulfilling, his marriage was also falling apart. Finally, it all came to a turning point.

Before Connery even arrived on the set of You Only Live Twice, he made it clear to the film studio that he was done with James Bond. They prepared themselves to find a replacement. It’s unknown if his wife Diane Cilento took it as well when she and Connery finally separated in February 1971. Either way, Connery wasted no time in moving on…

After his divorce from Cilento, Connery became quite the ladies’ man, dating actresses Lana Wood, Magda Konopka, and Jill St. John, among others—but the dating pool in Hollywood is surprisingly small, and he stirred up quite a bit of trouble. While making Diamonds Are Forever in 1971, Connery dated two of his co-stars simultaneously—the aforementioned Wood and St. John.

The two have had a well-publicized feud since the 80s. However, many trace their hatred back much longer, to their competition over Connery back in 1971. Whoops!

Connery dated around following his divorce, but for years, only one woman caught both his eye and his heart: painter Micheline Roquebrune. There was just one problem. When they met, they were both still married to other people. Their relationship stayed on the back burner until each got their respective divorces, and then they were off to the races. Or, more accurately, the altar.

The press was all over Connery and Roquebrune. They expected the couple to get married in early 1974. However, Connery was determined to throw them off, so he came up with an ingenious plan. In March 1975, he told the press that they were already married, and the ceremony had taken place four months earlier—a complete fabrication. Two months later, they finally wed…but there was a bizarre twist.

Connery chose to wed Roquebrune at the same place he’d married his first wife, Gibraltar. I guess he just really liked it there?

Connery has the unexpected distinction of being part of one of the first male-on-male kisses on television. In the 1960 TV movie Colombe, Connery’s character accuses his wife of having an affair with his brother. In a pivotal scene, he kisses his own brother to see what all the fuss was about. Even though the kiss was not romantic, it was still one of the first of its kind!

After Connery left the role of James Bond, producers signed up George Lazenby for a seven-film contract as the suave spy—but Lazenby immediately crashed and burned, and left the role after just one film. Connery had struggled incredibly hard to get away from the 007 character. It was a shock to fans, insiders, and perhaps even himself when he agreed to return to the role in 1971. But he had his reasons…

First off, Connery asked an exorbitant fee in order to come back to Bond. He also demanded that he get to do two films of his own choosing immediately following the completion of the seventh Bond film. When the studio agreed, Connery took the money and used it to establish a trust to support fellow Scottish artists.

With Diamonds Are Forever out of the way, Connery was free to move on to whatever projects he desired. He helped director Sidney Lumet make one of his first films and appeared opposite his close friend Michael Caine in The Man Who Would Be King. He played Robin Hood and got to participate in an Agatha Christie adaptation with a star-studded cast. Connery was on top of the world—but that didn’t mean they were all hits.

In 1974, Connery made his weirdest appearance yet, in the bizarre sci-fi thriller Zardoz—best known for Connery’s costume of a scarlet mankini, some 40 years before Borat hit the scene. According to writer and director John Boorman, Connery had actually had a hard time finding work after leaving the Bond franchise, which is why he did the film.

While critics panned it at the time, it’s become something of a cult classic. I blame the mankini.

By the 80s, Connery’s star status was set in stone. The sour taste of being the first Bond must have left his mouth, because he agreed to take on the role again for 1983’s Never Say Never Again. Connery’s wife had suggested the very-appropriate title. The star had once stated that he would “never again” play Bond. He probably should’ve stuck to that vow…

The making of Never Say Never Again was an utter disaster—and Connery was at the center of it all. He demanded rewrites of the script, hand-picking the screenwriters himself. During the production, it became clear that the film’s producer was in over his head. As a result, Connery took over many production duties. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the film’s fight trainer accidentally broke Connery’s wrist while training.

That fight trainer? None other than Steven Seagal.

After that horrible on-set experience, Connery really did say “Never again,” but this time, he meant it—and not just about Bond. He actually took a two-year break from making films—but when he returned, it was with a vengeance. First, he appeared in The Untouchables, for which he won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, and then he took of the role of Indy’s father in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Once again, he was on top…but for how long?

In 1993, fans were shocked when the tabloid pages descended on Connery yet again. A singer-songwriter by the name of Lynsey de Paul had made a shocking revelation, claiming that she’d had an ongoing affair with the married movie star in 1989—and the details were chilling. She claimed that he’d first flirted with her and asked for her number as his wife sat right beside him.

According to de Paul, he left her high and dry after five months. She said that their romance was one of the biggest regrets of her life. Connery denied the affair, but the story didn’t end there.

Another woman also came forward and claimed that she’d had an ongoing affair with Connery. Danish journalist Helle Byrne said that they’d met when she interviewed him for a magazine, and that their affair had lasted 11 months before it ended. Once again, Connery denied it, and his wife stood by his side, remaining silent on the subject ever since.

In the late 90s, Connery was on the shortlist for contenders for knighthood—until a controversy derailed it all. Connery had been a fierce supporter of Scottish Independence from Britain. As a result, political opponents made sure that he was vetoed for knighthood in 1997 and 1998. However, he clawed his way back onto the list in the year 2000, and the Queen finally knighted him that year.

Sean Connery appeared in all kinds of films throughout the late 90s and early 2000s, but one project was so disastrous that he left Hollywood completely afterward. Connery took a part in the long-awaited film adaptation of The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, but the production was a catastrophe from the very start.

Connery clashed with director Stephen Norrington in a big way, and they nearly came to blows on set—but their feud didn’t stop when the film was done.

When Norrington skipped a release party for the film, a journalist asked Connery where the director was. His reply was utterly savage. Connery told the writer to “Check the local asylum". While he made no formal announcement at the time, Connery effectively retired from making movies after The League. He never appeared in another live-action movie again.

Three years later, in 2006, Connery finally confirmed his official retirement from acting, and he didn’t hold back with what he thought, saying that “the […] idiots now making films in Hollywood" had caused him to never want to make a movie again.

Sean Connery has topped many critics’ lists as their pick for the best Bond—but there’s one behind the scenes secret that few fans know. Connery began losing his hair at a very young age, and every time that he played 007, he actually wore a toupee.

In 2006, Connery’s first wife Diane Cilento published her autobiography, and in the book, she made disturbing accusations about the star. Cilento claimed that Connery had both physically and mentally harmed her during their marriage. Connery denied the accusations, saying "I don't believe that any level of abuse of women is ever justified under any circumstances"—but that wasn’t all.

To make matters worse, journalists unearthed quotes from an old interview with Connery. In 1965, the star had said: "I don't think there is anything particularly wrong in hitting a woman, though I don't recommend you do it the same way that you hit a man". On top of that, Connery had told Vanity Fair in 1993: "There are women who take it to the wire. That's what they are looking for, the ultimate confrontation. They want a smack". Yikes.

Remember Connery’s disturbing confrontation with Johnny Stompanato on the set of one of his first films? Well, their story didn’t end when Stompanato returned to the US. Soon after, someone fatally stabbed Stompanato in his girlfriend Lana Turner’s home—and one of the people closest to him made a chilling accusation. While law enforcement detained Turner’s daughter for the attack,  Stompanato’s boss, Micky Cohen, thought there was no way a teenaged girl could’ve done it.

Cohen suspected that Connery was the culprit…and he wanted revenge.

When this was all occurring, Sean Connery was in the US working on a Disney film. Cohen actually went so far as to take out a hit on Connery—but as we know, messing with the original Bond is never a good idea. Connery moved hotels when he received a threatening call at the Roosevelt where he was staying, but other than that, he didn’t let the intimidation bother him.

Cohen eventually called off the hit after a judge found Lana Turner’s daughter guilty, and Connery went on with his life. The man was basically bulletproof!

On October 31, 2020, Connery’s family and the production company behind the James Bond films jointly announced that the actor had passed on peacefully in his sleep at the age of 90. Later, Connery’s wife Micheline Roquebrune made a heartbreaking revelation about the star’s final years.

She shared that: "He had dementia and it took its toll on him. He got his final wish to slip away without any fuss. It was no life for him. He was not able to express himself". RIP.

Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38

We had been together for quite a while—about 6-8 months—and had been living together for at least 2 months when I decided to make tuna salad. I asked him how he liked it. He told me. I came back with two bowls, half the can made his way, and half the can made the way I liked it. He completely freaked out about the two different versions.

He said, “If we can’t agree on how to eat tuna, how will this ever work?!” I said that we don’t have to agree—we can both have it exactly the way we want and be happy. He vehemently disagreed. Then, I started thinking of all of his other controlling behavior and the inability to compromise. It wasn’t that day that we broke up, but it was definitely the day our relationship broke. The cheating didn’t help either.

Tousca

We went to the mall and stopped by this little kiosk selling cookies. I decided that I would get one cookie. The lady working there said that if I bought two then I would get an extra one free. So, I decided to buy two and get the third one free. My date WENT OFF on this lady, saying that she was trying to scam me, etc. etc. He was legit yelling so loud that it was echoing through the mall.

It was so embarrassing I wanted to die. If you're rude to people in customer service, you're not for me.

lotus_flower2419

I genuinely feared for my safety. I went over, and we got in an argument so I slept on the floor, essentially. I went to the bathroom to text one of my buddies to come pick me up since I thought she had fallen asleep. I suddenly get a text from her saying, "Where are you?" And, of course, my phone made a sound. I froze up and opened the bathroom door.

She was already standing there waiting for me in the darkness. She didn't say a word at all, just stared at me until I walked by. I went back to my spot on the floor and got under the blanket and pretended to be falling asleep until she did. After about 30 minutes, I decided to peek out from under the covers and...she was literally towering over me in total darkness with her eyes wide open the entire time. I got out of there so fast.

GAU8

I met a girl on Tinder, and we went for a coffee date. We shared some of the same music tastes, and she lets me know that one such performer is playing at a local club on Friday. I suggest we go together and do dinner before. When Friday comes, we do a late sushi dinner and head to this club around 10 for the aforementioned show.

The headliner, who we wanted to see, is supposed to go on around midnight. We get to the club, finally get to the bar and order drinks then head to the dance floor. She pounds the drink and says that she is getting another drink. She comes back a few minutes later with a new drink, gives me a kiss on the cheek, and wanders off to the dance floor.

I am not someone who is overly possessive and figure my wanting to be in the back to get a full visual and auditory experience is not her jam. I wasn't worried. Then, 20 minutes later, I looked across the dance floor—and my stomach dropped. I see her grinding on some dude. Now, mentally, I am already back at my car, but I want to see what happens when she makes eye contact with me. They start making out, and the guy notices me eyeballing them.

She then wanders off to get another drink, and the said guy comes up to me asking if I have a problem. I explain the situation, and he says something to the extent of, "Sucks, bro, she's with me now. Push off". I took his advice and did just that. So, I called up a friend and went to his house, and we played Catan till about 2.

Then my phone rings. It's 2:30am, and she is calling me asking where I went, since my car was clearly missing from the parking lot. I told her that I went home and she was on her own to find a ride. I said something like, "I bet that guy you were making out with could give you a ride," to which she responded with "which one". We kissed once and made out zero times. I laughed, hung up, and rolled for more bricks.

OldRuskiNoir

My date, who was a restaurant manager, took me out to dinner. He was rude to the staff there almost constantly. I had had enough and got up and left a twenty on the table, after he said, “Do you want to see how long it takes me to get this waitress to apologize to us?” The waitress was great—she only forgot one extra water.

I matched with this girl on Tinder and we clicked really well. We had great text conversations for several months, but she was busy and I wasn’t trying to be pushy to meet her. Just the conversation was nice. In one such conversation, queue me making a joke and it leading into a conversation about how she thinks the world is only 6,000 years old.

Oh, and also, apparently dinosaurs never existed. She claimed to have reviewed all the evidence for both and had arrived at the conclusion that they’re both false. Instead, she opined that the Bible was a hundred percent accurate. I noped out of that one no thank you. Didn’t bother sticking around to see what other crazy ideas she had.

PiesInMyEyes

I went on a date with a guy. We ordered our meals and while we were waiting for them to come, I stepped away to go to the bathroom. When I came back, I found out that he had canceled part of my order while I went to the bathroom because he thought I had ordered too much. It was just a small, extra dumpling. That was the end of everything.

summermode

I was dating a guy for not even 6 months when a family member in another province in Canada unexpectedly passed. My mom and aunties were going to go alone to deal with everything, but I knew there would be a lot of heavy lifting with his belongings, and I didn't want them to do everything alone. It might have been too much.

I used to do weight training and can do a lot of heavy lifting, so me being there would help with that. So, I went and did most of the moving of my late uncle's belongings. I got everything organized and sorted, packed his truck, and drove it back to our home city, which was an 8-hour drive. On top of that, I dealt with all the paperwork, since I have a long history of admin experience.

I'm also a part-time Ordained Minister and was asked to do the eulogy for the funeral/cremation. No problem, that's my job and it's an honor to serve my family. During this time, the dude I'm with won't stop blowing up my phone. He tries to tell me I'm cheating on him. He even messages my brother on Facebook saying that there's an emergency and he needs to talk to me right away.

The emergency was that he's afraid my uncle’s passing made me unlove him. I cut ties as soon as I got back in the city, but he still stalked me.

unrealcrocodiletears

He followed me on a night out, got on his knees, stopping traffic in the middle of a city center street to declare his love. We had been on two dates. He also told me that same night that he could see into the future and already knew he was going to die defending my honor while I was carrying our twins. Yeah...he was fun.

whatsername235

I was dating a girl in college that I was really into. We both loved going to watch concerts for smaller emo-type bands. Anyway, I took her to Dallas with my sister—who happened to be dating the lead singer of one of the bands at the show—and a couple of other friends. The show was at a venue called Trees and it had a really cool almost cellar like feel.

Well after the show was over, we were all hanging out with a lot of the band members in the cellar-like bar area. We were all laughing and having a good conversation when my girlfriend says, out of the blue, "This seems like a really good place to screech". So, confused as we are, one of the guys from the band says, "Screech?" Oh god, I wish he hadn't asked.

And, then my girlfriend immediately lets out this high-pitched, godawful, screech that had everyone in the venue turn around to see what was causing this terrible sound. My sister looked at my girlfriend and then back at me as if to say, "Why in the world would she do that?" The guys from the band just stared at her for what seemed like forever before simply saying, "OooooooK".

And that was the first and only time that I knew the exact moment that I was done with a relationship...The second we got back to town, I got out of the car and said, "Well, it's been fun, but this relationship just isn't going to work for me". And that, as they say, was that. That was the last time I ever heard from her.

wsawyer12

I went on a date with a dude who thought he was a dragon! His friends were dragons too! He was looking for his mate. He had all the elemental dragons as friends but the one he was missing was the water dragon and he knew that the water dragon was his mate. Also, he was close to 600 pounds and wanted to make himself a suit of armor to mirror his dragon’s exterior. I was out.

pepperanne08

I had a very long and bad relationship with an ex. I had wanted to leave for years, but he would threaten to end himself and I would end up staying. I, finally, got the courage to walk away when I was diagnosed with several benign liver tumors and was told by the doctor that it was very important with this type of tumor to immediately and permanently stop taking hormonal birth control.

I researched it on my own and confirmed the single most important thing I could do to avoid further complications was to stop taking hormonal birth control for good. I told my then-husband about the appointment and he said, oh so calmly, "Well that's going to be a problem". I was like, “What do you mean? I'll go to the gynecologist as soon as I can get an appointment and we can just use condoms until then".

Nope. According to him, condoms were unacceptable because we were married. And not being intimate until I got to go to the gynecologist was also unacceptable. And that's not even the part that really made my blood run cold. That was when he suggested that I should continue to take birth control as normal and just not tell the doctor. "He'll never know," he said.

Then he went on to suggest that maybe I could go on and off birth control so I'd be off of it before any follow-up appointments with this doctor, to ensure that he'd never know. I was totally stunned and I just looked at him and said, "You understand this could kill me? This isn't about placating a doctor; this is about my life".

He just shrugged and said he wasn't using condoms and I needed to "figure it out". I did figure it out. I left him more than a decade ago and have never been happier.

SharMarali

I’m a black person. My bestest buddy in the whole wide world is a white person. We were roomies at one point and he brought a date over. I met her, and there was nothing weird. But, as it turned out, she had a problem with my bromeo living with a black person—me. He immediately broke it off with her. I don’t have many friends, but I’d like to think I got quality over quantity.

ghettoccult_nerd

Lady stayed the night for the first time then started taking pictures of my house the next morning and posting them on social media. She put my bedroom, living room, and master bath on and I was like...what are you doing. She said, "I want everyone to see your place". I said, "Uhh, let me take you home". I also told her I didn't like that she did what she had done.

What she took away from this became obvious pretty soon. She complained on social media how I was so petty for not liking her posting my house. Then she called me up to go out again! I was just astonished that she thought I would be like “post my house, speak ill of me, and come on back". That was one night...NOPE.

Cannotakema

I met this guy. As I came to know him, I found out that he was working. And, then it turned out that he had enough money to move out of his parental house and live independently. However, he chose not to do so. Why not you ask? He told me he would stay with his mother forever because she cooks and does the chores for him.

Ines_cstle

I dated a guy back in high school. I thought he was pretty awesome—he was one of the first guys that I dated that didn't dump me after a week. Well, after about 3 months of dating I, finally, went over to his house to spend time with him—it took a while to convince my mom to let me—and we were playing Super Smash Brothers.

I had already told him I was pretty decent at the game since I grew up with two older brothers and played it with them all the time. I beat this dude ONE TIME and I swear I've never seen a dude act like such a toddler. He screamed, threw his controller at the ground, and started cussing at me and the game. I grabbed my things and got out of there and never looked back.

Cupcake_Octopus

She microwaved her travel coffee cup in my microwave and nearly set my kitchen on fire. It was clearly made of non-microwavable plastic and stainless steel. Lightning was forming in that microwave, as was pitch black smoke which began to pour out. She got annoyed at me for being upset by this and I then realized that this woman, despite being very attractive, kind, and usually good-hearted, lacked a survivable IQ and common sense.

Previous actions contributed to this final judgment but this action and lack of response to it sealed the deal for me.

Belisar002

I had already come close to dumping this guy a few times, but the moment that made me really kick him out was that one time he just wouldn't stop tickling me and I almost passed out. He already knew I don't accept tickling, but he kept on going until I had almost passed out, and I was literally fighting to get him off of me".

Get out" was the first thing I said when I got my breath back.

Clare_Not_A_Bear

I realized he was trying to cut me off from my support network. It started off innocuous enough. He didn't like my two closest friends and would make remarks like, "Do we have to hang out with them? Can't we see some of your other friends," and I figured whatever, he doesn't have to like everyone. Then I realized, he liked anyone if I wasn't really close to them.

I also realized that he had started to act rude and crass around my closest friends but was nice and charming with other people. One night I told him I was going to hang out with my best friend alone and he went off and said she was a dog, she was trash, and I shouldn't waste my time. I told him he was a terrible person.

He threatened to break up with me if I didn't end my friendship with her, and I said that it sounded like a good idea. He went to my mom's house that night and poured some kind of "woe is me" story out to her to make her think I was a cold-hearted person who had broken up with him for no reason and to help him convince me to get back with him.

I told him I didn't need someone to control my life and I certainly didn't need him.

She picked me because I had the same first name, general appearance, and lived in the same area of the state as her ex-fiancé. They had been together for two years. And, it turned out that she had been dumped by the said ex-fiancé just a month before we met. I felt even more offended about all of that than just being straight-up rejected.

blackmobius

I was engaged and my fiancé had a fit because I bought her flowers and didn't have them delivered. She said it only counts if they are delivered and I was being cheap. Shortly thereafter I was given a $100 gift card at work for perfect attendance and I gave it to her. And, when she found out later it was a work prize, she had a meltdown.

All because I didn’t disclose it was prize that I had "deceived" her into thinking I had purchased the gift card. These two things and I was like, nope. Plus, I'm gay and she's a lesbian so it all worked out for the best.

greeperfi

I was at his house on our third date and his dog wanted me to throw the ball. I did. On the second time that it hit the wall he raised his voice and told me if I did it one more time, I was repainting the wall (You are not my father!). He was already on tenuous ground because of the way our second date had gone. To be clear, it wasn’t that great.

On that date, he went with me to my daughter’s recital. And, on the way home, said daughter was all excited and talking. He looked at her and said, “Do you ever be quiet?” Not gonna work out buddy.

JRich61

She got unreasonably aggressive and angry over a game of monopoly. I dislike the game anyway but went along with it because it was something she wanted to do, but I didn’t really know the rules. She shouted at me when I did anything ‘wrong’ in the game, or anything she didn’t think made sense, to the point where I said, “Is this supposed to be fun?”

She said, “Yeah, it’s a great game”. So, I shot back, “No, I meant this relationship”. It had only been a month or so, so it was an easy out.

FisherPrice_Hair

We dated for a few months. The first time that I went to his place, I saw that he lived like a teenager. No real dishes, couches that people had put on curbs (one had holes where you would sit), tons of Mountain Dew, etc. He was not broke, as I knew, so I didn’t understand why he had everything that was pretty much garbage.

I went to his bathroom to take a shower and you could tell that he had not cleaned it in the three years that he had lived there. I was completely grossed out and out of there.

paps2977

He had already shown very jealous tendencies and had smacked me over the head because he thought I was looking at a guy. So, our relationship wasn't good already. One day, we were outside of his friend’s house and his friend asked how I was doing. He got mad at me for answering his own friend. I just got in my car and drove away.

i_izzie

I start dating a girl who does this to me not only on the first date but several afterward. Initially, I assume she overestimates our appetites. On our first date, when we meet at the restaurant-bar, she suggests some appetizers which I was all for because this place makes great ones, but they are big. She picks about 4 appetizers.

I like them so I say, "Sure". Then the bartender asks if we want a main course too. She immediately orders a steak dinner. I am hesitant but still order fish and chips so as not to make her feel gluttonous. So, the big appetizers come out; we are sharing them and talking. After about twenty minutes, I'm full already and we haven't even put a dent in them.

The server brings the main courses out as she’s nibbling at a blooming onion. She says she’s not hungry anymore. I say, "I'm stuffed". She calls the bartender and asks for takeout boxes. They oblige us. We now have 5 styrofoam boxes stacked beside us in two bags and have another couple of drinks.

We'd been there 1-hour max when she says her mom is expecting her to pick up her five-year-old at 10pm. We had previously discussed the babysitting situation. The bartender asks if we are done and brings back the tab and slaps it down between us. I had gone into this fully expecting to cover whatever the cost of the meal and drinks.

However, she just stares into space as the bartender walks away. I see her going in her handbag and pulling out her phone and hear her saying, "Yes, ok I'll be there shortly. How was he?" To avoid any awkwardness, I reach for the tab. It is around $150 before tip; she's still on the phone glancing at me but not offering anything.

I start filling out the tab and make it for $190, since we had about 4 drinks each as well. He takes the tab and my debit card and returns smiling, thanking us. Having ended her call, she says she's gotta run. She grabs both the to-go bags and asks if I want anything from in there. I wouldn't have minded having my untouched fish and chips but had no idea which box within the bags was which.

So, I told her no. She says, “Thank you. Mikey and I will enjoy these tomorrow". She also thanks me for the date and says she'll call me the next day or that I could call her if I want so we could "do this again or catch a movie". Believe it or not, I actually go on another date with her at a Tiki bar on the beach a week later. She does almost the same thing again. I just shrug my shoulders. I should have noped out right there—but the worst was yet to come.

Then, she says, "Why don't we have the next date at my apartment in a few days?" I, as someone who likes to go out, agreed. On the evening the date at her place, she texted her address. Right as I'm about to leave my place, she calls me and asks if I'd mind stopping by a specific store and grabbing her a specific bottle of red for us and also grab a pack of microwave popcorn for 'Mikey.'

At her place, I go to put the drinks in the fridge and grab one and see the cleanest, emptiest fridge I've ever seen. Except for some juice boxes, there is nothing at all in there. We start watching some movie she picked for her son since it wasn’t his bedtime yet.

She eats most of the popcorn and then suggests ordering Chinese food from one of the more upscale places. I agree, assuming since she had invited me, that she probably was going to get the food she suggested. Eh nope. I end up paying. When the food arrives, she rushes to the door. There was so much food we could have fed five adults.

She makes him a little plate with like an egg roll, etc. He's still watching his movie and we attempt to eat whatever we could. Again, we hardly put a dent in it and into the fridge it goes "for tomorrow". It's about 9pm now and she says goes to put her son to bed in his room. She, later, joins me on the balcony where we take a few puffs and I'm enjoying the buzz.

Then, she hides the bag up in a hanging plant and tells me that her dad pays half the rent and she can't get caught with ashtrays or empty beverage bottles as he has a key and is known to show up at any time. I thought this was odd coming from a 28-year-old independent woman but whatever. 30 minutes later her son is back outside.

She goes to put him to sleep and asks me to wait. I wait a half hour. Then, I open the sliding glass door quietly to get the last of my drinks from the fridge and pass the kid's room. The door is half open, and I hear nothing so I lean in and see that she is passed out on her son’s bed. Her son is sleeping too. Bored and tired, I lay down clothed on the couch, shoes off, and pull this tiny kids’ sheet over me. I didn't want to risk driving after the 6 pack.

The next morning, she wakes me up and apologizes for passing out, surprised that I hadn’t gone home. I told her I didn't want to drive after drinking and assumed she meant it when she asked me to wait for her. She actually has coffee and makes it. We have it out on the balcony again while her son is watching cartoons.

She goes to get another cup and exclaims as she bends down to where she'd been standing the night before. She picks up a pea-sized piece of what she had offered me last night off the carpet, comes back out and, holding the crumb, asks, "How did this get there on the carpet?” I'm confused about why she's asking me and say it may have fallen out when she packed the bowl the previous night.

She hems and haws, acting as though she thinks that I helped myself. I am insulted and tell her I'm no thief. I am about to go and she concedes that she may be wrong and that she sometimes jumps to conclusions. I tell her that she definitely jumped to an insulting conclusion and that I am not impressed with the accusation.

The UNBELIEVABLE next part. I stand up, grab my keys to go when she comes out with, "I thought maybe you and I and Mikey would spend the day at the park today since it's Saturday!" No apology, no thanks for the excessive meals, drinks, and movies. She actually goes from accusing me of theft to saying she thought I'd want to spend the day with her and her kid.

I realized I was dealing with some kind of greedy narcissistic nut and told her, "Enjoy your day". I am noping outta there for good. She follows me to the door and says, "Call me later, babe?" Yeah right! As if that would happen. She texted me saying that she hoped to see me again, and that it was a misunderstanding yet did not apologize.

Before the "Grand Finale" event at the end, we had gone on a few more similar dates, and I noticed that in every bar-restaurant that we went to the staff would grin at her and clearly knew her. This was probably her modus operandi.

Multitrak

We were at Hot Topic—it was the early 2000s—and I felt something slide into my back pocket as we were browsing. I turned around quickly and realized this wonderful person was trying to take one of those scene girl bow hair clips by slipping it into MY pocket. What was she hoping for? Maybe that I wouldn’t notice, I guess?

ayybillay

We were not in a relationship officially, but I had been getting to know a girl in one of my classes back in college, and we were starting to get pretty close. One day before class I was reading an article about Global Warming and she rolled her eyes and said, "Ugh, you don't actually BELIEVE in that stuff, do you?" I don't think I've backed off from getting to know someone so quickly.

TheBrianJ

We were nowhere near a relationship. We just knew each other by sight, I thought, and said hi. However, this girl went from saying hi to me to having everyone at our trade school and their respective home schools convinced that we had been dating for years and, to top it off, I had, apparently, suddenly started cheating on her.

throwaway1a936

There was not a fully formed relationship for there to be a proper break-up, but I stopped talking to this guy. Why? On one occasion, we were watching Shrek. He, then, wanted to make out while we were still watching Shrek. Like who gets turned on by Shrek?

[deleted]

I received a message that clearly wasn't meant for me. We just had our first date which went really well. The message was calling me cheap and a slimeball and how I'm on my absolutely last chance to make things right on her upcoming birthday with lots of presents. I replied, "Hi, this is X. We just met and had one date. Was that message for someone else?

She replied pretending to be her 12-year-old sister. Then, apparently, her dad messaged me with how he's told off his younger daughter. I'm out!

Otherside-Dav

We had been married for six years. I started out thinking that she just struggled with depression and anxiety sometimes, but things kept escalating. I walked away when she started threatening to stab me in my sleep. We had already tried several couples’ therapists and individual therapists, but she refused to consider medication.

I called her to meet up and try to find some closure, but she cut me off by telling me that I wasn't allowed to leave her, and that, as a punishment, she was sleeping with two other guys. At that point, I just ignored her number and filed for divorce. I hope she's doing well, but I am glad to not be afraid for my life!

QuestionableKoala

My brother came to visit me. After I spent the whole day with my girlfriend, it was time to see my brother because we had not seen each other for a long time. We prepared some snacks and were about to start Lord of the Rings because both of us love Lord of the Rings. She called me and started a long conversation on the phone.

I said my brother was waiting for me, and she said that I could not spend my time with anyone else because it belonged to her. It was the last talk between the two of us.

vtoken6

He wanted me to grow out my pit and leg hair and texted, called, and emailed me repeatedly about it. It seemed like a pretty silly thing, and I thought that he just had a little special taste. But, after several days of this, my sister said, "Why do you always attract the controlling freaks?" and I finally had a moment of clarity.

Klpincoyo

My wife did this stupid thing early in our marriage. Her line of nonsense was “I can’t fall asleep if you fall asleep first” which was particularly hateful because I don’t snore while she sounds like a chainsaw copulating with a dirt bike. I basically had to threaten to sleep in a different room to get it to stop.

I still, generally, fall asleep after her out of habit but if I’m especially tired and pass out you should leave me well alone!

Roguespiffy

I was going through some stuff in my early twenties and was pretty desperate for any kind of affection, which is the only reason I took a couple weeks to back out of this. The second time I ever met this girl, she told me to delete every other girl's number from my phone—sister included. She then came over to my place, saw I had a full bookshelf, and ridiculed me for being a reader.

In the same breath, she announced that she loved using a specific substance so much and wanted me to try it. I, finally, escaped, but by then she was already sleeping with two of my friends—who are obviously no longer my friends. The good news is, I've now been happily married for five years and consider myself so incredibly lucky.

ResponsibleShape9336

She came to stay for the first time. It was the night before New Year’s Eve and we were planning to go out drinking for the said New Year’s Eve. I had just worked a 12-hour shift. I am a carpet fitter so I do manual labor. I was, of course, exhausted. After coming over, she had a few drinks and started to get aggressive. The reason? Because I wanted to just relax that night but she wanted to go out for more drinking.

We broke up three days later. My father was an aggressive drinker when I was a kid so I could see how it would go...If you know you're an aggressive drinker, get off the drink, man.

ChewwyStick

He didn't have a car so I'd help him with rides to work. He worked the third shift at Toys R Us where he stocked shelves. I picked him up one night and he was so hammered he could barely stand. I made some comment about how he wasn’t going to be able to work that night. He started throwing things at me in the parking lot.

I threw his things on the ground and left him there. Cut to 5 years later, he is now much better and getting married this year! So good for him!

elmsa517

I had a big crush on this guy at work and my mom was very sick and passed very quickly without much notice. We had only learned she was sick about 6 weeks before she passed. At 69, that was too young. We were, of course, devastated. And, when I would talk about how hard it's been, the guy I had a crush on said I was being a buzzkill. Outta here with that. Crush over.

eacomish

I had a huge crush on her for a while but never had the opportunity to talk to her given our weird work schedules. Then a friend from work sets us up; I am elated. First date goes really well and we hit it off. We start spending as much time as we can around each other—talking on the phone every night, and all the other special things you do when you're starting a new relationship.

Then she starts coming over more often unannounced. At first, she would stay for a couple nights. This then became a week, then two weeks. Then things got truly dark. I would come home from work and she would be in my house, sometimes hammered. Thing was she had almost been fired for an incident involving drinking before and was lying to them about her life.

She would have a few too many and then go off about her family or how I wasn't taking our two-month relationship "seriously enough". The final straw dropped on Valentine's Day this year. She gets annihilated to the point of not being able to walk on her own. After I refuse her hammered advances, she completely flips out.

What followed was a couple hours of her threatening to drive home in that state and sitting outside so the cold weather would freeze her, laying in my bed and wailing my name till she was hoarse, and alternating between manic laughter and crying. Two days later, once she was clear-headed, I told her to kick rocks. We dated for just around 3 months. Quickest turnaround ever for me in a relationship.

Blabernathy

I was with this girl who called herself a punk. At one point, she completely stopped showering because, according to her, “punks don’t shower”. To make up for this, she would then put massive amounts of patchouli on herself. The resulting smell was overpowering to the point where I have developed almost a fear of patchouli.

Deku_plus_bebop

The guy came up with the gem, "Not like you're not pretty, but you would be so much more attractive if you looked like [insert his baby sister's name]". To which I said, "you mean 15 years younger (and a minor), 6', blonde, and a size 2?" He said it in front of his friends, and everything went completely silent. You could hear a pin drop.

His best friend punched his arm and told him he was being inconsiderate. I got up and walked out. His sister called later to apologize for him being a terrible guy, and told me his entire family was furious with him. Worst part? He genuinely didn't think he did anything wrong.

schroedingersnewcat

Her father recently got into a brawl with a date's teenage kid. I was concerned and asked questions. She then explained how the teen had it coming because they didn't know their place. Feeling confused, I asked her to elaborate again. It turned out that a grown man punched a mentally disabled autistic teen, rather than simply walk away.

I told her that I refuse to date people who are cool with that. She was immediately remorseful, but then defended her father's outburst against a child a few moments later. Do not date people who think that an adult ought to beat mentally disabled children. That is not and never will be acceptable.

AdeptlyDisconnected

I was interested in this woman I used to work with many years ago, and the feeling was mutual. We had gone bowling a couple of times, and we had started talking about potentially dating. She said if we date, "I expect to be taken out at least twice a week, given gifts at least once a week, and we won't be intimate for at least three months". Considering we had almost the same work schedule, I have no idea how she thought I was going to pull any of that off.

ProjectShadow316

I was seeing this guy for a couple of weeks, and hadn't met his 2 young kids yet because that was his choice. He tells me that he's fighting for his kids. According to him, the mom took them in the breakup, but doesn't really want them. She is living at her parents' and doesn't have to do anything if she has the kids. So, one night I'm over and he tells me the following:

If we were to get serious, I'd move into his apartment. I'd take care of his kids and clean his apartment while he's at work and he'd expect dinner to be ready when he gets home from work. He told me to think about it for a few days. He said if I couldn't do this, then we could have a purely physical relationship until he met someone else.

Then he would straight up cut me off. Why was he doing this? Because his kids NEED A MOM and they need stability. I hadn't even met his kids! I ended up telling him no and I'm glad I did.

cryingstlfan

Back in my "hound dog" days I met a girl through an acquaintance. We seemed to hit it off. One day I had to work late, it being a last-minute notice kind of thing. When I did get home, later than normal naturally, I found out she had come by my apartment and scratched "where are you" right into my front door!

This was before cell phones, so she couldn't just call, but I grabbed an overnight bag and spent a few days at a buddy’s house. Luckily, I never saw her again.

Worried-Cow5238

There were so many things that should have been red flags but I was too naive to recognize them. They left notes on my car windshield when I was at work/a friend’s house/the store. It seemed sweet, but I realized later that was my SO keeping tabs on me, even when I didn’t say where I was. They let me know how much a hitman cost and that it was “cheaper than you’d expect”.

They would tell me something, and then later say that was a lie or a test, as though I should have figured that out instead of expecting the truth. They expected me to answer every call, and would get angry if I wanted to end the call first. They also complained about my friends and family all the time. All of them. Apparently, everyone I knew was manipulative and/or rude. I didn’t figure out this was an attempt to isolate me until after we broke up.

BitwiseB

It was a couple of little things combined which gave me complete clarity. His birthday was a month before mine. I had planned the entire day from hotel, to visiting a zoo (which was on discount since I had purchased a Groupon coupon), to cake and dinner. A couple of days after that, we were making plans for my birthday.

And, as we were doing this, he found out that the zoo visit was on discount and I hadn’t paid the full price. That's when things went off the rails. He actually took out his phone and started calculating how much I EXACTLY spent on his birthday and told me that since you spent x amount of money on me, I will also be spending the exact same amount and to not expect him to pay anything more.

I thought the whole thing was extremely shallow. It’s not about how much he wanted to spend, but he did the calculation of how much I spent on him right in front of me...which according to me was quite…C.H.E.A.P.

Mayaaa_1992

I wouldn't really call it a relationship as it was only 3 dates, but I had met this girl at a wedding. She was a friend of a friend and we shared numbers that night. We texted for a while and then had a date. First date was probably a big red flag, but I shrugged it off. We had connected on Facebook and she noticed that she went to college with a girl I went to high school with.

No big deal, until I found out she had been messaging that girl and asking her all these questions about me in high school—who did I date, what car I drove, etc. Anyway, the third date rolls around. I wasn't really sure how long we would be together so typically I wouldn't have taken her to a really nice restaurant so early in a relationship, but I was in the mood for steak so I took her to a pretty high-end steakhouse.

I have never been more embarrassed by someone's behavior in public in my life, and I have a 6- and 3-year-old at home now. She sent 3 martinis back because they weren't made correctly while being extremely insulting and rude about it. She ordered a medium steak and then got annoyed because she insisted that she had ordered it medium-rare.

Both the waiter and I told her she had ordered medium. She was also making comments about what other women in the restaurant were wearing, and not very subtly. Then, despite me trying to get out of there without buying her dessert, she got a dessert menu and expected them to make her something that they didn't have on the menu.

They had cheesecake and she wanted chocolate cheesecake. So, another outburst at the staff. On the way out the door she made a point to stop and complain to someone loud enough that the other customers could hear. When we got into my car, I was so embarrassed I pretended I had left my credit card on the table so I could go back in.

I gave the waiter an extra twenty dollars and also apologized to him, telling him that I was dumping her as soon as I got to her place. He laughed and told me he wished he could be there to see it. I didn't really give her a chance to say much. She called me a loser and stormed off. I haven’t seen or heard from her since.

StyrofoamCueball

His mom wanted to put his socks on for him. And he let her! This fully capable, adult male actually sat there grinning at me quite happily while his 50 something-year-old mother knelt before him as if he was a demigod. She then proceeded to lovingly roll his socks onto each of his feet! Noped outta there? I'm still running!

ApartLocksmith1

Source: 1, 2, 3

In my second year of college, I was pulling an all-nighter at the same time as one of my friends, who was very cute. We weren't in the same place, but we kept messaging over Facebook. It was really nice just talking with her. I had been single for about two months and was feeling confident. When dawn hit and our papers were done, she asked me out for celebratory breakfast.

I looked like I had just finished an all-nighter, and she looked radiant. As our breakfast went on, we talked, laughed, and the caffeine begins to mix with the satisfaction of completing my work for the semester. I’m feeling like I'm in a really good place. The sun is starting to fill the windows of the restaurant we're in, and there's this warm light everywhere.

She smiles coyly and asks me if I'm over my ex. I smile, say I am and I'm already thinking about who I'd like to ask out next. She smiles even broader and asks me who that is while touching me on the hand. And I said the stupidest thing possible. "Her name is Rebecca and she was in one of my history classes." Distinctly, this was not the girl I was out to breakfast with.

She looked devastated. At the time, I had no idea why. Realizing the mood had changed I quickly said, "I'm sad the semester's ending soon, but I'll see you in the spring!" I ran back to my dorm, ending what I would later learn was the first date with my future wife.

My wife was set up on a blind date by a friend several years before I met her. They agreed to meet at a mall and then go from there. This is the late nineties, before cell phones, so he tells her he'll be wearing blue jeans and a Megadeth t-shirt and she tells him her outfit so they can identify each other. She arrives at the mall and sits down to wait.

After thirty minutes there’s still no sign of him. She’s about to leave when a guy approaches her and asks if she's waiting for a date. It's him, but wearing a completely different outfit. Confused, she asks why he told her he'd be wearing something else. His response was absolutely insane. He just shrugged and says his mom didn’t do the laundry yet. Two strikes...

They still decide to grab some food. He tried to use an expired coupon and started an argument with the girl behind the counter. At the table, he asks my wife if she knows how to cook. What meals does she know how to cook? Can she make this or how does she make that etc. The conversation continues but now he adds, "Do you do it naked?" after everything.

For example, she likes to go rock climbing, “but do you do it naked?" Or, I like to grow my own vegetables, "but do you do it naked?" Needless to say, my wife decided to end the date early and leave. He asks if she can lend him bus fare since his mom won't be coming to get him for several hours. He was twenty-seven years old.

r

This was embarrassing at the moment, but it worked out. It was a second date, on Valentine's Day, so I decided to go all out. I bought her flowers, a musical card, and chocolates. I was aiming to impress her and couldn’t wait to surprise her after the date. It was freezing cold, and I didn't have anywhere to keep the presents except my car, which I thought would be fine.

We finish dinner and everything is going smooth until we get back to my car. The flowers had withered, but I thought, “That’s ok, I still have two more surprises!” I hand her the card and hear it go bbbzzzzzz as she opens it. I sighed and said, "Well... I hope the chocolates are okay." She started laughing and gave me our first kiss.

My first date with my now-husband. Two very anxious people with no dating experience. We decided to go to the library and use their wifi to watch Netflix in the backseat. As soon as we got to the library he got out of the car and threw up in the parking lot. I then admitted to him that I had done the same before he picked me up. He tried to play it off, but we both knew it was nerves.

We chose a late-night movie that ended around 2 am. Public transit had stopped running and we didn't have a car, so we walked back to her house. Exhausted from the walk, we collapsed fully clothed on her bed and fell asleep. Three hours later her dad shakes me awake. He finds out I’m studying chemistry but only has questions on thermodynamics...really not my strongest subject.

Back in middle school, my mom drove me to meet a girl at an outdoor mall to see a movie. It was an hour away and my date canceled on me fifteen minutes before. I felt so bad for my mom driving me all the way there that I pretended everything was fine. My mom dropped me off, and I watched a movie by myself. Almost cried but I kept it together.

Second date but the first time at his apartment. After a few hours, disaster struck. Normally I’d never go number two at someone’s apartment but it was an emergency. The toilet wouldn’t flush and I ended up wrapping it up in toilet paper and hiding it in my purse! I slept over and the next morning the entire apartment stunk. He never found out thankfully and blamed his roommate for the smell.

I met a girl through mutual friends, and we drifted in and out of each other’s lives for a few years. I finally asked her out, and we had a romantic dinner at an outdoor cafe. It was a beautiful late summer evening and everything was going really well. We head back to my place and start kissing on my bed when I feel something warm drip from my nose.

I was having a nose bleed and it was already dripping on her upper lip. I was horrified and tried to wipe it off my face, and hers, which just smeared it, and then ran to the bathroom for kleenex and a washcloth. She was polite but promptly informed me that she was leaving and wouldn’t let me walk her to her car.

As she walked out the front door, she turned and said, “It’s really too bad, because I was in a REALLY good mood tonight.” Then she was gone, and I headed to a bar to drown my sorrows. Somehow we’ve been together almost 10 years and married for six. Love you, sweetheart.

I was 13 and it was my first date. She wanted to meet and I asked my mom to drive me. Unbeknownst to me, after she dropped me off she stuck around to watch. My date and I began to walk when suddenly my mom yelled out from behind us. I was so embarrassed I wasn’t able to talk to the girl after and just went home very quickly.

I was on a mediocre date, walking back to her apartment. On the way, she took a phone call about a couch she was buying. This call continued for the next few hours. She insisted I stay and put on Netflix while she was on the call. After she hung up she said, “There isn’t going to be a second date, is there?” I agreed there would not.

I went on an ice skating date with a professional figure skater. I knew skating basics and could get from one side of the rink to the other without falling, and sometimes even stop without hitting the boards. By the end of the date, I had managed a few moves including a pirouette but also fell several times to the amusement of bystanders.

My date and I met in a park and were walking around getting to know each other. He suggested walking into the woods, and I said no because it was the first time I had met him. He was immediately offended that I didn’t trust him. It wasn't personal, just common sense on a first date. Against my better judgment, we continued to dinner. I should have listened to my gut.

The restaurant brought him the wrong food and he was very upset and angry about it. At the end of the meal, I wanted to split the bill and was so anxious to leave I had trouble with the math. By accident, I tipped more than I intended. He was again immediately offended. Never saw each other after that and I’m still cringing.

I wouldn’t call this a date, but it led to us dating later. We were friends at work and would go walking at this big park near the office. Afterward, we occasionally bought bottled water from Stop N Go. One night after a walk, the lot was full so I had to park at least 10 or so parking spaces from the front doors. On this particular night only I went in to buy water, and she waited in the car.

I buy the water and come out of the store and notice that she has both of the windows halfway down. It’s a chilly fall evening, and I remember the windows had been up when I got out of the car. So I get in and it reeks of horrendous gas. She’s frantically apologizing but I can’t stop laughing, and soon neither can she. That was the moment I knew we could be more than friends.

The year was 1991 and I finally asked out a really gorgeous coworker. She says yes and I take her to a friend's party. Once we’re there she proceeds to get on the drinks and spend the evening flirting with another guy. The evening ends and she brings her new friend back in the car. They make out with each other for the duration of the drive.

When I was in high school I dated a guy with IBS and my parents insisted on having him over for dinners where he would just sit there because he couldn’t eat any of our food. It would’ve been fine if my parents ever let him and I cook, but even worse, we’re an introverted family. I still cringe thinking about the silence and him sitting next to me bored and hungry.

4

Tale from my best friend and this guy she matched with on Tinder. He was running late so she texted him asking if he was cool with her ordering the pizza. He says yes, so she orders and pays for it. After the meal, he goes to pay and she tells him she already took care of it. He went off on her because he wouldn’t have eaten the food if he knew a woman had paid for it. Seriously.

I went on a Tinder date with a guy for ice cream. We placed our order and when it was time to pay, the cashier asked if it would be together or separate. He berated her because men and women are equal and should therefore pay their own way and how dare she even ask! The whole store turned around to watch him yell at this poor girl.

I chose a dessert shop for a first date. Wanting to be a gentleman when the bill came, I told her, "No, it was great getting to know you. I got this." I tried to play it real cool—and ended up looking like an idiot. Walk up to pay with my debit card, and it's cash only. I don't have any cash and embarrassingly walked back to ask her if she did. I made it up with a second date on my dime, but we ended up not being compatible.

My sister-in-law set me up with a friend of a friend of hers. First impression, I’m relieved she looks like her picture, but then we start talking. She had a Korean boyfriend who had cheated on her. I’m also Korean, and she kept insulting Korean guys as I sat there listening. After her rant, she goes: "You're Korean right?"

I try to steer the conversation to other topics, but it goes back to her ex and her bashing all Korean men. Feeling uncomfortable I apologized on behalf of Korean men, and then made a hasty exit. She texted me as I was driving away that her next date showed up early. I wished her the best of luck, and immediately called my sister-in-law to complain!

I had a date with a girl who asked me out. At the time, this had never happened before, and I was excited. We went for dinner and then picked a bar for a couple of drinks. We went back to my house and she politely informed me that we could chill at my house, but that she doesn’t sleep with people on the first date. "No worries," I told her and we hung out with my roommates and listened to music.

After a couple of hours, she told me she had a great time but that she was going to head home. Since my roommates were home she asked if I would walk her to her car. Once we got out there she leaned in and kissed me. I kissed back and a light makeout session occurred for maybe thirty seconds. We hug and she must have felt my bulge of excitement because she looked down.

I also looked down, and what do I see? My package visibly out of the top of my waistline. She loses it as if it’s the funniest thing she's ever seen. I stammered out an apology as she gets in her car. She never stopped heaving with laughter but said, “I’ll text you.” The joke ended up being on me because I dated that girl for a couple of months until she dumped me on my birthday.

In my freshman year of college, I went on a first date with a guy from my Italian class. We had dinner and were walking around when it started to drizzle. I was wearing ballerina flats with no grip. I took one step on the wet cobblestones and my foot shot out from under me. I landed on my back, hard. Mortified, I stood up quickly.

He asked if I was okay, and I remember saying I felt queasy. The next thing I knew I’m regaining consciousness in the gutter. I eventually got up and finished our date at the student health center. Turns out I'd broken my tailbone. I had to sit on a donut cushion in class for the next two weeks. Unfortunately, there was no amore.

s

I took a girl out to Nando's once and she was really nice but a bit strange. We ordered and I’m eating mine, but notice she hasn’t touched her chicken. I ask if everything is ok, and she says she’s not hungry and proceeds to dump her entire meal into her purse. I’m shocked and a bit annoyed but everyone has quirks. I drove her home in silence, but my car smelled like Nandos the whole way.

She messaged me two days later saying she was really sorry for acting weird. A few nights prior to the date she had been at the Manchester Arena attacks and was extremely traumatized. We hadn't talked a lot before the date, and I didn’t even know she had gone. I felt really bad for not asking about it, but we never spoke again after that.

Technically, there was never actually a date. Back in high school, I called a young lady to ask her out only to be told she had a boyfriend and was away on a weekend ski trip. I learned this from her mother, who demanded to know who I was and why I was calling her daughter. I had looked the number up in a phone book and cold-called her house.

It legitimately never occurred to me that anyone else would have the brilliant idea to ask her out. I got off the phone and regretted everything. When I saw her in school the following week, I tried to apologize by giving her a rose. She freaked out and loudly recounted her mom's version of it, to everyone in earshot.

I was dating a ballet instructor and she had mentioned our date to her class. She taught teenage girls and there was a group of ten watching us when I picked her up from class. As we were walking to the restaurant/bar we noticed six of them tagged along and were trying to hide any time we looked in their direction. I thought it was funny at first—but it just got worse and worse.

We figured they would get bored while we had dinner but for the next few hours I’d catch them spying on us from different locations. It was like being followed by a bunch of little sisters. When we left and went for drinks, we noticed the youngest girls left but the older ones still followed us to the next place.

The entire night I thought we finally lost them, and I’d lean in for a kiss but catch one of them peeking in on us. We had planned on going to her place and even made a plan to split up and go in different directions but didn't want to reward their persistence with something juicy to talk about so we called it a night.

I went out on a date with a girl going to college in a neighboring town. Dinner went great, and when I drove her back to her apartment, we sat and chatted in my truck for a few minutes. Then she said, “My roommates are out, do you want to come up for coffee?” My response was, “No, I don’t like coffee.” She gave me a strange look and we said our goodbyes. I was halfway home before it hit me.

My first date was when I was twelve years old and living in Germany. I took the bus to the air force base she lived on, and I was going to be early. Walking to her house I realized I didn’t remember the apartment number, and all the buildings looked exactly the same. I said hello to a lot of confused people that night after knocking on their door.

By the time I found her, I was really late and she was upset. We went to a dance where the boys I knew made terrible fun of me for having a date, and her friends were also being completely terrible. The night ended with her crying and me wanting to crawl into a hole forever. Petra, if you are out there somewhere, I am sorry.

On my first date with this girl, we went to a restaurant called "Duck Duck Goose" that promised duck and goose-based tapas-style dishes. We ordered duck meatballs and duck poutine. The duck meatballs had a sauce that just tasted like duck grease. After eating just one of the three meatballs she confided in me that she hates duck, and then I also realized, I hate duck too.

A woman asked me on a date to a dog park bar. I told her my dogs don't travel well so it would just be me. I arrived and she also didn't bring her dog and tells me she's a recovering alcoholic. So we're at a dog park bar with no dogs and no drinking. The date only lasted twenty minutes before she began crying about how she'd ruined everything and ran to her car.

I had just got back from this long trip biking across America. One of my friends decided she had a crush on me after this. I was clueless to her new emotions, as we had always had a flirtatious friendship. When she asked if we could go out to eat I thought nothing of it. I chose my neighborhood Popeyes. She picks me up, full hair and makeup, I’m still oblivious.

When we got to Popeyes the cashier asked if we were dating. She looked at me and I said we were just friends. The rest of the time was really fun and we talked about life and my trip. She drove me home and we stayed friends for a few years. The embarrassing part for me is I didn't realize this was a date until a year later.

I met a woman online, we chatted off and on for a few weeks, and finally decided we should grab a drink. Things are going smoothly, and then she says that she’s happy I wanted to see her again. Confused, I asked her what she meant? Turns out we had met six months ago and I ghosted after. I didn't even recognize her or remember we went out.

My best friend at the time was dating a boy who refused to hang out without his best friend. Their lack of independence resulted in me getting dragged into the worst double date of my life. We’ll call the boyfriend’s best friend “X.” He tried to make it less awkward by asking me out himself, while we were already on the date, to which I said no.

X spent the rest of the time aggressively yelling at me. Exclaiming, “I can’t believe you said no!” and “I can’t believe you don’t want to date me!” While we were watching a movie, in a public theatre. I had driven with my friend so I couldn’t leave. The plus side is his behavior was so bad I never got asked to double date with my best friend again!

I was on a first date with a girl and it was going really well. We'd only met the day before but we were vibing and I was feeling confident and optimistic. We were sitting near the front of the bar when she asked if I could pass the water. With my surge of confidence, I decided it would be funny to hold it over her head.

I thought it was even funnier to pretend to drop it on her head. Then my hand slipped, and I actually poured the whole jug of water on her head. In front of the whole bar. Pretty sure she understood it was an accident, but by that point, the damage was done, and there were several tables of people laughing at us.

My girlfriend and I planned a nice picnic/fishing daytime date. Everything was out on our blanket by the river when it started to rain. It wasn’t a small sprinkle, but instead was turning into a full storm. We were quickly trying to gather our belongings and get into the car. Once everything was in the trunk I slammed it shut.

The very instant I heard it click I remembered inside the tackle box were the car keys. The rain was only getting worse, and we had no keys or cell phones. The closest phone was about a mile away, in someone’s farmhouse. The only other keys were thirty miles away, in the possession of her dad. So we started walking that mile, and I’ll let you figure out the rest.

One day one of my classmates asked me why Shirley was mad at me. I honestly had no idea who Shirley was. About a week later I met her in passing and my friend told me that's who was mad at me. Fast forward a couple of weeks later, I was asked by my classmate if I wanted to go on a blind date. I told him it better not be Shirley.

The evening came and I waited at a bar to meet my blind date for a drink, and it turned out to be Shirley. I wasn’t that attracted to her, but I was raised to be a gentleman so, we had a nice couple of drinks. At the end of the evening, she tried to kiss me but I graciously and respectfully said no. I never had a blind date ever again.

During the first round of Covid lockdowns, I met someone for coffee but the coffee place was closed. We decided to go to my place instead since it’s near my apartment. She agreed to follow me. I was nervous and distracted and I pulled out of the coffee place into a lane where you can only turn right because of a median.

I had to go left and there's another way out of the parking lot that would have been better. However, I turned on the one way and found myself going against traffic. Got to the end of the street fine but of course, she didn't follow me. I waited at a cross street until I saw her car and she followed me to my place. When we got out of our cars she was still laughing at me.

Many years ago, I was talking to a girl on a voice chat line. We ended up wanting to meet in person, so I drove to her house. From my place, it took about 50 minutes, and then we went out to eat. Later in the evening, we decided to get a hotel room for some fun. She gets on the bed, pulls off her jeans, and my god I have never smelled anything worse.

I end up standing at the edge of the bed trying to explain to her why I don't want to get on the bed for what felt like five minutes. Then she asks, is it a smell issue? I could not have been happier to hear her say that, because now all I had to do was say yes. I told her this was not going to work out. I took her home and blocked her number.

3

I fainted at the zoo on a first date in the butterfly room. I have always had an irrational phobia of moths but I love butterflies. I didn't realize a beautiful "butterfly" almost the size of my face was, in fact, a moth. The second he corrected me, everything went black and I was down. I should have known that the moth was just too big. It was almost the size of my face. We still dated for almost six months afterward.

tatltael88

On the first date, we were having dinner at a nice Italian restaurant and he asked for a lemon slice with his Prosecco. In his defense, he thought he was ordering sparkling water, but the waitress gave him a weird look. Later he made a hand gesture and sent his drink flying across the table and onto the back of the patron at the next table.

My date took me to a bookstore. At first, I thought it was sweet because I said how much I like to read. We find books by an author I like and he picks them up and tells me he’s buying them for me. I ask him not to but he heads to the cash register. I wait outside mortified, and when he brings me the books, he’s somehow surprised that I’m uncomfortable.

The rest of the date was supposed to be pizza at his house and a movie. I knew him through mutual friends so I thought I would be safe. On the couch, as I sat further away, he kept trying to snuggle closer. I’m getting more uncomfortable, and go to the bathroom to take a breath and think of an exit strategy. When I open the door, he’s standing in the hall.

He compliments my dress and asks me to twirl, which I hesitantly do. Then he says “hold on” and grabs and grabs scissors before going towards my legs. I’m freaking out and he doesn’t see why! Turns out he’s trying to trim a loose thread on my dress but went about it the wrong way. He was mad at me for not wanting a second date.

DementorsAreCool

I met a very attractive, tall, and muscular guy at an uneventful networking event in New York at the end of last year. He invited me over to his place and I was understandably excited. When we arrived at his place, I was surprised to discover that he lacked a lot of confidence and wanted me to take the lead. I was feeling generous and wanted to make the most of the evening.

As I was on my way out, I noticed his flatmates had people over and were having a quiet party. I decided to stay a little longer but started having a really bad panic attack. The whole night just spiraled into a complete nightmare. I left as quickly as I could and realized my car battery had run out. I had no money so I had to walk back to my place in freezing temperatures.

My date picked me up and took me to get frozen yogurt. When we got to the shop, he did that annoying thing when the passenger reached for the door handle, and the driver locked the door. This happened several times and he was cracking up. We went to watch a movie, and he told me the ending as it was starting. I got home and blocked his number.

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This happened on my one-year anniversary date with my high school boyfriend. We decided to go to a nice restaurant, and before the date, he called to ask how much he should budget for dinner. I told him 80 dollars. Everything goes great until he asks for the bill. While looking at it, he quietly asks how much money I brought.

I didn’t realize he had also asked a friend how much money to bring and followed their advice instead of mine. He was 15 dollars short, and this was before the age of everyone having debit cards. We called my dad to explain what happened and ask for help with the promise of paying him back. Dad came to the rescue and told this story at our wedding.

My date was on her phone the entire meal as I was trying to talk to her. Just to test her I asked, "How's your steak?" To which she told me it was great. She was eating fish because she’s a vegetarian. At the end the waiter asks if we want the bill on one receipt or separate, I immediately said separate, cue her confusion.

She looked unhappy but didn't say she was upset. I said, "Look, I didn't come out here to date your phone. You've been pretty rude the whole time and ignoring me. Be glad I just didn't get up and leave, not like you would've noticed anyway.” All she could say was, “You asked me here, and I'm here with you. Why would I pay for this?"

I responded with, "I invited you and asked for your time. I wanted to go on a date, and get to know you. I didn't get your time, your phone did. I'm not paying for you to date your phone." Looking back, I could've been a bit nicer about it. That girl was not ready to date anyone for a while with that kind of addiction.

I had been chatting up this really awesome dude and he invited me over to hang out one night. At the time I didn't have a bank account and just kept cash on me. On my way there I ask if I can stop and pick up anything from the store, and he replies that drinks would be good. I ended up spending a fantastic night with him cuddling.

The next morning, I invited him to get breakfast with me. Breakfast is going great until the check comes. I grabbed my wallet to pay, and completely forgot I spent all my cash on drinks the night before. I wanted to fall through the floor. I’m apologizing while asking him to cover breakfast promising  I’ll pay him back that afternoon.

He explains he didn't bring his wallet because I said I wanted to treat him. He tells the cashier that he lives nearby and just needs to go home and grab his wallet. I had to be at work soon, but offered to drive him back. He assured me it was fine and he would just walk back. We were laughing, but I was mortified on the inside.

When I was working sales I completed an intricate order with a guy from the manufacturing side. Once it was done, he invited me out to dinner to celebrate. I had never met him before, but we had spoken so much through phone and email, I said sure. We ended up meeting at a chain restaurant. As soon as I saw him I knew the night would be awkward.

Honestly, he looked the way I expected...except that he was dressed head to toe in Scooby-Doo gear. A grown man was wearing matching Scooby clothes, including a hat. The minute we sat at our table, he started talking about Scooby-Doo. He asked me what my favorite episode was, my favorite character, and with whom do I identify the most.

This was over the top, and he did not talk about anything else, even when I changed the subject. I remember looking over at a table where another couple sat, holding hands and laughing with each other, and thinking "that must be nice" as he began telling me about his Scooby-Doo collectibles and their values. When my food arrived, I immediately asked for a box.

He went quiet, and I could tell he knew the date was done. We split the bill and as I walked out to my vehicle, he said, "We're not going out again, are we?" I told him no, we aren't, and he wished me well before walking away. I honestly felt bad for him. He knew what he was like but just couldn't help it. Nice guy, but I couldn’t cope. I hope he eventually found his Velma.

On a Bumble date, he ended up talking about aliens making the world according to the book of Genesis and the earth being flat, very loudly in a coffee shop, with all of his proof. He sounded like the History Channel at 2 am. I tried to be as polite as possible but he was ridiculous. I am not sure if I was embarrassed more for me or for him.

This date happened when I was 18 and she traveled an hour to meet me after we matched on Tinder. We went to a cafe I had been to plenty of times before, and after we ordered I started talking about ketchup; EXCESSIVELY. I didn’t know what to talk about so I decided to bring up how I used to drink ketchup from McDonald’s when I was hungry.

Back then I had anxiety about using my debit card in public, and when I realized I had no cash; I started silently sobbing. She paid for me, and the woman serving us asked if I’d like to take my food to go. I looked at her, my eyes full of tears, and said, “Yes. I’ll take the rest of hers as well.” I didn’t ask her before I said this.

We walked out, and I immediately threw the food into the trash outside the front door. She asked why I did that and I told her it was an accident. The total date was an hour and a half and I’d managed to cry; talk about my weird childhood habits and make her pay for me. Without telling her, I walked her to the bus station and said, “I think you should go.”

I was messaging with a woman on Plenty of Fish, and her pictures were a little blurry. We messaged back and forth a few times and she offered to send me some more pictures in my email. She was cute, not gorgeous, but with curves in all the right places. I appreciated that she asked me to meet up and I figured why not!

She chose a particular restaurant for dinner. I got there a little early, and she showed up a few minutes after I did. I couldn't believe what she was wearing. I could only describe it as a prom dress. She explained that she doesn't go out very often and likes to dress up when she does. She was also wearing some very high heels, and definitely not comfortable.

We go into the restaurant and sit down to order a drink when a couple of her friends "just happen to show up” and come over. Comments like, "Is this your date? Oh, y'all are going to have so much fun tonight, do you have any cute friends you can hook us up with tonight? What are y'all doing after dinner?" It was all too much for me.

We ate and I told her I appreciated her meeting me for dinner but I didn't feel like we were hitting it off. Undeterred, she asked if she could come by my place, for a one-time kind of thing. I gently said no, and she started crying. I jumped in my vehicle and put the pedal to the metal. I haven't been back to that restaurant since.

Over 25 years ago a coworker set me up on a blind date. The evening arrived, and I was a little early at the restaurant. Feeling anxious, I ordered a drink, and chatted with the waitress, telling her I was on a blind date. After the first drink, I checked the time and my date was 15 minutes late. City traffic. I figured. But the seed of doubt was planted.

I finished the second drink quickly while battling new anxiety mixed with doubt, and a bit of fear. I took a deep breath, sighed, and tried to relax. "Still waiting?" the waitress asked, startling me out of my worry. I tried to laugh, but it felt hollow. Checking the time again, my date is now 45 minutes late. I felt terrible—but I didn't know this chilling truth.

My face was red and I wanted to shrink into the booth. At the hour mark I couldn't take it anymore and gave up. As I was paying, my waitress found me. "She stood you up," and I just nodded. Then I walked out the door and went home. I found out two days later, my date had passed in an auto accident on the way to the restaurant.

Went on a date with this girl a couple of years ago to a comedy show. I picked her up and she was a little tipsy from day drinking with her friends. We go to the comedy show and get seated in the first row. I don’t recall who the comedian was but he did a lot of crowd work. Halfway through, I look over at my date, and she is head back, mouth open passed out. I knew what was coming—but it was still brutal.

The comedian begins ripping into me about boring my date to sleep for five minutes. By this point, my date wakes up and is with it for a minute or two, but then falls asleep again!  By this point I could tell the comedian would not let me live this down and everyone around me was laughing and giving her concerned looks.

The waitress comes over and pulls my date to the side, giving me an excuse to get my date away from me (good on her for looking out), and asks her if she was safe. Thankfully we were new in our short relationship because she told me after that if we were closer she would have pranked me or something. Didn’t follow up on another date.

I had just moved to San Francisco from college and started talking to this guy on Tinder who was in his late 30s/early 40s. I hadn’t had much luck with older dates previously but I decided to be more open-minded. We got cocktails and on the date, I acted as pleasant and engaged as I could even though there was not much chemistry.

After one drink we decided to part ways, and he offered me a ride home. Once I got home, I received a message that was paragraphs long from him! He really wanted to leave the whole time but stayed to pay for my drink and give me a ride home. He also let me know I was overweight, unattractive and I had acne that was disgusting.

My heart sank after this unprompted and completely unnecessary message. I immediately deleted it and blocked him but the words still replayed in my head. Even now I still think about it, and it makes me sad that I dimmed my light because some guy decided to be awful.

throwawayyy4564467

Sources: , 2, 3

Henry VIII's future wife Anne of Cleves came from stubborn stock. Her father John, Duke of Cleves, was one of the bad boys of the Protestant Revolution, and openly ticked off the Pope and other Catholic monarchs left, right, and center. Accordingly, he raised Anne and her sisters and brother to think deeply and to think for themselves. But Anne had one more secret weapon on her road to Henry VIII. 

See, while Anne's family was scandalous among a certain set, she was exactly what Henry VIII was looking for. Ever since he had divorced his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, Henry also despised Catholicism and the Pope. So when Anne started to become a marriageable age, Henry's eye fell right on her. Only, he didn't get the response he was hoping for.

Anne was extremely close with her mother, Maria of Julich-Berg, and their woman-heavy household—Anne did, after all, have two other sisters—was something of a haven for the young girl. Indeed, when Henry first began courting Anne, the matron of the family tried to prevent the union, saying she was  "loath to suffer her to depart her". But that wasn't even the worst part.

We all know that Henry VIII was mega lecherous during his day, but most people don't understand just how bad it was for poor Anne of Cleves. While the 24-year-old Anne was relatively mature for a royal bride, Henry VIII was still practically double her age and almost 50 years old when he was sniffing at her skirts. Oh, and there's more.

Though Anne's tragic tale with King Henry has gone down in history, few people know the whole disturbing story of their courtship. For one, Henry didn't just court Anne as his bride—he also considered her younger sister Amalia as his potential Wife #4. Maybe if he'd actually chosen Amalia, the disaster that was his fourth marriage never would have happened.

But then again, the beginning of their official courtship wasn't any better...

In the late 1530s, Henry sent his court painter Hans Holbein on a creepy mission. Still deciding between the two sisters, he told him to go paint both Anne and Amalia so he could decide which one he liked best. He also gave Holbein a very specific instruction: Paint the girls accurately and don't flatter them, because he needed a beautiful queen. Well, this is where it all started to go wrong.

When it came time to do portraits of the Cleves sisters, Hans Holbein ran into one big difficulty. Both Anne and Amalia kept their faces covered with veils, as per the modest German customs of the time. The painter had to wheedle his way in and gain their trust before Anne and her sister finally revealed their faces and let themselves be painted. Spoiler: This was a big mistake.

After Holbein returned and Henry saw both portraits of the women, he obviously went with Anne over Amalia—but his motives were very far from romantic. Many historians agree that the choice probably had less to do with looks, and more because as the elder daughter, Anne had more hereditary rights than her sister. Aw, true love. Maybe THAT's why it unraveled so fast.

Henry's "don't flatter" directive to Holbein goes against the common story that the painter deceived the king and painted a beautified portrait of the actually homely Anne. Even so, as any online dater can tell you, you can't tell everything from a picture—especially not chemistry. And let's just say, when Anne walked into the room, Henry was not pleased...

Almost as soon as he met her, Henry's reaction to his bride was chilling. He pretty much immediately complained about her looks, and blamed not only Holbein for supposedly glowing her up too much, but also his chief Minister Thomas Cromwell, who urged him to marry Anne and kept talking up her beauty. And since this is King Henry we're talking about, he did not hold back.

Henry's exact response after actually seeing Anne has gone down infamy. He apparently grumbled, "She is nothing so fair as she hath been reported". Still other sources claim he called her a "Flanders Mare," an infamous nickname that has stuck with poor Anne ever since, though as we'll see, that little moniker has another origin entirely. Yet despite King Henry's horrible reaction, the royal wedding was already in the works. There was no backing out now.

On January 6, 1540, Anne of Cleves married King Henry VIII at the Royal Palace of Placentia, despite all his protests and misgivings. On the day of the wedding, Henry gave his new queen a ring that he had inscribed with her new motto: "God send me well to keep". It could have been a fairy tale day, but Anne's nightmare was just beginning. 

Once the unhappy couple finally married, there was still the dreaded wedding night...and alhough it was a chance for Anne to rise in Henry's estimation, it went horribly. On the morning after the wedding, the king reportedly complained, “I liked her before not well, but now I like her much worse". So what actually happened? Well...

When her ladies questioned Anne about her night with the king, Anne's reply was revealing in all the wrong ways. She told them, “When he comes to bed he kisseth me, and he taketh me by the hand, and biddeth me 'Good night, sweetheart'; and in the morning kisseth me and biddeth 'Farewell, darling.'" So...just kisses then. Did poor and sheltered Anne even know how to consummate her marriage?

There is a fair chance that Anne believed these smooches were all it took to seal the deal. Henry, meanwhile, had more embarrassing complaints.

It wasn’t just about Anne's inexperience in the bedroom. After all, Henry VIII liked his wives innocent and pliable. Instead, Henry accused Anne of even worse sins. He claimed that in addition to how little he was attracted to her, she also had “very evil smells about her" that he caught a whiff of at the most inopportune times. Then he really took it up a notch.

Henry also threw Anne's virginity into question, which was a serious allegation during a time when a woman's worth was all about her "purity". Henry's evidence for this? "The looseness of her...tokens". As you might tell from his way with words, Henry was a poet and songwriter in his youth. Whatever the truth, though, Anne was in for her biggest humiliation yet.

After their disappointing meeting and wedding night, Henry was desperate to get rid of Anne, so he came up with an ingenious plot. In 1527, an 11-year-old Anne had been briefly betrothed to another man, Francis of Lorraine. Though her parents quickly canceled the match, it would bite her in the well-clothed back in January 1540, when Henry struck out HARD.

Henry and his councilors, looking for a way to weasel their king out of his ill-fated match, tried to use Anne’s childhood pre-contract to Francis of Lorraine as “proof” that she was not free to marry. Um, guys, we've all had exes. And maybe even this accusation wasn't enough, because they soon took the divorce proceedings to a disgusting climax.

Henry held a full-blown trial for his annulment from Anne, and it was an absolute three-ring circus. You see, the king wanted to cut off the marriage on the grounds that they had never consummated the union. Easy enough, right? Well, wrong. Because while Henry wanted to claim he hadn't slept with Anne, he didn't want anyone to think he was impotent. To prove his vigor, he resorted to an incredibly crude claim.

Get this: Henry hired a doctor to come in and defend his, er, male desires. According to the medic, His Majesty experienced an entire two “nocturnal pollutions” (i.e. wet dreams), even as he slept with Anne for days without consummating the marriage. In other words, the king was not impotent, it was only the marriage itself that was bad. He just needed you to know that. Worst of all, it worked...

In the end, Henry VIII got what he wanted yet again, and they officially annulled their short and ugly union on July 9th, 1540 after just six months—the briefest of his many marital adventures. I'm betting Anne was pretty relieved to leave the marriage with her head still squarely attached to her shoulders. Yet in reality, this was just the start of Anne and Henry's sordid history. 

After the annulment was official, Henry and Anne had to go through the very awkward stage of giving their possessions back to each other. Anne’s wedding ring was one of the very first items to go...and she returned with a stroke of genius. When Anne sent it back, she told Henry to break it apart, since it was of little worth. Do I detect some shade? If she wasn't angry yet, though, Henry's next move must have incensed her.

Even as he was married to Anne of Cleves, Henry committed a cold-hearted betrayal. Certain that Anne wasn't The One, Henry started immediately casting about for his next wife. He quickly honed in on the young Catherine Howard, and married the new girl within a few weeks of his annulment from Anne. Yep, sounds like Henry. Only, Anne must have learned a thing or two, because her reaction to this was as Machiavellian as they come.

In public, Anne held no hard feelings about Catherine Howard replacing her on the throne and in the royal marriage bed. For the New Year in 1541, Anne even gifted her ex-husband and his new wife two fine horses, and also joined the couple for dancing. Smart girl, Anne—but as we'll see, eventually even Anne couldn't play nice. For now, though, she had a bigger scandal to deal with.

Just because Anne was free of Henry doesn't mean she was free of controversy, and soon a dark rumor started going around the castle. In November 1541, people started whispering that Anne of Cleves had given birth to a secret child. Just to thicken the plot, some sources even said it was King Henry VIII's own son. This had disturbing consequences.

Though the baby scandal was almost definitely a rumor gone wrong, the crown still took chilling action. Henry launched a serious investigation into the whispers and even detained two people for alleging that Anne was Henry’s true wife after all, and they had consummated the union. Then, soon enough, Anne was in deep trouble again.

In 1542, Anne found herself in hot water with King Henry VIII once moe. By then, the king believed Queen Catherine Howard had been unfaithful to him, and the poor girl was awaiting execution for treason, just like Anne Boleyn before her. Not content to suffer through yet another of his breakups on his own, Henry lashed out at Anne of Cleves in a cruel way.

Since they were still on friendly terms, mostly thanks to Anne's desire to keep her head, Henry thought he could use Anne whichever way he pleased. The hurting Henry sent Anne a terse letter, ordering his ex-wife to return a royal ring that Catherine Howard had given to her as a gift. Way to strike at two exes in one swoop. But the mess was just getting started...

History has tended to paint Anne as a humble and shy woman, but the truth is much different. When Henry finally executed his fifth queen Catherine Howard in 1542 for adultery, it was Anne who harbored a dark secret. She may have viewed the execution as less of a tragedy and more of an opportunity. After all, the spot of "Queen" was now open for business again, and Anne jumped at the chance.

There are more than a few hints that after Catherine Howard's violent demise, Anne of Cleves held some hope of re-marrying Henry and convincing him she could be just as good of a wife as she had been a friend these past years. For one thing, Anne's brother even tried to pressure Henry into taking her back. Instead, it all blew up in Anne's face.

Just when Anne thought her time had finally come as the permanent Queen of England, Henry went and chose Catherine Parr as his sixth wife instead. But it got even more mortifying than that for Anne. Parr was an English widow who was actually a few years older than our girl. Ouch, that's one's gotta hurt...and Anne did not take the news well.

We don’t know how exactly Anne reacted to Catherine Howard's execution, but she reportedly detested the idea of the upstart Parr as her "replacement". Anne did think of herself as the more attractive option, and she also remarked, “Miss Parr is taking a great burden on herself," somehow insulting both Parr and Henry in the same comment. Masterful, Anne.

Anne had a perfectly functional education for a European princess, and she was even innately clever enough to become fluent in English within a very short time. Except there was one huge thing missing. Unfortunately, growing up, her conservative family discouraged Anne from frivolities such as music, singing, and dancing. This was actually more of a problem than you might think.

Although Anne was accomplished in her own right, Henry was a lifelong geek of the arts—including all the things Mommy and Daddy Cleves forbid Anne from taking part in. So even if Anne could speak to the king in English, the pair probably had very little to actually talk about. Reminder, guys: emotional chemistry is just as important as physical chemistry. Still, Anne knew how to make up for her deficiencies...

Like the cunning woman she truly was, Anne got along with all of Henry’s kids. She even sent gifts to the king’s heir, the future Edward VI, was close with the future Queen Mary I, and also made an impression on the future Elizabeth I, to whom she left part of her jewelry collection when she passed. After all, Anne clearly knew where power flowed from...and it paid off.

Anne's later life was the picture of idyllic living in many ways. Leveraging her friendship with Henry's children, she enjoyed good favor in court under his daughter Queen Mary I, and eventually retired to a quiet life away from the city. According to one source, the middle-aged Anne was "courteous, gentle, a good housekeeper" and generous to all her servants. That's more than Anne Boleyn could ever say.

Despite her notorious reputation, Anne made surviving King Henry VIII look easy. But, well, it wasn't. In order to marry him in the first place, she had to agree to more than a few trade-offs. Besides going to live far away from her beloved mother, Henry also insisted she convert to Anglicanism when she married him. Anne, without any other option, obediently agreed. But the minute she could, Anne asserted her dominance.

In the end, Anne's attention to Henry's children didn't just provide her with a comfortable old age, they also allowed her to do what she darn well pleased after Henry passed. Anne was so close to Queen Mary, she likely even attended the young queen's coronation at Westminster Abbey, and she converted back to Roman Catholicism for the Catholic queen. Take that, Henry.

Henry proved to be a generous ex-husband to Anne of Cleves, even though most of his ex-wives couldn't say the same. After she agreed to the annulment, Henry hooked Anne up with a severance package that included great manors, estates, and a sexy royal income. Not bad to keep your head and your financial independence. But that wasn't all. 

After their divorce, Henry kept the random acts of kindness rolling. He ruled that Anne would be England’s highest-ranking lady, with only the King’s wife and daughters ahead of her in precedence. He even adopted her in name as “the King's Beloved Sister". Did that make up for all the torment he must have put her through? Gonna go with "no". Still, there is one cruel story about Anne that Henry had nothing to do with.

Anne’s oft-repeated and cruel nickname, “The Flanders Mare,” did not originate from Henry VIII, much as I'd like to blame him for everything. In fact, it didn’t even originate from the Tudor period. The name only emerged in the late 17th century, when the history of Henry VIII grew into a legend. Anne luckily never knew about the hurtful moniker during her lifetime.

It’s the question we’re all here to learn: What did the legendary “ugly one” of Henry’s wives really look like? Was she really that ugly? Or was she secretly hot and just awkward? The answer probably lays in “attractive enough, I guess?” Though Anne was tall with pretty blonde hair, she also apparently had a "solemn face” that aged her beyond her 24 years.

Anne “survived” her term as Henry VIII’s fourth wife, but others suffered a much darker fate. Henry had Thomas Cromwell, the engineer behind the match in the first place, executed for treason on the same day he married his fifth wife, Catherine Howard. The man Anne had to thank for her crown lost his head on July 28th, 1540.

The big plot hole in all this is: If Henry disliked Anne so much, why the heck didn't he get out while he still could? He was a super-powerful King of England; surely he could snap his fingers and the wedding would be off. Well, it all goes back to the fact that Anne and Henry were a political match. There was simply no way to call the wedding off without offending his German allies.

Anne of Cleves' strange, tragic story all starts and ends with that first painting of her by Hans Holbein. Believe it or not, although so many other Tudor artifacts are lost to the sands of time, you can still see the original painting to this day. Oddly enough for its very English history, it hangs in the Louvre museum in Paris.

Even from her far away homeland, Anne was a distant cousin to Henry VIII. Like all his wives, Anne of Cleves is a descendant of King Edward I "Longshanks" of England. Yep, King Henry sure did have a type when it came to his six wives. Edward was Anne's nine-times great-grandfather, for those who care to keep an exact count.

Anne of Cleves is the longest surviving of Henry VIII’s wives, and she not only outlived his other queens, but also the king himself. On July 16, 1557, just months shy of her 42nd birthday, she passed on in her adopted country of England, mostly likely from cancer. When the former queen passed, her family gave her a heartbreaking tribute.

As Queen Mary I’s beloved “aunt,” attendants buried Anne of Cleves in the legendary Westminster Abbey, albeit not in a very prominent place. But Anne had one more trick up her sleeve. Despite her annulment, her grave reads “Anne of Cleves, Queen of England". Even more impressive? Anne of Cleves is the only one of Henry's wives to be buried in Westminster Abbey.

Anne is now infamous as Henry’s rejected queen, but modern historians suggest a more disturbing reason for his disgust. Anne’s first meeting with Henry was a diplomatic blunder: Making their way to London, Anne’s party stopped on New Year’s Day 1540 at Rochester, where she took time to look at bull-baiting from the window. Suddenly, an old burly stranger entered the room—and everything went horribly wrong.

You see, this stranger was really Henry VIII in disguise. He had wanted to creep in and get a sneak peek of his new bride-to-be. He also expected that she would see through his costume via the power of “true love”...or something along those lines. Guess what? This was not a good idea. When Henry approached Anne, her response made his blood run cold.

Depending on the account, either Henry tried to get Anne's attention and she politely ignored him, or he outright tried to kiss and grope her. Which, uh, understandably caused the young woman to ring the alarms about a strange dude harassing her. Either way, it was utterly disastrous. Henry left the encounter angry, embarrassed, and possibly ready to take revenge...

Some historians believe that this ill-fated early encounter between Anne of Cleves and Henry VIII sealed her fate. According to them, Anne's lack of enthusiasm for Henry (even in disguise) made the king put up his defenses. If she was unimpressed with him, he may have decided to be unimpressed with her no matter what. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13

Meghan Markle is biracial; her mother Doria Raglan is black and her father Thomas Markle is white. Raglan worked as a makeup artist before having Meghan, while Thomas Markle worked as a lighting technician on television shows; the pair met on the set of General Hospital. That's right, it turns out that show business runs in the family.

Even though she grew up in the City of Angels, Markle didn't have the best childhood. Her parents divorced when she was just six years old, with her father eventually moving all the way to Mexico and Markle staying back with her mother. And when it came time for her royal wedding, her father dealt her a cold-hearted betrayal. 

Just days before her wedding to Prince Harry, Meghan's father Thomas started causing a hailstorm of trouble. Meghan has always been private, so when paparazzi photos of her father surfaced, she naturally wanted to protect him. She found out the dark truth later.  Turns out, Thomas actually staged the photos in exchange for money—and that's not even the worst part.

When Harry and Meghan asked Thomas about the photos and the possibility that he sold them, he lied and told them he was innocent. He then rubbed salt in the wound by going on multiple talk shows to discuss his relationship with his daughter and Prince Harry, claiming that she would "be nothing without me. I made her the Duchess she is today".

The "Thomas Markle Affair" became an instant media sensation, but few people know the heartbreaking coda to the story. Meghan Markle wrote her father a private letter and confessed that he had broken her heart into "a million little pieces" with his behavior before the wedding. How do we know this? Thomas later publicized the letter for all to see, naturally.

Thomas Markle ultimately didn't attend his daughter's royal wedding, leading to speculation that Meghan had banned him entirely from the service. In truth, Thomas was undergoing heart surgery on the day, though many felt the timing was a little too convenient. According to Thomas, he and Meghan have not talked since the royal wedding. Shocker.

When Meghan Markle and Prince Harry got engaged, the public was happily surprised. But to royal insiders, there was one big problem. Markle is actually a divorcee; her first husband was producer Trevor Engelson. The British crown has a long and sordid history of disapproving of divorces, and for many, this was a scandalous piece of her history.

But if some reports are to be believed, things only got worse from there.

The guest list for Meghan and Prince Harry's wedding read like a who's who of both Hollywood and English society. Not only did people like Oprah Winfrey and Idris Elba make an appearance, but so did tennis champion Serena Williams. She and Markle are close friends, and Markle still supports Williams during her matches.

Meghan Markle loves cooking. Her go-to dish is a roasted chicken, and she brings it to dinner parties wherever she goes. She calls it a “game-changer,” and had said that it makes her a lot of friends. As for the chicken being a "game-changer"? Well, let's just say it was involved in the very night that Prince Harry proposed to her...

Markle and Harry have revealed details about the night that he proposed. Apparently, they were roasting Meghan's famous chicken when the prince decided to get down on one knee. Markle claims she was so excited, she didn't even wait for him to finish before she said, "Can I say yes now?" The pair were so in love, they even momentarily forgot about the ring.

In January 2020, Thomas Markle dug the knife even deeper into his daughter's side. In the wake of Harry and Meghan's suit against The Daily Mail for hateful publications, the magazine has cited Thomas as a possible witness against the Duchess of Sussex. That's right, he could testify against his own little girl in court.

When it comes to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, age really is just a number. At 38 years old, Markle is actually three years older than the 35-year-old Harry.

Rumors of Markle's relationship to Prince Harry began in October 2016, but the palace didn’t confirm it until closer to the end of that year. All of this talk ended up making her the most Googled actress of 2016, which is pretty impressive when you consider the other Hollywood heavy-hitters she was up against.

Meghan Markle and Prince Harry met in a very unconventional way: A mutual friend actually set them up on a blind date. This one meeting ended up creating a whirlwind romance, with each of them falling quickly in love with the other. No, really—Prince Harry admitted that Markle “just tripped and fell into my life".

The royal wedding took place on May 19, 2018, at St. George's Chapel in Windsor. Before the wedding, the media speculated endlessly about what Markle would wear, and she did not disappoint. Her wedding dress was from high-end fashion label Givenchy, and sported an elegant bateau neckline and a long train. But the details give away Markle's personal secrets.

Markle's bridal veil was chock full of symbolism. The fabric had 55 embroidered flowers that represented not only the 53 Commonwealth countries, but also contained the blooms wintersweet and the California Poppy. Why these two flowers? They symbolize Harry and Meghan's union: Wintersweet grows outside Nottingham cottage where they live, and the poppy is the state flower of Markle's native California. Aw.

It's a little-known fact that when Markle first met Prince Harry, she was actually on the rebound. She had dated celebrity chef Cory Vitiello for almost two years, but the relationship ended in May 2016. She then met Prince Harry the very next month, in June. Can't say a quick rebound works out for everyone, but it certainly did for her.

Markle's engagement ring truly is something special. Prince Harry created the ring himself with help from royal jewelers Cleave and Company. One large diamond he got from Botswana flanks two smaller stones from his mother Princess Diana's own personal collection. The meaning behind these stones is beautiful.

Harry and Markle have a special relationship to Africa, which explains the Botswana connection. Meanwhile, he continues on Diana's legacy with her gemstones.

To top off her bridal attire, Meghan Markle wore an unforgettable diamond bandeau tiara that made the whole world gasp. The custom jewelry piece was made especially for Mary of Teck, the wife of King George V, all the way back in 1932. Queen Elizabeth II lent it to Markle from her own personal collection as a sign of her support.

After marrying her prince, Meghan Markle was supposed to live happily ever after. But nothing could be further from the truth. Since the wedding, British publications have continually attacked Markle, with occasional help from sources inside the palace. Things got so bad that the royal couple are even suing the tabloids for running certain stories, including publishing Markle's private letter to her father Thomas.

On May 6, 2019, Harry and Meghan welcomed a son: little baby Archie Mountbatten Windsor. Both parents want the boy to grow up as normal as possible. As a result, he has no fancy titles: he's styled simply as "Master" Archie. How is that even more adorable somehow?

Since Thomas Markle was unable to attend the wedding, Meghan was left scrambling for someone to walk her down the aisle. The royal family stepped up in the best possible way. In a heartwarming act of kindness, Harry's father Prince Charles—AKA the next in line for the throne—performed the duty. What a way to say "welcome to the family".

As a visible member of the royal family, Markle's fashion instincts often become worldwide phenomena. When she announced that she was pregnant with baby Archie, she wore a white Karen Gee sheath dress. Such was the "Markle effect" that that very same day, the Karen Gee website crashed because of all the requests for the same dress.

When someone asked Prince Harry when he knew Markle was "The One," his answer was like something out of a rom-com. As he confessed, he knew "The very first time we met". Now that's a fairy tale romance.

On January 8, 2020, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle surprised both the normal world and the royal palace when they announced that they'd be stepping back from their duties. Reportedly, neither the Queen nor Prince Charles knew of the so-called "Megxit," and sources close to the palace say Harry's father was "furious" at the news. So why did they make such a sudden decision? More on that later.

After deciding to curb their royal duties, Prince Harry and Meghan also decided to leave the UK and live on the other side of the Atlantic. First, they moved to a mansion in Vancouver, Canada that's worth millions of dollars. In July 2020, they relocated to a gated community in Montecito, Santa Barbara, not far from where Markle's mother still lives. Grandma must be thrilled!

Meghan Markle gave up a lot to join the royal family when she married Prince Harry. Not only did she quit her acting career, she also completely shut down her popular lifestyle blog The Tig, deleting all the previous posts and social media. After all, a member of the royal family can't be seen as relatable now, can they?

Meghan Markle had lots of little nods to Prince Harry and his family during the public wedding, but few people know about the massive tribute she made to Princess Diana in private. At the closed reception held only for friends and family, Markle stepped out in a white halter dress and an enormous Aquamarine ring that used to belong to Diana.

Princess Diana was obviously tragically absent on her son's big day, but Prince Harry made sure to remember her. His tribute was incredibly touching. Harry actually handpicked Markle's bouquet that day, and he included forget-me-nots specifically in honor of his late, beloved mom. I'm not crying, you're crying.

Markle took her "something old, something new" to the next level. Her dress and tiara  were new and borrowed, respectively, but her "something old" was actually fabric from Princess Diana's wedding dress that she had sewn into her outfit. Perhaps even more sweet, Markle's "something blue" was a piece of the dress she wore on her first date with Harry.

Markle’s mother Doria has had a great influence on her life. As a yoga instructor, her mom brought her to "mommy and me classes" when she was little. She also made sure her daughter was a global citizen, and they traveled to many remote places that opened Markle’s eyes to poverty and the harsh realities many people around the world face.

Markle completed her Communications degree from Northwestern University, where she also joined the illustrious Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority. After graduating, she traveled to Buenos Aires, where she worked for the US Embassy. She hasn’t ruled out more schooling, either, saying that she’s considered going for her Masters.

While Markle was making Suits in Toronto, she had three dogs: a beagle named Guy, a Labrador named Oz, and a Lab/German Shepherd mix named Bogart. But when Markle moved to the UK to be with Prince Harry, she had to make a heartbreaking decision. Because Bogart was too old to fly, she left him behind in North America with friends.

You'd expect the royal wedding gift bags to be full of swag, but that wasn't exactly the case. The presents Harry and Meghan gave to members of the public at the wedding were so low-key, I'd be a little insulted. The bags contained: a chocolate gold coin, a fridge magnet, a bottle of water, some shortbread, and a 20% off coupon for the Windsor Castle gift shop. Um, what?

Markle's very first acting gig was a small part as a nurse on General Hospital, the same show her parents met on.

As an actress, Markle went through the wringer more than a few times on set. In the 2005 movie A Lot Like Love, a scene required her to learn how to drive a manual engine, all just an hour before she actually filmed it. One way or another, the future Duchess pulled it off. At least it was good practice for living in the United Kingdom?

The press has accused Markle of purposely defying old royal traditions, but we're going to guess that Markle is proud of this. After all, she's always been outspoken. When she was 11, she penned a letter to then-First Lady Hillary Clinton to complain about an ad for soap, which claimed a woman's place was in the kitchen. Thanks in part to Markle's efforts, the company changed the ad.

Fairy tale days come with a high price tag. From Markle's stunning dress, to the cake, to the lavish reception, experts estimate that Prince Harry and Meghan's wedding cost somewhere around 32 million British pounds. But don't worry: His family paid for it.

Few people remember Markle's humble Hollywood beginnings even before she joined Suits. Before the hit show, Markle actually worked as one of the briefcase models on Deal or No Deal—and she didn't enjoy it. She said she was always uncomfortable standing in her five-inch heels, and loved when someone called her number because it meant she could sit down.

Markle is the first American to marry into the British royal family since 1937. The last time this happened, it was the tragic story of King Edward VIII and his beloved divorcee Wallis Simpson. Although the pair did get married, Edward had to abdicate the throne to accomplish it. Thank goodness Harry and Meghan weren't put through that circus.

Markle's mother Doria Raglan gave Meghan the nickname "Flower" when she was growing up. It ended up suiting her very nicely: Markle loves flowers, and her favorite blooms are peonies.

On the morning of their wedding, Queen Elizabeth II officially granted Harry and Meghan the titles of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.

If you ever need someone with gorgeous writing, be sure to call Markle up. When she was struggling to make ends meet as an actress before landing her role on Suits, she relied on her calligraphy skills for weddings and events to pay her bills. Markle even did the invites for Robin Thicke and Paula Patton’s wedding.

According to palace insiders, Harry's grandmother Queen Elizabeth II was shocked by the color of Meghan Markle's dress. Since she had been married before, the Queen didn't expect to see her newest granddaughter-in-law walking down the aisle in a white dress. You heard it here, folks: Queen Elizabeth is just like other grandmas.

Meghan is actually Markle's middle name. Her first name is Rachel, which is coincidentally also her character’s name on Suits.

Meghan Markle admitted that while filming her first intimate scene in Suits, she actually found it a little "weird," and that filming the racy romps that fans love was always a bit strange. When asked about what scenes were specifically tough to shoot, she said, "in the file room was weird. Yeah, that was a little strange".

As her co-star Patrick J. Adams said, "Meghan and I are like brother and sister at this point, so a scene like that is basically just hilarious for us to shoot, but also really fun, because for these characters this is a big moment".

Harry and Meghan have since given some insight into their unprecedented decision to recede from royal life. Though some have argued it was actually the palace's doing, most believe the royal couple is trying to get away from the racism and malice of the tabloids. As Harry put it, "There really was no other option". But one recent interview gives even more details.

As a part of their work in Africa, a film crew followed Harry and Meghan for a documentary. During one interview about media pressure, Markle was more candid than any royal has ever been. She revealed that though she "really tried to adopt this British sensibility of a stiff upper lip" about the tabloid scrutiny, she ultimately couldn't.  Harry's comments, though, give another heartbreaking angle.

In the same documentary, Harry revealed that his mother Princess Diana still haunts him in his marriage. Harry confessed that though he thought he was over his mother's tragic fate, "suddenly it all came back" when the media started attacking Markle. As he said, "So everything that she [Diana] went through and what happened to her is incredibly raw every single day".

According to some sources, Markle and her sister-in-law Kate Middleton are "very different people" and don't actually get along very well. Although this is a vague rumor, one unsettling story hints at the truth. After Middleton went into a bridesmaid's fitting just before Harry and Meghan's wedding, she reportedly left the room in tears.

Further details about the incident are scarce, but given Harry and Meghan's recent decision to leave the royal family, it seems like all was not well in paradise. As one royal source put it, “Kate had just given birth to Prince Louis, so maybe she was a little bit emotional. But whatever the thing was, the future queen of England was in tears over what Meghan had said to her". For months, this was the story that spread—however, there was a different side to it. 

In March 2021, Meghan Markle and Prince Harry sat down for a bombshell interview with Oprah Winfrey, where they laid bare what really happened after their fairy tale wedding, and the events that led to “Megxit". One of the things that Markle shared was how the story of her disagreement with Kate Middleton during the dress fittings had been misconstrued.

The common story was that Markle had made Middleton cry—and as Markle claimed during the interview, the reverse was true. According to Markle, Middleton had actually made her cry, but had apologized and sent flowers afterward. Markle says there’s no bad blood, and that she wishes the press would stop pitting them against each other.

Of course, this was just the first of many revelations that Markle made during the interview.

When Meghan Markle and Prince Harry announced that she was pregnant, the couple sparkled with joy. Sadly, behind the scenes, the truth couldn’t have been more different. As the tabloid scrutiny heightened and the expectations from the royal family intensified, Markle became increasingly despondent. It got so bad that she reached out to palace officials to ask for help—and their response was chilling. 

When Markle confessed to them that she felt like she “didn’t want to be alive anymore,” they responded that there was nothing they could do to help her. When she asked a palace official about the possibility of some sort of inpatient care, they said it “wouldn’t be good for the institution". And that wasn’t the only rough period of her pregnancy.

The birth of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s son Archie should’ve been joyous—but instead, Markle faced untold heartbreak. During her interview with Oprah, Markle confessed that “certain” members of the royal family were more rudely preoccupied with the child’s skin color than whether she and the baby were happy and healthy. They also ensured that baby Archie wouldn’t have a royal title.

Of course, this was compounded by years of tabloid scrutiny over her race. The reactions of the royal family members to all of this have been mixed.

When Meghan and Harry announced that they’d be stepping back from palace life, many tabloids made it seem as if they’d blindsided the Queen and Prince Charles—but as they explained, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Harry discussed his plan at length with his family, but some reacted more graciously than others.

While Harry explicitly said that he is still in regular contact with the Queen, he described the situation with his father as one of “space,” and it appears that Prince William and Kate Middleton have also distanced themselves. Strange, as they’d once been so close…

Of course, it wasn’t all doom and gloom, and some revelations were more poignant than others. For one, Markle and Prince Harry confessed that they’d actually had a secret wedding three days before the big royal one. They’d wanted something more private and just for them, so they secretly said their vows to each other in their backyard, with only the Archbishop of Canterbury to officiate them.

On top of that, they also revealed that their second child will be a girl!

Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, , 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31

Julia Roberts took her first breaths on October 28, 1967. Born in the city of Smyrna, Georgia, performing was always in her blood. Her father ran a local acting school, where he taught the daughter of Martin Luther King Jr. In fact, as a thank you for instructing the girl, Mrs. King actually covered the hospital bill for little Julia's birth. It was an A-List start, but her childhood wouldn't be glamorous for long.

Despite her parents' shared love of the performing arts, Mr. and Mrs. Roberts divorced when Julia was just four years old. And from there, hoo boy, her childhood just got worse. Not even a year later, Roberts's mother Betty remarried with a man named Michael Motes—and he was bad news. According to Roberts's brother Eric, the siblings' new stepfather was "abusive".

Roberts has said that she hated her new stepdad. Luckily for her, he didn't stay in the picture for too long. Shortly after giving  birth to a daughter, Julia's mother Betty Lou filed to divorce her second husband, citing cruelty as the reason for the split. All of this happened before Julia even graduated from high school. Yeesh.

On top of all this, when Julia was only ten years old, her biological father passed of throat cancer.

Thankfully, during her teenage years, the sailing got a little smoother for Julia. Showing her brainy side, she played the clarinet in the band and wanted to become a veterinarian. But all that got put on hold after she graduated from her small Georgia high school. In 1985, Roberts moved to New York City, signed with a modelling agency, and started taking acting classes.

As Roberts made her first steps to stardom, scandal was hot on her heels.

Roberts landed minor TV roles before starring in the movie Satisfaction with Irish heartthrob Liam Neeson. In one of Hollywood's best "wait, they dated?!" stories, Neeson and Roberts quickly struck up an intense romance. There was just one problem: Neeson was 35 and Roberts was just 19 years old. Despite the enormous age gap, the new couple moved in together at a breakneck speed—before fizzling out after a year.

Looking back, this was the first of Roberts's many, many dramatic relationships.

During her whirlwind romance with the dad from Taken, Julia Roberts also found time to star in her breakout role. In 1988, she struck gold with the hit coming-of-age film Mystic Pizza. Upon release, she became a star overnight. Really—Roberts claimed she knew the exact moment she became famous. And it's...a lot stranger than you'd think.

According to Roberts, she realized she was famous in a very classy place: a public bathroom. Roberts was in a stall when a girl asked if she’d been in Mystic Pizza. Confused, Roberts replied that she had, only for the girl to ask for her autograph and slide a napkin under the stall door. Roberts understandably asked her to wait until she was done in the restroom.

After breaking out in Mystic Pizza, Roberts nabbed another high-profile role in the classic sobfest Steel Magnolias. This movie is notoriously sad, but behind the scenes, production was just plain insane. According to Shirley MacLaine, the movie's director was horrible to everyone, but he "went after Julia with a vengeance" even though it was one of her first big movies.

What did Ross do that was so mean? Oh, get ready.

Ross criticized all his stars, even telling seasoned actresses that they couldn't perform. But everyone agreed that he was hardest on Roberts. He didn't just insult her acting—he went after her appearance too. Sally Field said that he hated Roberts's beauty marks and tell her to cut off her "warts" and "moles". Unsurprisingly, Roberts just cried after finishing a long day on set.

But Steel Magnolias wasn't all bad. While filming the movie, Roberts swapped Liam Neeson for a hot young actor named Dylan McDermott. He played her fiancé in the film, and clearly their chemistry moved off screen too. The couple were so in love that McDermott asked Roberts to marry him. She said yes—but their engagement wouldn't last long...

Mystic Pizza and Steel Magnolias were great roles—but the performance that really put Roberts on the map was Vivian in Pretty Woman. The movie came out in 1990 and immediately catapulted Roberts onto the A List. At just 22 years old, she was now a bonafide star and an Oscar nominee. But behind the scenes, things weren't so rosy.

Strap in, reader, because this is where we dive into the rollercoaster of Julia Roberts and Kiefer Sutherland's relationship. While on the set of Roberts's next movie, the supernatural thriller Flatliners, Roberts performed another romantic swap. She returned her engagement ring to Dylan McDermott and promptly began dating her co-star, Kiefer Sutherland. But Sutherland came with, shall we say, baggage. A lot of it.

Kiefer Sutherland, ahem, wasn't exactly available when he got together with Roberts. In fact, he was already married to another woman—and not only that, he had a young child too. Even so, young love barrels ahead. Roberts separated from his wife and began seeing his new girlfriend. Roberts was thrilled with her new boyfriend. Well, for the time being.

Sutherland and Roberts's lovey dovey phase didn't last long. Sutherland, who'd struggled with alcohol issues in the past, started hitting the bottle hard and soon decided to match his surroundings to his boozy habit. He moved out of Roberts's glam mansion and into a grimy hotel. Sutherland claimed that he did all this to prepare for a role—but that wasn't the whole story.

Apparently, Sutherland's "role" didn't just involve a dicey hotel and booze. It also required him to spend a lot of time with an "enormously buxom" dancer named Raven. Yeah, this was not a good look for a man with a girlfriend. Even so, Sutherland and Roberts patched things up and moved back in together. However, Raven wasn't out of the picture just yet.

Raven pulled a classic Hollywood mistress move: she sold her story to the press. In a spicy interview, she claimed that Sutherland used to complain about Roberts and specifically, about her cold and condescending personality. After the tabloid hit the news stands, Sutherland's people immediately denied that he'd been more than friends with Raven. Meanwhile, Roberts did something much more chilling.

As a sign of how much Sutherland's betrayal may have hurt her, Roberts has never addressed this time in her life. However, we do know this: shortly after the tabloid came out, Roberts claimed to have caught the flu. She checked herself into a local hospital and rested for five long days. Was she physically sick, or just emotionally drained? Either way, no one saw her next move coming.

As Roberts left the hospital, she waved to the crowd of photographers that had assembled outside the doors. Immediately they spotted it: A gigantic sparkler on her ring finger. Soon, Roberts gleefully confirmed that she and Sutherland had (evidently) patched things up—so much so that the rollercoaster couple was now engaged.

Once they were back on, Sutherland and Roberts moved fast. They set their wedding date for just four short weeks after Sutherland popped the question—and they did not do anything by halves. The extravaganza wedding involved 150 guests, an $8,000 custom made gown for Roberts, and, as the big day approached, a truly insane amount of drama.

Just three days before the wedding, Roberts called the entire ceremony off.

Roberts didn't just run away from her problems. She flew from them. After telling Sutherland she couldn't go through with the ceremony, she boarded a plane to Ireland—and she wasn't alone. Roberts escaped from LA with her new beau: the young actor Jason Patric who was also, in a very awkward twist, Sutherland's good friend. You just can't make this stuff up.

Roberts wasn't just making headlines for her tumultuous love life. She was also hard at work on her acting career. Around this time, she filmed the movie Sleeping With The Enemy in South Carolina. After production wrapped for the day, Roberts and a Black friend went to grab dinner at a restaurant—only for the staff to turn away her friend due to his race. Roberts gave an emotional interview where she called out the town's discriminatory behavior—but her words backfired. 

Instead of siding with Roberts, the public demanded that she apologize to the restaurant. And her next movie-making experience was even more dramatic.

Steven Spielberg's 1991 movie Hook transported children to a magical fantasy world. Unfortunately, actually making the movie seemed to transport the cast and crew into a nightmare—and according to multiple reports, one person was to blame: Julia Roberts. Veering from sadness to hyperactivity, Roberts was the main terror.

In an interview about making Hook, the director Steven Spielberg threw some subtle shade at his leading lady. He revealed that she would refuse to come out of her trailer for hours and even implied that he wouldn't work with her again. The tea-spilling interview was already going to make news—but when Roberts publicly struck back at Spielberg, the scandal reached a whole 'nother level.

After Roberts saw Spielberg dissing her on TV, she spoke her mind to a high-profile magazine. She insisted that Spielberg was lying through his teeth and claimed that his remarks made her eyes "pop out of [her] head". According to Roberts, she wasn't the problem; he was. In her words, Spielberg was a "turncoat". Evidently, these two never patched things up. After Hook, they never worked together again.

By 1992, Roberts was becoming known as a bit of a maneater. To uphold her new reputation, she ended her relationship with Jason Patric and did a complete 180. Instead of dating another Hollywood star, she fell for the pompadoured country singer, Lyle Lovett, and took "whirlwind romance" to the next level. They only dated for three weeks before getting married.

Shocker: These two wouldn't last long.

According to Lovett, he and Roberts hadn't spent a straight week together before they got hitched. Even faster, after getting engaged, they waited just three days to exchange rings! It was definitely a whirlwind romance—and it fizzled out just as quickly as it ignited. Before their marriage turned two years old, Lovett and Roberts announced that they were divorcing. They insisted it was amicable, but the tabloids suggested otherwise...

In the weeks leading up to Lovett and Roberts's divorce, paparazzi snapped pictures of Roberts dancing with her usual type of guy: the up and coming Hollywood heartthrob, Ethan Hawke. After the pictures came out and a Rolling Stone reporter asked her about the photographs, Roberts snapped, basically saying, "I danced, so what?" The reporter wisely changed the subject after that.

In 1993, Roberts switched things up. Before, she'd mostly made headlines for her movies and her relationships. Now, she added messed up family dynamics to the list. Roberts's brother Eric had recently split up with his wife Kelly Cunningham, leading the exes to battle for custody of their infant daughter. You'd think that Roberts would side with her big bro—but you'd be wrong. She actually paid for his ex's lawyers, making her low opinion of her brother crystal clear.

Everyone's gotta have a Hollywood feud. Roberts' is with Nick Nolte. The two starred together in the 1994 film I Love Trouble and seemed determined to live up to the title of their movie. The actors clashed on set, with Nolte saying Roberts was "not a nice person" and Roberts once calling Nolte "completely disgusting" in an interview. From there, it just got worse.

According to rumors, Roberts exhibited some youthful diva behavior on set, but Nolte did nothing to help matters. He would irritate her as much as possible, derailing the production even further. As a sign of how much they hated each other, the actors insisted on performing alongside stand-ins, instead of having to look at each other. Yiiikes.

Justice for Julia—amid all her feuds and break-ups, she also used her fame and fortune to give back. For years, Roberts has donated her time and resources to UNICEF, even traveling to Port-au-Prince with the organization in 1995. She also narrated a documentary about Rett syndrome to raise awareness about the neuro-developmental disorder.

Did you know that Julia Roberts had a relationship with Friends star Matthew Perry? Me neither. She started dating Chandler Bing after guest-starring on the show, only for the romance to end a year later. By now, you've probably noticed that Roberts has a thing for her co-stars, but on her next project, nothing could be further from the truth. Sparks flew—but in all the wrong ways.

While working on the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde remake, Mary Reilly, Roberts was...not the easiest person to accommodate. The movie filmed in London and instead of enjoying Old Blighty, Roberts demanded that she have a jet plane available at all times, just in case she decided to visit her home in L.A. The cost of this perk? Over $120,000.

Oh, and she allegedly feuded with her co-star John Malkovich, and the movie was a flop. Bet the studio regretted spending all that money on that jet...

In 1998, Julia Roberts met Benjamin Bratt and fell head over heels for the handsome actor (you probably know him as the hot FBI agent in Miss Congeniality). As Roberts herself cooed in a 2000 interview, Bratt "is all a girl could ever ask for". Um, considering what happened next, I'd say Roberts spoke a little too soon.

If you ever want some Hollywood gossip, just watch a clip of Hugh Grant on a chat show. This man kisses and tells like no one else—and he didn't mince his words when it came to his Notting Hill co-star, Julia Roberts. Critics said the pair didn't have chemistry and it seems like Grant agreed. When asked about kissing Roberts, he looked uncomfortable and joked about her notoriously large mouth, quipping "I was aware of a faint echo as I was kissing her".

In 1999, Julia Roberts caused yet another of her signature scandals. Did she run off with a new man? Testify against a family member? No. This time it was far worse. She wore a spaghetti strap dress to the premiere of Notting Hill and, gasp, didn't shave her armpits! Roberts's unshaven underarms caused an absolute uproar in the press, handily overshadowing every other aspect of the glitzy premiere. Sigh.

But hey—it wasn't all bad for Roberts. In 2000, she received rave reviews for her performance as the whistleblower Erin Brockovich, eventually winning the Best Actress Oscar. However, there was an embarrassing twist to the night. The press noticed that in her acceptance speech, Roberts forgot to mention one very important person: the real-life Erin Brockovich. Awkward.

Remember how Roberts gushed about her then-boyfriend Benjamin Bratt? Yeah, this is the part where that ends. In 2001, her sweet nothings turned into public accusations. As Roberts's relationship with Bratt imploded, the exes each accused the other of cheating and not being ready to settle down. Who was telling the truth? Well, let's explore what Roberts got up to around this time.

While Roberts filmed The Mexican in 2001, she was still dating Benjamin Bratt. According to rumors, that started to change when she met the movie's cinematographer, Danny Moder. Moder and Roberts had a lot in common: they were both tall and attractive, oh and seriously involved with other people. Roberts had a boyfriend but Moder raised the stakes—he had a wife.

At the time, Moder was already married to a makeup artist named Vera Steimberg, and Roberts wanted her out of the picture, stat. She reportedly offered Steimberg $10,000 if she'd agree to a quickie divorce from Moder. Whether Steimberg took the money or not, Roberts got her wish: Moder filed for divorce in 2001. But that didn't mean this meet-ugly was done just yet.

In a move so petty that it's almost impressive, Roberts was seen wearing a handmade shirt that said "A Low Vera". People quickly wondered if it was a dig at her man's ex-wife, Vera Steimberg. When Oprah asked Roberts about the headline-inducing T-shirt, Roberts just said, "It was private" before adding, "I stand by my T-shirt".

During this scandal, Moder's ex-wife didn't pull punches. She gave an infamous interview where she called Roberts "a husband stealer". Her words, however, didn't change anything. Roberts and Moder continued their romance. Like all couples in the early 2000s, they got tattoos of each other's initials. By 2002, they were husband and wife.

Did you know that America's Sweetheart has a tramp stamp? Not only does Roberts have ink of Danny Moder's initials on her lower back, she's added to the tattoo over the years. It's now surrounded by the names of her three children. So wholesome, yet...the placement...

When notorious prankster George Clooney heard Roberts had joined the cast of Ocean's Eleven, he sent her an envelope with a note and a 20 dollar bill. The note read, “I hear you’re making 20 a picture now,” jokingly referencing Roberts's record-breaking $20 million paycheck for Erin Brockovich. It’s rumored that she's earned at least $20 million for each role ever since.

In 2004, Roberts added a new role to her extensive résumé: she became a mother to not just one baby but two. She and Moder had twins named Phinnaeus and Hazel. With their birth, Roberts's family grew in more ways than one. Having children made her realize that she wanted to reconcile with her estranged brother Eric. This was a wholesome time for Roberts and unfortunately, it wouldn't last long.

Two years after giving birth, Roberts stepped out of her comfort zone and starred in her first Broadway play, Three Days of Rain. However, this...did not go well. Roberts received terrible reviews, and the star-studded show, which also featured Paul Rudd and , only lasted for 70 performances. One reviewer said Roberts "wanders around the stage...as if she's looking for the Prozac".

After her less-than-inspiring time on stage, Roberts retreated from public life. She had another son, Henry, and took two years off. She only returned to the screen in 2009 for the romantic-comedy/caper Duplicity. While discussing her break, Roberts said, “I don't have the bug to work. I have the bug to make good movies, and those don't come along very often".

Unfortunately, while critics liked Duplicity, audiences weren't so convinced. Despite Roberts's track record with blockbusters, the movie only made a modest profit.

Evidently, over a decade after working with Nick Nolte on I Love Trouble, Roberts still hadn't forgiven or forgotten. In 2009, she did an impression of a bratty actor throwing a tantrum on a talk show. After virtually everyone pointed out that Roberts sounded a lot like Nolte, she confirmed that he was her target all along.

During press for her 2010 hit movie Eat Pray Love, Julia Roberts made a surprising revelation. It turned out that she practiced Hinduism. She initially felt drawn to the religion after seeing a photo of a guru. Then, while filming Eat Pray Love in India, a Swami even gave Roberts's three children the names of Hindu gods. However, the film wasn't without controversy.

Despite Eat Pray Love's positive message, the movie's afterparty was anything but. Reports circulated about Roberts's frosty behavior, where the actress allegedly refused to spend more than five minutes in the part of the event with non-famous people. One person even claimed that they overheard her referring to the crowd as "tacky". Yeesh.

Eat Pray Love was a hit for Roberts, but unfortunately, she hasn't replicated that kind of success. Movies like Larry Crowne, Mirror Mirror, Secret in Their Eyes, Money Monster, and more have all failed to make a mark. Even Roberts's other ventures, like her work as a brand ambassador have had trouble. In 2011, one of her ads for L'Oréal was so airbrushed that England banned it.

In 2011, family drama reared its ugly head. Roberts's half-sister Nancy had recently become engaged and invited Julia to be one of her bridesmaids. Roberts, however, hated her soon-to-be brother-in-law and didn't want any part in the ceremony. It was already a dramatic time for the family—only for things to take a sudden, tragic turn.

Before Roberts's half-sister could walk down the aisle, Nancy's demons caught up to her. In 2014, she drowned in her bath tub after falling victim to her addictions. Nancy's fiancé claims that in her final note, she called out Roberts, writing "My so-called siblings get nothing except the memory that they are the ones that drove me into the deepest depression I’ve been in".

And then, just one year after Nancy's demise, more tragedy followed. While Roberts filmed Secret in Their Eyes, her mother Betty Lou passed. While Roberts doesn't often discuss her family life, she has spoken about her mother, saying that Betty taught her how to raise her own children. In a recent Instagram post, Roberts wrote that she misses her mother every day.

Despite Hugh Grant's less-than-enthusiastic ideas about Roberts's mouth, Roberts has her trademark teeth insured for a cool $30 million.

As of 2020, rumors are swirling over a potential Steel Magnolias remake. And, according to some sites, one particular reunion has already begun. Roberts might be back in touch with her old co-star and fiancé Dylan McDermott. Roberts's husband is, understandably, not pleased with this development. Again, though, these are all just rumors.

Remember how Julia Roberts pretty much left Kiefer Sutherland at the altar? Well, in a surprising twist, Sutherland doesn't actually have hard feelings about the incident. When asked about it, Sutherland said that he didn't hold a grudge. In his words, Roberts "was smart to get out while she did. I commend Julia for seeing how young and silly we were, even at the last minute, even as painful and as difficult as it was. Thank God she saw it".

Julia Roberts has starred opposite Hollywood's hunkiest men: Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Richard Gere, and of course, the best of them all, Denzel Washington. But, as many people noticed, in The Pelican Brief, Roberts's and Washington's characters never kissed, even though they got together in the book that inspired the movie. The question is: why?

Apparently, Roberts (like any sane woman) was down to mack on Washington. It was Washington who declined, claiming that viewers wouldn't like a romance between a white woman and a Black man. However, some sources think Washington isn't being entirely truthful. Apparently, Washington feared that kissing Roberts would tick off his Black female fans. Hmm.

Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, , 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28

The judge was giving a mass ruling for a group of people about their probation for driving under various influences. The judge asks the room, “Has anyone consumed or taken substances in the last 24 hours?” It was half a joke, but one dude proudly raised his hand. That single dude did not get probation.

A wife filed for a restraining order because she wanted the house during her divorce. The husband has a good job, like $200k per year. The employer finds out about the restraining order and fires the husband. He was a very specialized employee, so the only job he can find close to the house and his daughter is $50k. Ooh boy, did this not go well. 

The house gets foreclosed. Child support is set at less than $500 per month. The wife has to get a job as a waitress.

I was involved in a custody dispute. The dad alleged the mom was doing all sorts of things, and he should have the kid. The dad's attorney grilled the mom about texts she had sent where she was trying to sell prescription pills. She wouldn't admit it. It seemed like the dad's attorney moved on...until he came up with a brilliant trap. 

He eventually ended with, "One more question. Where did you get the pills you were selling". Mom responds without thinking, "Oh, my doctor prescribed them".

I had a family client whose ex wasn’t letting him see his kid. So we were in court with him explaining how important parenting was to him, how much he loved being a father, etc. After 45 minutes of this, the mother says, “I don’t know why he’s saying this, he abandoned his other kids". Cue me who has never heard him mention having other kids.

It turned out, yeah, he 100% abandoned them, has had no contact for years, and never made any efforts. Please give your lawyers important information, especially if another party involved knows your secrets.

I was a very new lawyer, with no bankruptcy experience. A partner sent me to bankruptcy court to try to make a claim as a creditor related to a $50 million building that was being sold. The Court handled my client's claim very quickly and easily...at first. The Court ruled we were not a creditor because our claim was against a tenant, which was correct.

So I could just sit back for the remainder of the hearing and watch the two premier bankruptcy attorneys go at it. One represented the debtor and the owner of the building; the other represented a secured creditor with a lien against the building. They absolutely hated each other on a personal level, and were arguing with great venom about the plan to sell the real estate.

There was a small break in the action while the judge took care of another matter. When we came back, the secured creditor attorney told the Court the following: His client (the creditor) had purchased controlling interest in the debtor (the owner of the building). He had been directed to fire the other attorney. He had been directed to withdraw the motion to sell the real estate.

He then did both things right there in the courtroom. I have practiced for almost three decades. It was the coolest thing I had ever seen, and was particularly noteworthy because the courtroom was packed with other attorneys watching, and those two attorneys absolutely hated each other.

I’m an attorney and a foster parent, and my wife won’t sit next to me when we have to go to court for our kids because I usually have a running commentary on how inept the attorneys are. The judge for this type of case knows me and knows I’m an attorney, so he finds this entertaining. Last time we went in there was one attorney, who is my FAVORITE, in the case before us.

Myself, the judge, and every other attorney hate her because she oblivious, loud, and incompetent. So she stands up in this case and goes “Your honor, my client has only been found guilty of child endangerment in another county. I see no reason that this court should hold that against him when it comes to custody of his children". The judge did not agree.

This was literally the first thing I ever did as a law student intern. My client has a good defense on a possession case. Substances were found in a jacket, but my guy wasn't wearing a jacket, so they were going to have a very difficult time proving that the jacket belonged to him. I had a long meeting with the client and explained everything. He was excited.

Day of the preliminary hearing, the guy shows up and sits down directly in front of the officer who took him in...while wearing the jacket in question. The exact same jacket we were going to say they couldn't prove belonged to him.

I was the plaintiff in a tribunal suing for wrongful termination. My representative says, “So you terminated him because he was ill?” Employer responds, “Yes". My representative continues, “And he was ill because he's disabled?” Again, the employer says yes. “So you fired someone for being disabled?” Employer says, “Yes".

I was trying to get a restraining order for a woman in divorce court from her son’s father. She details a story where he grabbed her arm and slammed it on the tub, breaking her wrist. On cross examination, I asked the accused, her ex, if he ever broke my client's wrist on purpose. Then the true, awful story came out. 

His response: “Oh yeah I did!" I'm jubilant....for two seconds. Then he continues. "She was nine months pregnant and about to do crack. I tried to grab her arm to get the pipe and protect my unborn son". She left that detail out in her conversations with me.

Years ago I worked in personal injury, and we had a woman come to us saying that she slipped and fell outside a nail salon because they hadn't swept up the wet leaves outside the door. So we take the case, and almost immediately we get a call from opposing counsel saying he's going to courier us something important. When we opened it, I almost burst out laughing.

We pop the disc in the computer, and right there is security camera footage of our client picking up the wet leaves, putting them on the sidewalk, and sitting down on them before calling for help. I have never facepalmed so hard. Needless to say, we dropped the case.

Custody battle. The lawyer for the mom puts her on the stand for the sole purpose of credibility. It all unravels from there. Opposing lawyer starts questioning her about an allegation that she smoked substances with her kids when they were 12 years old. Mom says the children are lying and deflects to the dad's "harassment"...which, by the way, doesn't exist.

During the same cross-examination, the mom admits to “medicinal Mary". When probed, she did not have a card and when asked where she got her medicinal stuff, she said “local drugstore down the street". Liar, liar pants on fire. Remember...her lawyer put her on the stand in an effort to make HER the more credible parent. It went as badly as it could have.

This lady got into a minor fender bender with a truck in a casino parking lot. My guy said she parked and went inside the casino for a few hours. At her deposition, she testified that she was so hurt, she went right home and to a hospital. So I asked if she was a frequent visitor of the casino, and if she had a rewards card.

She was happy to tell me she did, and she had gold status, and showed me the card. This turned out to be her big mistake. I subpoenaed her rewards card's records, and it showed she was playing slots for hours after the accident.

My father as a young lawyer was trying to get a case to take place in one state and not another because the insurance laws were more favorable in state A. The company he was in litigation with wanted it in state B for that reason, and claimed they only distributed in state A but had no locations in it and should not have to go to court in state A.

Well, this company was a soda company, and my dad has a major diet soda addiction. He goes through at least a 12-pack a day. So they were in a meeting with the soda company lawyers and took a break, and he went downstairs to get a diet soda. When it came out, he noticed on the can that it said "Distributed by the soda company of State A".

So he got another diet soda and brought that one up the stairs to the meeting. The soda company decided to settle after that.

I was involved in a civil suit against an organization that attempted to cover up the battery and molestation of an at-risk population. During a deposition, the opposing counsel began asking an aggressive line of questions accusing the deposed of false reporting in the past, convictions for forgery, and identity theft.

After our client answered with a simple “no” to about a dozen of these questions, the opposing counsel became belligerent, and threatened to pull out mug shots at trial. He pulls out a photo and turns ghost white. It was a photo from his folder, which he put up right close to his face, then shoved it back and suddenly asked to conclude the deposition.

Turns out, he had pulled records on the wrong person. I later found out who this other person was, and while their names were the same, the ages were more than 15 years apart.

This happened the summer after my first year of law school. I was making a court appearance as a student attorney. I was working with the public defender’s office and representing a client at a first appearance on a probation infraction and bail hearing. On a probation infraction, the judge is allowed to hold a defendant without bail.

The client says he has some money, but not much. He could get together about $500 for bail. Well, the prosecutor asks for $300 bail. Great, my work here is done. Whatever I say, the judge will order $300 or less and my guy is out. I say my piece...but I didn't realize how stupid my client really was. In the next minute, he showed me.

My client interrupts the judge just before he's going to set bail, saying some incoherent stuff about how he needs to get out, and he’s got this, that, and the other thing going on. He won’t let the judge speak. Welp, the judge held him without bail even though the prosecutor didn’t ask for it. All he had to do was shut up and he’d have gone home that afternoon.

My law professor was once defending a young woman on drug charges. In court, his strategy was to tell the truth: This woman's life had turned dark due to trauma, but she was now in a steady loving relationship with another woman. For the first time, she had some peace and security, was genuinely working on overcoming her demons, and was unlikely to reoffend again.

It was a 50-50 proposition on how this would land with the judge...until the prosecutor stood up and started lambasting the two women, the accused and her lover. He claimed they were lying because "lesbian relationships aren't real". According to the professor, "Everyone in the courtroom except the prosecutor could see that the judge was a flaming fruit," so this did NOT go down well.

The judge tore strips off the prosecutor, gave a furious lecture on gay rights, and ended up giving the woman a slap on the wrist and wishing her well with her partner.

We had a client who was on the board of directors for a company and was being sued for not telling the board something. I and few other attorneys spent an entire week—9 AM to 5 PM or later, Monday through Friday—prepping this client for his deposition by going over every document in the case with him and explaining why it was important.

On several occasions, we reiterated that no matter what else happened in the case, as long as we can show that he told the board about this thing, he was fine. The day of the deposition arrives, and disaster ensues. So, opposing counsel sits down and starts questioning our client, and we think we have this in the bag. He just has to say he told the board this one thing.

In the first 5-10 minutes of the deposition, the opposing counsel straight-up asks our client what he told the board. Client responds, “I told them about Y, I told them about Z, I told them about A, B, and C”—and says NOTHING about what he's being sued for, literally the only issue in the case against him. In 20+ years of practice it was the closest I’ve ever come to rage-quitting.

My firm had been chasing down this woman for years, trying to get her to pay out on a six-figure judgment. She kept nothing in her personal bank accounts and used the money for her business accounts for a rather lavish lifestyle. She kept claiming she was broke and that she didn't use her company funds for her living expenses, including in court affidavits.

During the deposition, at the beginning, she stated she was current on her mortgage for her huge house. We went through all her finances and companies, and after a few hours, I brought up the mortgage again and then asked, "If you're broke but current on your mortgage, how are you making mortgage payments?" Her face went pale.

Utter silence, then in a soft voice: "I use company funds". Her attorney stopped the deposition and pulled her out of the conference room. My boss was observing and started laughing and told me it was a good question.

I was sitting in court waiting for my case and there is a basic traffic stop case going on. The prosecutor has the officer walk through the incident. The officer recalls all these details about how he pulled the driver over for running a red light, then noticed a busted tail light. How he stayed cool, calm, and collected, even as the driver became irate.

The officer said the driver was cursing at him and saying he can "Shove the ticket where the sun don't shine". The officer then claimed that the driver ripped up the ticket, rolled up the bits, and threw it at him. The officer sells the story really well, and I noticed that most of the courtroom has become invested at this point.

The driver is not a lawyer, but chooses to represent himself and takes all of a minute to embarrass the officer and court. "Your honor, the officer testified, under oath, to the court that I acted belligerently, then aggressively tore up and threw away the ticket, which I find hard to believe". He pauses for effect here, and then absolutely slam-dunks".

Seeing as this here is the ticket, in one piece, without even a crease on it". He pulls out the ticket from a folder he had in front of him. You could hear many in the court gasp, laugh, mumble. The judge stops the driver, looks over to the prosecutor, and addresses him, "Mr. Smith, thoughts?" Without hesitation, the prosecutor replies, "We would like to drop the case".

All the other defendants pending their case applaud. The judge bangs his gavel, calls order in the courtroom, admonishes the room, and then admonishes the officer and prosecutor before closing it out.

I had a former client file for bankruptcy and, in connection with that case, he brought an action against his landlord for violating the automatic stay. In order to prove "damages," he wanted to show he paid my firm for fees at the same time he was supposed to be paying rent. So this guy's bankruptcy lawyer serves me a subpoena to show up at the hearing.

I get put on the stand, and I'm asked to verify an invoice. First, I object to the question as a precaution, since it may be an infraction of attorney-client privilege to answer the question. As predicted, the judge overrules and orders me to answer. So I review the invoice in front of me and answer, "No, this is not my invoice". The room goes silent.

His attorney asks a bit desperately, "I don't understand, this is your firm's logo and information right?" I responded, "Yes". "...and you provided these services, right?" This time I responded, "No". A very confused attorney slowly started to put together that this idiot client of ours had manufactured my invoice to prove his damages.

I represented a guy whose car lost battery in the middle of the freeway at 4 am. He put his hazard lights on and called 9-1-1 for help. At the same time, an LAPD officer in an unmarked car was driving pretty fast. He doesn’t see our guy, strikes him, and causes a major six-car collision, including overturning an 18-wheeler truck.

The authorities arrive and take photos. The LAPD officer claimed our guy did not have his hazard lights on, and he was driving slower than we say. Basically, he was trying to put some of the fault on our guy. At the deposition, the attorney brought photos from the scene...One of the photos showed my guy’s hazard lights on. We were dismissed shortly after.

At a deposition, it’s the questioning lawyer’s responsibility to ask the right questions, and they have to be thorough and methodical. If they neglect to ask about something, that’s their problem. Those defending the witness always tell the witness not to volunteer information and to just respond to the questions. Again—don’t volunteer.

I had a witness come in, and we went through the whole preparation meeting where I gave her all the instructions and told her not to volunteer. Again—don’t volunteer. We go through the deposition and she does fine. The questioning lawyer is done, he’s packing up his stuff, the court reporter is packing up her stuff, and the lawyer is walking toward the door. That's when the worst happened.

Suddenly, the witness says “Did you want to see this?” and pulls out a stack of books that no one had ever asked about, she hadn’t told me about, and which contained stuff that the other side was able to use.

I represented a client who was put into custody for being under the influence while driving, and he swore up and down to me that he hadn’t been drinking. The case involved a newbie officer who had his field training officer with him in the car. The rookie pulls my client over for a tag infraction and walks back to the car with his body camera still on. The recording went like this:

The training officer says, “Book him". The rookie says “But he’s not intoxicated” to which the reply was “Do it anyway". Then the body cam clicks off. Seven minutes later, it turns back on, and they’re doing field exercises on my client. My client sat in custody for three weeks until I finally got the tape from the prosecutor and presented it to the judge.

The “Uh-oh” looks from the prosecutor when the judge saw the tape...well, I’ll treasure them forever. The judge wrote the chief a letter saying the training officer was gone to him, and he’d deny every search warrant the guy tried to bring thereafter for being a liar. My client is hopefully still on track with his civil attorney in a lawsuit.

I worked as an investigator on a trade secrets case involving the manufacture of dental wheels used to grind teeth. Company A was a small family-owned manufacturer, but made the best product on the market from a small factory in the middle of nowhere. They sold massive amounts of product because of their quality.

Its location was remote enough and the owner paid employees so well, the employees stayed there FOREVER. All of them had worked there for 30+ years. When the founder of Company A passed, it was sold to International Company B because the kids and grandkids had no interest. Company B then closed the old factory, fired everyone, and tried to use company A's formula at their facilities. But they couldn't make the formula work...

Now enter Company C...another international company who lost the bid on buying company A. When company C heard about the problems that Company B was having, they bought the old factory facilities and then rehired the old staff to restart production. All the employees of old Company A were delighted to have their good-paying jobs back and went straight to work.

They began producing the better quality items once again, and Company C's product worked. Company B then sued for a trade secrets infraction. When you buy a company, you buy their trade secrets. Company B managed to get a temporary restraining order against company C, so they had to stop manufacturing at the old plant they now owned. This is when I enter the picture.

Our firm represented Company C, and I was assigned to interview all the employees. I was in the living room of this delightful older lady in her late 50s who offered me snacks, asked me if I was married, and wanted to set me up with her granddaughter. Best and funniest interview I've ever done. Then she drops the most amazing piece of information.

I asked her how she knew how to make the product. All my previous interviews said so-and-so taught them. She said, "From the directions on the wall". Total moment of silence. "Directions on the WALL?" I ask, flabbergasted. "Yes," she said, "No one ever looks at 'em. But there is a board on the wall with the directions". It was all so simple.

It also completely reversed the restraining order. I got the wall into evidence, and the judge was laughing when he heard the details of what I found. The factory reopened immediately. Company B and C settled by agreeing that they both got to use the trade secret, but couldn't sell it to anyone else. Everyone was happy with it.

I am not a lawyer but a videographer. This gentleman was claiming injuries and seeking damages against his employer after a fall at work. He claimed he couldn't raise his right arm above his shoulder because of the fall. The first deposition comes along, and I'm hired by the defendant's attorney to videotape deposition of the plaintiff.

Does anyone know THE FIRST THING a court reporter asks you to do in a deposition? "Please raise your right hand and repeat after me..." The plaintiff raises his right arm above his shoulder with ease and no sign of discomfort, and it does not occur to him what he has just done. Except both attorneys were looking down at their notes and neither of them caught it.

The plaintiff himself didn't catch it, either. The court reporter looked at him and then looked at me, and her eyes went wide with realization at what just happened. Four hours of deposition proceed where the plaintiff is instructed to show his range of motion and proceeds to pretend like he can't raise his arm above shoulder level, which he did at the very beginning of his deposition.

The deposition ends, the plaintiff's counsel leaves, and I call the defense lawyer over and show him the first two minutes of the tape. The counsel excitedly whispers to me, "Case closed, you just saved us tens of thousands of dollars". I got a $5,000 bonus and the plaintiff's case was dismissed with prejudice.

This will always be my favorite. I was doing a boundary dispute, a squabble over what was essentially a few inches of land. The other side was a lawyer, and an absolute jerk. He was acting for himself—the whole "a lawyer who acts for himself has a fool for a client" thing was bang on for him. He was a deeply unpleasant guy, a tormentor who thought he was the smartest guy in the room.

Part of his case hinged on wheelie bins and how prior to the boundary having been moved, there wasn't space to store a full size bin beside the house. The fact that you now could means that clearly the boundary must have moved. That was the extent of his evidence. It really was thin stuff. But man, he had an idea and he was sticking to it.

During the actual trial, he pulled a fast one by suddenly producing an old aerial photo, ostensibly to show the boundary at the front of the property had also moved. Generally, you have to disclose stuff like that in advance. You can't just sit on something relevant and then suddenly whip it out at trial with a flourish. But it backfired horribly. 

While he was making his submissions, I looked more closely at it. I then realized that it very clearly showed a wheelie bin in exactly the spot his case said there couldn't be one. I told the judge we were happy for the photo to be admitted after all, got the other side to confirm the date it was taken, then pointed out he'd just completely screwed his case. Couldn't have happened to a more deserving chap.

I was taking my ex to court over the custody of my kid. I had compiled a 150-page dossier complete with a report from child protective services, since there was harassment in the household. There were text messages and tons of records of this. The ex decided to represent herself because...hubris, I suppose. Or just plain stupidity.

Before the case started, she gave me an agreement in the hallway outside the courtroom. It was something she typed up that would grant me custody as well as some generous provisions for herself. I politely declined, since we were confident we would be getting a lot more that what she was offering in trail. The case was called up.

Our testimonies went in. She put on the most hilariously insane and embarrassing show for the court. In her closing testimony, she then attempted to hand the judge the agreement she tried to give us. Judge refused to take it. “You can't just hand me things. That's not how you submit things into evidence. I'm not reading that".

She's arguing with the judge, yelling at him, and losing her mind. In the insane nonsense she was spewing she said, "...and this agreement gives him custody, which is one of the things he's after!" in what I assume was an attempt to show that she's willing to compromise. My lawyer peppers in a quick statement, "Ok, so you agree for the father to have full custody?"

She snaps in heated anger, "Yes! That's what I agreed to!" Our side falls completely silent and the judge, after much effort, ends her little outburst. Gave his final verdict, which started with granting me custody and putting her in court-mandated therapy. She literally gave away custody of her daughter in a heated argument with the judge.

I was representing a mom in a bitter custody fight. The dad wanted full custody and argued the mom was an unfit parent. Mom wanted full custody because the dad had a history of domestic battery towards her and the kids. Dad's lawyer was doing a good job of painting her in a bad light during his cross-examination, and I was starting to get worried.

His lawyer then brought a close family friend as a character witness, who said the usual nice things about dad. Then he said something about them owning chickens. I thought that was odd, so I asked more questions. Suddenly, it let the cat out of the bag. I was able to get the friend to spill the beans that the dad owned chickens for cock fighting, and he'd take his minor children to these cock fights.

Apparently, when the children were acting up, he would punish them by forcing them to feed the chickens, during which they would get pecked and scratched by these angry, fighting chickens. And obviously, the children were terrified of those chickens. I could see the color draining from dad's lawyer's face. Mom got full custody.

I’m doing landlord-tenant stuff, and my client was facing eviction over non-payment. However, the client was withholding rent payments because of habitability issues in the apartment: No heat, high lead levels, vermin. I think this is going to be an easy win for me. I told my client continually to make sure they don’t spend the money, keep it but don’t spend it.

If you show the judge you still have the money, it looks really good for you in terms of making the judge believe that you’re withholding for good reasons. We get up in front of the judge, and the landlord doesn’t even have an attorney. I’m dancing inside, there’s no way I can lose. I make my arguments and the landlord makes his.

The judge asks my client if they still have the money. My client responds, “Nah, I blew all that at the casino last week".

My wife is a lawyer. When children reach the age of majority, if they don’t continue studying and start working, it's not necessary to pay alimony. Well, my wife's client found a new lover, which unleashed the wrath of the ex-wife, who started asking for more alimony for her children. To win the case, we needed to prove that the children were working, couldn't get any proof.

There wasn't much chance of winning, but we still went to court hoping that with the interrogations they could find information that would put them in evidence. On the day of the trial, the children did not go, only the mother and her lawyer were present. The judge says, “Tell me why your children couldn't come". The mother responds, “They couldn't get permission at work".

Silence all around. The judge, the lawyers, the mother….Another few seconds of silence goes on before the judge says, “Well, that was fast".

This was in a custody dispute, in a jury trial. We represented the father of young twins, and the mother wanted child support. The issue was that, for the past three years, they had been sharing the kids EXACTLY 50-50, as in he got a weekend, she got a weekend, one of them got Monday and Tuesday, the other got Thursday and Friday, and they split Wednesday.

Well, she thought she could get more. The thing was, she did not have a case. She kept taking the kids to CPS and child psychologists before the trial to make a reason why she should have primary custody, but we managed to get all of that excluded. So on the day of the trial, her big argument is that these kids have...asthma.

Severe asthma, apparently. The kind of asthma that requires special equipment, and the father is ignoring these issues. He's negligent. He's endangering them. She should have custody. The trial is generally going our way. She's not a great witness and she doesn't have any medical records to back up these allegations. But the moment that sealed the deal came when the mother called her last witness.

The last witness to testify was the children's grandmother, the mother's mother. The jury already knew that she frequently babysat the two kids, and that her apartment was often a drop-off location for the kids. The mother swore that the grandmother never used substances in front of the kids, and that her apartment was not a dangerous environment for asthmatic children.

The grandmother was called last minute by the mother as a rebuttal witness. As she took the stand, the grandmother leaned over into the microphone and cleared her throat. "Ahecchhhmm". It was a long expression of smoky phlegm. I don't recall exactly what the grandmother said in her testimony, but I remember she sounded like decades of three-pack-a-day inhalation when she said it.

After a half-hour of deliberations, the jury awarded primary custody to the father. He immediately started crying, while the mother sat motionless. It was a good result.

Picture it: Mother and father are in a custody dispute. Mother's not making a lot of money, but she's hustling as best as she can to take care of her kids. Father's a loafer. He actually was supposed to have primary custody, but skipped out, so she's been taking care of them for a couple years, and now she wants primary custody officially transferred.

He's fighting it because he's a narcissist. In many jurisdictions, in addition to the lawyer for each side, when there's a child involved, the court appoints a guardian who also represents the child. The guardian interviews the parents, interviews the child, does some basic investigating, and reports to the judge about their assessment.

In this case, the guardian said outright that the mother was probably the better bet, but he thinks that both parents should take a drug test just in case. Well, the judge has no problem with any of that, and sends the parents off to be tested right then. That's done, everybody comes back to the courtroom, where the judge reads the test. The results shocked even me.

Mother tested negative for everything. Father...tested positive for a powdery drug. But that't not the shocking part. See, this drug doesn't stay detectable for very long. So either the father used it very recently, or he was such a habitual user that it remained detectable for longer. Things really did not go well for him after that. Mother ended up with primary custody.

When I worked for insurance defense, I handled a case where a man reported his Rolex as stolen. He was adamant that he was at a hotel when it was taken. However, he had no proof he was ever at a hotel during this time. We went through the whole process and finally reached depositions. He gets sworn in, and eventually lets out where he really was.

He wasn't at a hotel, he was with his mistress, and he had accidentally left it at her house.His wife noticed he didn't have it on, so he immediately claims it must've been stolen etc. Yep, this man decided to hire an attorney and go through this whole circus just so his wife wouldn't find out about his affair. Needless to say, we denied the claim.

My parents have a jewelry store, and the landlord was trying to squeeze them into signing a lease for nearly double than what the appraiser said it was worth. Problem was, the lease they signed said when they renewed the lease, both parties were to get their own appraiser, then meet in the middle of the two prices.

Well, the landlord didn't like what his appraiser said, so he refused to tell my parents what the appraisal was. For two year,  he sent every lawyer in town to try to kick my parents out. They tried everything, but legally had no leg to stand on. Well, unfortunately during this time, the landlord developed Parkinson's and his mind started to go.

We finally got him to do a deposition. That's where everything went to trash for him. It was like he drank a truth serum. He just told all. My parents lawyer would ask things like: "Why did you not show the appraisal to my clients?" And he'd say: "It wasn't what I wanted. I wanted them to pay more so I hired other appraisers, and paid them off to raise the price nearly double".

Another one was, "Why did you want them to pay you in gold that you would then sell back to them?" Remember: jewelry store. He said, "Oh, I didn't want to pay taxes". It was sad, honestly. By the end, his lawyer just had his head in his hands. We had a new lease within a month for less than we originally even offered, and he had to pay back 75% of our fees.

I had a client who was trying to get away from a horrible ex and filed for a restraining order. The ex shows up to the final hearing and is making a big fuss about a truck that they bought during their marriage. He said it was just his, and she had no rights to it because their marriage was void. This pinged something big in my head.

I asked him on cross-examination what he meant by that, and he said that he had already been married in another state when he married my client. He said that my client had no idea, but that it means their marriage is invalid and the truck was all his. Not only is that not true, he didn't even realize the enormous trouble he'd just landed himself in.

We promptly turned the transcript of the hearing over to the authorities, who were actively investigating him for bigamy. All for a truck. Which, by the way, my client kept.

A young woman and a young man have a child. The young woman seeks divorce from the young man because he enjoys the "thug life". He had recently been taken into custody and charged for possession. The young man doesn't like her leaving him. He hires a local big-name top divorce attorney and gets a temporary divorce order entered saying she can’t have overnight guests of the opposite gender.

The young woman starts seeing someone new. The young man is very upset about this. He has his fancy lawyer ask for a hearing accusing her of violating the court order. He's also seeking full custody, on top of attorney fees. It's starting to turn into a mess, so the young woman, on advice from a mutual friend, hires me for this hearing.

I sit down with opposing counsel, and she basically tries to strong-arm me with her experience and lays out egregious terms. She says the mother must not only give up primary custody, but must have visitation with a supervisor and pay child support and attorney fees. She knows I'm a new baby attorney in town. She says she'll see us in court.

I go into the hearing with a copy of the guy's probation arrangement from his earlier charges. See, he's an idiot and hasn't told his attorney about this, and she is blissfully unaware. She calls him up, establishes how my client had her new boyfriend over on these different nights. The judge is VERY conservative and not pleased. But then I get a witness.

I ask him if he has a job. “No". What do you do for money? “Things here and there". Oh? Your lawyer is awfully expensive...Do you sell substances?" "...What?" "Have you ever sold substances to make ends meet?" "Uhhh no". I then introduce a copy of his guilty plea and straight probation sentencing. Judge is now staring daggers at him.

I lean over to my client sitting next to me, and whisper, "If you took a drug test today, be honest, would you be completely clean?" She says "Yes". I ask the young man, "When was the last time you used?" His attorney objects, but the judge overrules. Now I know I've got him, because I know this judge will test people on the spot and has done it many times before.

The disgruntled ex says, "It's been years, I'm clean". "So, if you were tested, you'd be clean?" "Yes". Opposing counsel asks the same of my client, and we agree. Judge has them both tested. He tests positive. My client is clean. Judge denies his motion, and asks me to send in new temporary orders where the young man is required to maintain employment and start paying child support. But then came the best part.

The icing on the cake is that the opposing counsel actually called me and left me a voicemail congratulating me on, and I quote, "Handing her butt to her for the first time in a long time".

I was involved in a pretty messy custody case. The other party was a mess and had kept the child from my client for weeks. He was playing lots of stupid games and kept requesting continuances. I requested a drug test, which the judge ordered. However, guy showed up, stood in front of the toilet for literally 2 hours, and claimed he couldn’t pee.

I was representing the plaintiff, so the burden was on me. I called multiple witnesses who testified to the defendant’s substance use. So, opposing counsel decides to call their client for direct examination and asks, “You don’t use crack or coke right?” That's a very stupid question for many reasons. Especially considering what his client did during his test.

However, I fully expected the defendant to just lie and say he was clean. After the question, there was a really long pause and then the guy said, “Yes, I do both of those". My head almost exploded. I didn’t ask any questions on cross-examination because I didn’t want to muddy the waters. I won, and the child is doing great.

I was in court for a hearing. The judge was already in a bad mood and asked why we were here for such a seemingly pointless litigation—without giving details, he was right. The barrister starts to make our case, and I'm taking notes about areas we need to further explore when I hear, "EXCUSE ME, WHY WERE YOU SO RUUUUUUDE TO ME?"

The client, who had been told to NOT COME, had come to court that day and was evidently incensed by the judge questioning the merit of their case. They berated the judge for about three minutes, with me and my co-counsel first stunned and then trying to shut them up, before he adjourned the hearing. It was an amazing sight to see. The case did not go very well, to my client's surprise and fury. Big sigh.

Where I live, a very, very environmentally conscious board controls municipal zoning rights. Their answer to anything that isn't 100% in compliance with the most stringent environmental codes is almost always "No". One day, this millionaire decides to move out to the area and buys an acreage. His plans for developing the land are absolutely ridiculous.

They include creating an artificial cave—so that he can host parties—by blasting one into a cliff using mining explosives. Not the most necessary of things. Needless to say, these actions were rather controversial amongst the community, and he had to have a public hearing in front of the zoning board to explain himself.

After a couple of pointed questions from the board, he loudly groused, "You know, where I come from, if we want to build a road and there's a lake in the way, we move the lake". That was about the point where I thought to myself, Yeah, you definitely just lost your case. Congratulations on passing into local legend, though.

I was trying a case where my client was charged with being a serial offender in possession of a pistol. The prosecutor has to prove a) he had a pistol and b) he is a repeat offender. The first part wasn't in dispute. The way to prove the second was to bring into evidence a certified conviction and sentencing order. This guy had been convicted several times in another state and once in my state.

The prosecutor was having some issues with getting a certified out-of-state order and just relied on the single in-state order, which he provided to me in discovery. My client pointed out to me that neither the DOB or SSN on the order was his. So at trial, when the prosecutor tried to introduce the conviction order, I objected.

The name was the same, but DOB and SSN were different than what was on the indictment. The judge agreed and refused to let it into evidence. Not guilty.

I had to cross-examine a custom-home builder who claimed he put more labor and materials into building the home than the contract provided for, and he was suing for these excess costs. I was asking him about an email with my client negotiating the price of the construction, and he says that he knew he couldn't build it for that price. My head snaps up.

The supervising partner’s head also snaps up, and the opposing counsel goes pale. I go in for the hunt at this point.  Me: You quoted this price? Builder: Yes. Me: You knew you couldn’t build it for that price? Builder: Yes. Me: You knew the homeowner was relying on that quote? Builder: Yes. Me: You knew the homeowner wouldn’t have signed the contract without that representation?

This is textbook fraudulent inducement and he had no idea. I couldn’t believe it. The builder got poured out in the arbitration, and he was slapped with sizeable punitive damages on top of it. Five minutes of testimony sunk his case because he volunteered information without being prompted. Some people truly amaze me.

This was a case another prosecutor in my office had a few years back. A 30-year-old defendant was charged with the molestation of a child after he got his girlfriend’s 14-year-old sister pregnant. She actually kept the baby, so the authorities just waited and got a paternity test to get their evidence. No surprise, the defendant was the father.

The defendant wanted probation, but the prosecutor refused to offer it. He decided to plead guilty and have a jury trial on punishment. Here in Texas, you can choose to have the jury set punishment. Evidence mostly proceeded as expected. The victim testified to having consensual (aside from not being old enough to consent) acts with the defendant, getting pregnant, etc.

The paternity test was introduced. The defendant took the stand. His testimony made the room gag. His version of events was that he snuck into the victim's room at night, covered her mouth, and held her down while he forced himself on her against her will. It seemed like his own lawyer had no idea that’s the story he settled on.

The jury deliberated about 15 minutes before returning a verdict of 17 years, almost the maximum. But there was a secret meaning behind this sentence. When interviewed by the attorneys afterwards, one of the jury members said they decided on 17 years so the defendant would never forget the age of consent in Texas again.

While doing disability hearings a few years ago, I represented a guy in a case that was back on appeal. Long story short, the original judge didn't follow correct procedure and screwed him over. This new judge apparently thought he could intimidate me and my client into withdrawing the appeal by threatening to take away all the guy's benefits. Little did he know, I’m not a moron.

I also hate people who work to torment others, and I had a fire in me to destroy this guy. The judge started the hearing by asking my client if he was aware that he could take all his benefits away. This was actually completely impossible, because six years had gone by since the original decision, and the judge could only reopen the decision within two years.

The guy was unmoveable on this issue. Also, the job he previously did, computer installer, was completely obsolete and physically impossible. His physical problems prevented him from lifting more than 20 pounds, and the computers he was installing during the 1980s were 50-150lbs. The judge didn’t think about that, and clearly didn’t read the case history.

So when the judge says to me, “Counsel, have you done your ethical duty and advised your client that he could lose all his benefits today?” I responded by looking at my client, and in a full voice saying, “The judge can’t do that". Then, without missing a beat, I looked back at the judge and said, “Your honor, I have advised my client that you cannot take his benefits away".

I told the judge we would waive all other procedural portions of the hearings and proceed to expert testimony. I then asked the expert two questions. First, “Would the prior job require lifting more than 20lbs?” And second, “Has the prior job existed as performed since 1999?” She quickly answered “Yes" then "No". Then on her own, elaborated all the reasons why.

The total hearing was six minutes long. The judge had no choice but to grant the original application, and the guy got $158,000 in unpaid benefits. He broke down into tears and said he could finally keep the promise to his wife to return her ashes to the beach they got married on in Hawaii. A dream he had years ago decided would be impossible. Best day of my career, so far.

I represent tenants in eviction proceedings. Landlords being landlords, I have lots of "gotcha" stories. The most recent one was last week, in a classic "he-said, she-said" case. That is, the entire case depended upon whom the jury believed. When the landlord was sworn in prior to testifying, she unnecessarily said "Yes, on the Bible," when asked to tell the truth.

Her testimony, however, was evasive. She avoided answering almost every one of my questions. She even avoided answering some of her own lawyer's questions. During a recess, but still in the middle of her testimony, she was seen outside the courtroom, in full view of the jury, whispering with her lawyer and a family member about, obviously, what she was supposed to say on the stand.

When she got back up, the first thing I did was ask her what she was talking about with her lawyer and her family member outside the courtroom. I demanded to know whether they were telling her how to answer my questions. Her lawyer objected. The judge overruled the objection and ordered the witness to answer. The witness responded: "My life is my life".

During closing arguments, her lawyer tried to argue that she must have been telling the truth because she swore "on the Bible" even though she didn't have to. That meant, according to him, that she took her oath more seriously than the average person who wouldn't bother swearing on a Bible when not asked to do so. But I had the perfect response.

In my response, I agreed with the landlord's counsel that his client must take her oath to tell the truth seriously. She must have taken it so seriously, in fact, that she refused to lie under oath when her truthful testimony would have sunk her case. So, instead, she just refused to answer almost every question put to her. The jury came back in 30 minutes with a unanimous verdict in the tenant's favor.

I work as a public servant in a judge's office, and since I have a law degree, I get to be with the judge in some of the hearings. Last month, we had a huge substance trafficking case. I'm talking about 20 or more people involved, months of investigation, undercover agents, videos, audio, the whole ordeal. The hearing lasted three days.

It was time for one of the defendants to be on the stand so the prosecutor could read the charges he was being accused of. The prosecutor told him that "He was being accused of selling, trafficking and carrying x amount of x substances, with the base of his operation being his house, where he lived with his partner". Oh man, his response.

He promptly said "Wait up, I was the one selling, she didn't do anything". His lawyer facepalmed so hard it's actually recorded in the audio of the hearing. He still pleaded not guilty.

The guy and his lawyer missed court appearances with little or no warning and with suspect excuses. It started getting ridiculous, and we kept pointing out holes in his story. For example, the client said he left for another country without knowing about the appearance, but his lawyer stood in court and said he told him beforehand.

Or all of a sudden he was in a former Soviet Bloc country for fertility treatments and it would ruin everything if he came back now. Or when he was visiting elderly relatives on another continent. Or he was going to the airport when he had to rush to the hospital yet showed us an admitting form in another language.

He also tried firing his attorney and saying he needed more time to brief a new attorney—who at the next appearance would say he hasn't been able to talk to his client, so he needs to adjourn. Or that he hasn't been paid and his client is basically a jerk, and he needs to be relieved. We kept saying to the judge he was doing it to stall, but the judge kept giving him the benefit of the doubt.

We even showed the judge other cases where he skipped appearances. Then finally, he didn't show up for an appearance where the judge had specifically told him, "I don't care if you're meeting with the Pope, I'm ordering you to be here". Boom, his answer was stricken, default judgment in full was granted to our side.

My dad is a physician and is sometimes called as a professional witness in cases of malpractice. In one memorable case, a family was suing a doctor for something fairly frivolous, and my dad was a witness for the defense. The lawyer representing the family was cross-examining my dad, and brought up a chapter in a medical textbook and asked my dad to read a highlighted paragraph.

He does, and the lawyer says something to the effect of, "So, what you just read means ". My dad confidently replied, "No, it does not mean that". The lawyer says, "No but if you read xyz, the author clearly states ". Again, my dad says, "No, really, that's not what the author means".

The lawyer didn’t know what he was getting himself into. "How do you know that's not what the author meant?" Dad replies, "Well, because I wrote it". The judge basically facepalmed while the lawyer mimicked a goldfish and stared at the author's name on the chapter. Basically the best moment of my dad's professional life. And yes, the ruling was in the defendant's favor.

I was in court, and the case before ours was going on way longer than it should have. The defense lawyer calls for a motion to dismiss, claiming lack of evidence. The judge says he will entertain said motion after lunch, hits his gavel, and says court will reconvene at 1 pm, court dismissed. The defendant stands up and says real loudly, "Told you I could get away with stealing that stuff!" He thought his case had been dismissed.

Someone I knew had a pro bono case where she had to defend a person who had been charged with an offense—I don’t know what, it is confidential. Even though the authorities and District Attorney could pretty much pinpoint the offense to her client, there was no evidence to tie him to it. It was circumstantial at best.

She had instructed him to shut up and let her do the talking during the trial, as from experience the client sometimes did not know how to answer a question properly and had the tendency to sabotage himself. She pleads and can show that the court has nothing on her client, and she feels that for once, a pro bono case is going her way.

After her plea, the judge thanks her for her plea and turns to her client. He asks if the client had something to add to the plea. Client looks at her, back at the judge, tears well up in his eyes, and he blurts out: "I'm so sorry, I'll never do it again!" She threw her notes and everything else she had in her hands at the client. She basically got screwed by her own client, who screwed himself even worse.

This guy wanted custody over his children after a divorce, but his wife was accusing him of physical harassment. He was asked if he had ever laid his hands on his wife, and he straight-up said: "Yes, but only when she annoyed me". I was ready to leave the courtroom and laugh.

Source: Reddit

This guy wanted custody over his children after a divorce, but his wife was accusing him of physical harassment. He was asked if he had ever laid his hands on his wife, and he straight-up said: "Yes, but only when she annoyed me". I was ready to leave the courtroom and laugh.

I was trying to get a restraining order for a woman in divorce court from her son’s father. She details a story where he grabbed her arm and slammed it on the tub, breaking her wrist. On cross examination, I asked the accused, her ex, if he ever broke my client's wrist on purpose. Then the true, awful story came out. 

His response: “Oh yeah I did!" I'm jubilant....for two seconds. Then he continues. "She was nine months pregnant and about to do crack. I tried to grab her arm to get the pipe and protect my unborn son". She left that detail out in her conversations with me.

Bejoty2

The judge was giving a mass ruling for a group of people about their probation for driving under various influences. The judge asks the room, “Has anyone consumed or taken substances in the last 24 hours?” One single dude proudly raises his hand—"I did some dope last night..." That single dude did not get probation.

MrPGH

I was in court, and the case before ours was going on way longer than it should have. The defense lawyer calls for a motion to dismiss, claiming lack of evidence. The judge says he will entertain said motion after lunch, hits his gavel, and says court will reconvene at 1 pm, court dismissed. The defendant stands up and says real loudly, "Told you I could get away with stealing that stuff!" He thought his case had been dismissed.

peoplewillknow

I was involved in a custody dispute. The dad alleged the mom was doing all sorts of things, and he should have the kid. The dad's attorney grilled the mom about texts she had sent where she was trying to sell prescription pills. She wouldn't admit it. It seemed like the dad's attorney moved on...until he came up with a brilliant trap. 

He eventually ended with, "One more question. Where did you get the pills you were selling". Mom responds without thinking, "Oh, my doctor prescribed them".

I had a family client whose ex wasn’t letting him see his kid. So we were in court with him explaining how important parenting was to him, how much he loved being a father, etc. After 45 minutes of this, the mother says, “I don’t know why he’s saying this, he abandoned his other kids". Cue me who has never heard him mention having other kids.

It turned out, yeah, he 100% abandoned them, has had no contact for years, and never made any efforts. Please give your lawyers important information, especially if another party involved knows your secrets.

amgirl1

I’m an attorney and a foster parent, and my wife won’t sit next to me when we have to go to court for our kids because I usually have a running commentary on how inept the attorneys are. The judge for this type of case knows me and knows I’m an attorney, so he finds this entertaining. Last time we went in there was one attorney, who is my FAVORITE, in the case before us.

Myself, the judge, and every other attorney hate her because she oblivious, loud, and incompetent. So she stands up in this case and goes “Your honor, my client has only been found guilty of child endangerment in another county. I see no reason that this court should hold that against him when it comes to custody of his children". The judge did not agree.

This was literally the first thing I ever did as a law student intern. My client has a good defense on a possession case. Substances were found in a jacket, but my guy wasn't wearing a jacket, so they were going to have a very difficult time proving that the jacket belonged to him. I had a long meeting with the client and explained everything. He was excited.

Day of the preliminary hearing, the guy shows up and sits down directly in front of the officer who took him in...while wearing the jacket in question. The exact same jacket we were going to say they couldn't prove belonged to him.

I was the plaintiff in a tribunal suing for wrongful termination. My representative says, “So you terminated him because he was ill?” Employer responds, “Yes". My representative continues, “And he was ill because he's disabled?” Again, the employer says yes. “So you fired someone for being disabled?” Employer says, “Yes".

Years ago I worked in personal injury, and we had a woman come to us saying that she slipped and fell outside a nail salon because they hadn't swept up the wet leaves outside the door. So we take the case, and almost immediately we get a call from opposing counsel saying he's going to courier us something important. When we opened it, I almost burst out laughing.

We pop the disc in the computer, and right there is security camera footage of our client picking up the wet leaves, putting them on the sidewalk, and sitting down on them before calling for help. I have never facepalmed so hard. Needless to say, we dropped the case.

Custody battle. The lawyer for the mom puts her on the stand for the sole purpose of credibility. It all unravels from there. Opposing lawyer starts questioning her about an allegation that she smoked substances with her kids when they were 12 years old. Mom says the children are lying and deflects to the dad's "harassment"...which, by the way, doesn't exist.

During the same cross-examination, the mom admits to “medicinal Mary". When probed, she did not have a card and when asked where she got her medicinal stuff, she said “local drugstore down the street". Liar, liar pants on fire. Remember...her lawyer put her on the stand in an effort to make HER the more credible parent. It went as badly as it could have.

This lady got into a minor fender bender with a truck in a casino parking lot. My guy said she parked and went inside the casino for a few hours. At her deposition, she testified that she was so hurt, she went right home and to a hospital. So I asked if she was a frequent visitor of the casino, and if she had a rewards card.

She was happy to tell me she did, and she had gold status, and showed me the card. This turned out to be her big mistake. I subpoenaed her rewards card's records, and it showed she was playing slots for hours after the accident.

lawgirl3278

My father as a young lawyer was trying to get a case to take place in one state and not another because the insurance laws were more favorable in state A. The company he was in litigation with wanted it in state B for that reason, and claimed they only distributed in state A but had no locations in it and should not have to go to court in state A.

Well, this company was a soda company, and my dad has a major diet soda addiction. He goes through at least a 12-pack a day. So they were in a meeting with the soda company lawyers and took a break, and he went downstairs to get a diet soda. When it came out, he noticed on the can that it said "Distributed by the soda company of State A".

So he got another diet soda and brought that one up the stairs to the meeting. The soda company decided to settle after that.

I was involved in a civil suit against an organization that attempted to cover up the battery and molestation of an at-risk population. During a deposition, the opposing counsel began asking an aggressive line of questions accusing the deposed of false reporting in the past, convictions for forgery, and identity theft.

After our client answered with a simple “no” to about a dozen of these questions, the opposing counsel became belligerent, and threatened to pull out mug shots at trial. He pulls out a photo and turns ghost white. It was a photo from his folder, which he put up right close to his face, then shoved it back and suddenly asked to conclude the deposition.

Turns out, he had pulled records on the wrong person. I later found out who this other person was, and while their names were the same, the ages were more than 15 years apart.

This happened the summer after my first year of law school. I was making a court appearance as a student attorney. I was working with the public defender’s office and representing a client at a first appearance on a probation infraction and bail hearing. On a probation infraction, the judge is allowed to hold a defendant without bail.

The client says he has some money, but not much. He could get together about $500 for bail. Well, the prosecutor asks for $300 bail. Great, my work here is done. Whatever I say, the judge will order $300 or less and my guy is out. I say my piece...but I didn't realize how stupid my client really was. In the next minute, he showed me.

My client interrupts the judge just before he's going to set bail, saying some incoherent stuff about how he needs to get out, and he’s got this, that, and the other thing going on. He won’t let the judge speak. Welp, the judge held him without bail even though the prosecutor didn’t ask for it. All he had to do was shut up and he’d have gone home that afternoon.

My law professor was once defending a young woman on drug charges. In court, his strategy was to tell the truth: This woman's life had turned dark due to trauma, but she was now in a steady loving relationship with another woman. For the first time, she had some peace and security, was genuinely working on overcoming her demons, and was unlikely to reoffend again.

It was a 50-50 proposition on how this would land with the judge...until the prosecutor stood up and started lambasting the two women, the accused and her lover. He claimed they were lying because "lesbian relationships aren't real". According to the professor, "Everyone in the courtroom except the prosecutor could see that the judge was a flaming fruit," so this did NOT go down well.

The judge tore strips off the prosecutor, gave a furious lecture on gay rights, and ended up giving the woman a slap on the wrist and wishing her well with her partner.

We had a client who was on the board of directors for a company and was being sued for not telling the board something. I and few other attorneys spent an entire week—9 AM to 5 PM or later, Monday through Friday—prepping this client for his deposition by going over every document in the case with him and explaining why it was important.

On several occasions, we reiterated that no matter what else happened in the case, as long as we can show that he told the board about this thing, he was fine. The day of the deposition arrives, and disaster ensues. So, opposing counsel sits down and starts questioning our client, and we think we have this in the bag. He just has to say he told the board this one thing.

In the first 5-10 minutes of the deposition, the opposing counsel straight-up asks our client what he told the board. Client responds, “I told them about Y, I told them about Z, I told them about A, B, and C”—and says NOTHING about what he's being sued for, literally the only issue in the case against him. In 20+ years of practice it was the closest I’ve ever come to rage-quitting.

My firm had been chasing down this woman for years, trying to get her to pay out on a six-figure judgment. She kept nothing in her personal bank accounts and used the money for her business accounts for a rather lavish lifestyle. She kept claiming she was broke and that she didn't use her company funds for her living expenses, including in court affidavits.

During the deposition, at the beginning, she stated she was current on her mortgage for her huge house. We went through all her finances and companies, and after a few hours, I brought up the mortgage again and then asked, "If you're broke but current on your mortgage, how are you making mortgage payments?" Her face went pale.

Utter silence, then in a soft voice: "I use company funds". Her attorney stopped the deposition and pulled her out of the conference room. My boss was observing and started laughing and told me it was a good question.

I was sitting in court waiting for my case and there is a basic traffic stop case going on. The prosecutor has the officer walk through the incident. The officer recalls all these details about how he pulled the driver over for running a red light, then noticed a busted tail light. How he stayed cool, calm, and collected, even as the driver became irate.

The officer said the driver was cursing at him and saying he can "Shove the ticket where the sun don't shine". The officer then claimed that the driver ripped up the ticket, rolled up the bits, and threw it at him. The officer sells the story really well, and I noticed that most of the courtroom has become invested at this point.

The driver is not a lawyer, but chooses to represent himself and takes all of a minute to embarrass the officer and court. "Your honor, the officer testified, under oath, to the court that I acted belligerently, then aggressively tore up and threw away the ticket, which I find hard to believe". He pauses for effect here, and then absolutely slam-dunks".

Seeing as this here is the ticket, in one piece, without even a crease on it". He pulls out the ticket from a folder he had in front of him. You could hear many in the court gasp, laugh, mumble. The judge stops the driver, looks over to the prosecutor, and addresses him, "Mr. Smith, thoughts?" Without hesitation, the prosecutor replies, "We would like to drop the case".

All the other defendants pending their case applaud. The judge bangs his gavel, calls order in the courtroom, admonishes the room, and then admonishes the officer and prosecutor before closing it out.

I had a former client file for bankruptcy and, in connection with that case, he brought an action against his landlord for violating the automatic stay. In order to prove "damages," he wanted to show he paid my firm for fees at the same time he was supposed to be paying rent. So this guy's bankruptcy lawyer serves me a subpoena to show up at the hearing.

I get put on the stand, and I'm asked to verify an invoice. First, I object to the question as a precaution, since it may be an infraction of attorney-client privilege to answer the question. As predicted, the judge overrules and orders me to answer. So I review the invoice in front of me and answer, "No, this is not my invoice". The room goes silent.

His attorney asks a bit desperately, "I don't understand, this is your firm's logo and information right?" I responded, "Yes". "...and you provided these services, right?" This time I responded, "No". A very confused attorney slowly started to put together that this idiot client of ours had manufactured my invoice to prove his damages.

NPesq

I represented a guy whose car lost battery in the middle of the freeway at 4 am. He put his hazard lights on and called 9-1-1 for help. At the same time, an LAPD officer in an unmarked car was driving pretty fast. He doesn’t see our guy, strikes him, and causes a major six-car collision, including overturning an 18-wheeler truck.

The authorities arrive and take photos. The LAPD officer claimed our guy did not have his hazard lights on, and he was driving slower than we say. Basically, he was trying to put some of the fault on our guy. At the deposition, the attorney brought photos from the scene...One of the photos showed my guy’s hazard lights on. We were dismissed shortly after.

Chelesaurez

At a deposition, it’s the questioning lawyer’s responsibility to ask the right questions, and they have to be thorough and methodical. If they neglect to ask about something, that’s their problem. Those defending the witness always tell the witness not to volunteer information and to just respond to the questions. Again—don’t volunteer.

I had a witness come in, and we went through the whole preparation meeting where I gave her all the instructions and told her not to volunteer. Again—don’t volunteer. We go through the deposition and she does fine. The questioning lawyer is done, he’s packing up his stuff, the court reporter is packing up her stuff, and the lawyer is walking toward the door. That's when the worst happened.

Suddenly, the witness says “Did you want to see this?” and pulls out a stack of books that no one had ever asked about, she hadn’t told me about, and which contained stuff that the other side was able to use.

Thirty_Helens_Agree

I represented a client who was put into custody for being under the influence while driving, and he swore up and down to me that he hadn’t been drinking. The case involved a newbie officer who had his field training officer with him in the car. The rookie pulls my client over for a tag infraction and walks back to the car with his body camera still on. The recording went like this:

The training officer says, “Book him". The rookie says “But he’s not intoxicated” to which the reply was “Do it anyway". Then the body cam clicks off. Seven minutes later, it turns back on, and they’re doing field exercises on my client. My client sat in custody for three weeks until I finally got the tape from the prosecutor and presented it to the judge.

The “Uh-oh” looks from the prosecutor when the judge saw the tape...well, I’ll treasure them forever. The judge wrote the chief a letter saying the training officer was gone to him, and he’d deny every search warrant the guy tried to bring thereafter for being a liar. My client is hopefully still on track with his civil attorney in a lawsuit.

Public_Defender

I worked as an investigator on a trade secrets case involving the manufacture of dental wheels used to grind teeth. Company A was a small family-owned manufacturer, but made the best product on the market from a small factory in the middle of nowhere. They sold massive amounts of product because of their quality.

Its location was remote enough and the owner paid employees so well, the employees stayed there FOREVER. All of them had worked there for 30+ years. When the founder of Company A passed, it was sold to International Company B because the kids and grandkids had no interest. Company B then closed the old factory, fired everyone, and tried to use company A's formula at their facilities. But they couldn't make the formula work...

Now enter Company C...another international company who lost the bid on buying company A. When company C heard about the problems that Company B was having, they bought the old factory facilities and then rehired the old staff to restart production. All the employees of old Company A were delighted to have their good-paying jobs back and went straight to work.

They began producing the better quality items once again, and Company C's product worked. Company B then sued for a trade secrets infraction. When you buy a company, you buy their trade secrets. Company B managed to get a temporary restraining order against company C, so they had to stop manufacturing at the old plant they now owned. This is when I enter the picture.

Our firm represented Company C, and I was assigned to interview all the employees. I was in the living room of this delightful older lady in her late 50s who offered me snacks, asked me if I was married, and wanted to set me up with her granddaughter. Best and funniest interview I've ever done. Then she drops the most amazing piece of information.

I asked her how she knew how to make the product. All my previous interviews said so-and-so taught them. She said, "From the directions on the wall". Total moment of silence. "Directions on the WALL?" I ask, flabbergasted. "Yes," she said, "No one ever looks at 'em. But there is a board on the wall with the directions". It was all so simple.

It also completely reversed the restraining order. I got the wall into evidence, and the judge was laughing when he heard the details of what I found. The factory reopened immediately. Company B and C settled by agreeing that they both got to use the trade secret, but couldn't sell it to anyone else. Everyone was happy with it.

Duesizzle

I am not a lawyer but a videographer. This gentleman was claiming injuries and seeking damages against his employer after a fall at work. He claimed he couldn't raise his right arm above his shoulder because of the fall. The first deposition comes along, and I'm hired by the defendant's attorney to videotape deposition of the plaintiff.

Does anyone know THE FIRST THING a court reporter asks you to do in a deposition? "Please raise your right hand and repeat after me..." The plaintiff raises his right arm above his shoulder with ease and no sign of discomfort, and it does not occur to him what he has just done. Except both attorneys were looking down at their notes and neither of them caught it.

The plaintiff himself didn't catch it, either. The court reporter looked at him and then looked at me, and her eyes went wide with realization at what just happened. Four hours of deposition proceed where the plaintiff is instructed to show his range of motion and proceeds to pretend like he can't raise his arm above shoulder level, which he did at the very beginning of his deposition.

The deposition ends, the plaintiff's counsel leaves, and I call the defense lawyer over and show him the first two minutes of the tape. The counsel excitedly whispers to me, "Case closed, you just saved us tens of thousands of dollars". I got a $5,000 bonus and the plaintiff's case was dismissed with prejudice.

THE_PHYS

This will always be my favorite. I was doing a boundary dispute, a squabble over what was essentially a few inches of land. The other side was a lawyer, and an absolute jerk. He was acting for himself—the whole "a lawyer who acts for himself has a fool for a client" thing was bang on for him. He was a deeply unpleasant guy, a tormentor who thought he was the smartest guy in the room.

Part of his case hinged on wheelie bins and how prior to the boundary having been moved, there wasn't space to store a full size bin beside the house. The fact that you now could means that clearly the boundary must have moved. That was the extent of his evidence. It really was thin stuff. But man, he had an idea and he was sticking to it.

During the actual trial, he pulled a fast one by suddenly producing an old aerial photo, ostensibly to show the boundary at the front of the property had also moved. Generally, you have to disclose stuff like that in advance. You can't just sit on something relevant and then suddenly whip it out at trial with a flourish. But it backfired horribly. 

While he was making his submissions, I looked more closely at it. I then realized that it very clearly showed a wheelie bin in exactly the spot his case said there couldn't be one. I told the judge we were happy for the photo to be admitted after all, got the other side to confirm the date it was taken, then pointed out he'd just completely screwed his case. Couldn't have happened to a more deserving chap.

SuntoryBoss

I was taking my ex to court over the custody of my kid. I had compiled a 150-page dossier complete with a report from child protective services, since there was harassment in the household. There were text messages and tons of records of this. The ex decided to represent herself because...hubris, I suppose. Or just plain stupidity.

Before the case started, she gave me an agreement in the hallway outside the courtroom. It was something she typed up that would grant me custody as well as some generous provisions for herself. I politely declined, since we were confident we would be getting a lot more that what she was offering in trail. The case was called up.

Our testimonies went in. She put on the most hilariously insane and embarrassing show for the court. In her closing testimony, she then attempted to hand the judge the agreement she tried to give us. Judge refused to take it. “You can't just hand me things. That's not how you submit things into evidence. I'm not reading that".

She's arguing with the judge, yelling at him, and losing her mind. In the insane nonsense she was spewing she said, "...and this agreement gives him custody, which is one of the things he's after!" in what I assume was an attempt to show that she's willing to compromise. My lawyer peppers in a quick statement, "Ok, so you agree for the father to have full custody?"

She snaps in heated anger, "Yes! That's what I agreed to!" Our side falls completely silent and the judge, after much effort, ends her little outburst. Gave his final verdict, which started with granting me custody and putting her in court-mandated therapy. She literally gave away custody of her daughter in a heated argument with the judge.

CitizenAlpha

I was representing a mom in a bitter custody fight. The dad wanted full custody and argued the mom was an unfit parent. Mom wanted full custody because the dad had a history of domestic battery towards her and the kids. Dad's lawyer was doing a good job of painting her in a bad light during his cross-examination, and I was starting to get worried.

His lawyer then brought a close family friend as a character witness, who said the usual nice things about dad. Then he said something about them owning chickens. I thought that was odd, so I asked more questions. Suddenly, it let the cat out of the bag. I was able to get the friend to spill the beans that the dad owned chickens for cock fighting, and he'd take his minor children to these cock fights.

Apparently, when the children were acting up, he would punish them by forcing them to feed the chickens, during which they would get pecked and scratched by these angry, fighting chickens. And obviously, the children were terrified of those chickens. I could see the color draining from dad's lawyer's face. Mom got full custody.

BabarThePug

I’m doing landlord-tenant stuff, and my client was facing eviction over non-payment. However, the client was withholding rent payments because of habitability issues in the apartment: No heat, high lead levels, vermin. I think this is going to be an easy win for me. I told my client continually to make sure they don’t spend the money, keep it but don’t spend it.

If you show the judge you still have the money, it looks really good for you in terms of making the judge believe that you’re withholding for good reasons. We get up in front of the judge, and the landlord doesn’t even have an attorney. I’m dancing inside, there’s no way I can lose. I make my arguments and the landlord makes his.

The judge asks my client if they still have the money. My client responds, “Nah, I blew all that at the casino last week".

Permalink

My wife is a lawyer. When children reach the age of majority, if they don’t continue studying and start working, it's not necessary to pay alimony. Well, my wife's client found a new lover, which unleashed the wrath of the ex-wife, who started asking for more alimony for her children. To win the case, we needed to prove that the children were working, couldn't get any proof.

There wasn't much chance of winning, but we still went to court hoping that with the interrogations they could find information that would put them in evidence. On the day of the trial, the children did not go, only the mother and her lawyer were present. The judge says, “Tell me why your children couldn't come". The mother responds, “They couldn't get permission at work".

Silence all around. The judge, the lawyers, the mother….Another few seconds of silence goes on before the judge says, “Well, that was fast".

CiusWarren

This was in a custody dispute, in a jury trial. We represented the father of young twins, and the mother wanted child support. The issue was that, for the past three years, they had been sharing the kids EXACTLY 50-50, as in he got a weekend, she got a weekend, one of them got Monday and Tuesday, the other got Thursday and Friday, and they split Wednesday.

Well, she thought she could get more. The thing was, she did not have a case. She kept taking the kids to CPS and child psychologists before the trial to make a reason why she should have primary custody, but we managed to get all of that excluded. So on the day of the trial, her big argument is that these kids have...asthma.

Severe asthma, apparently. The kind of asthma that requires special equipment, and the father is ignoring these issues. He's negligent. He's endangering them. She should have custody. The trial is generally going our way. She's not a great witness and she doesn't have any medical records to back up these allegations. But the moment that sealed the deal came when the mother called her last witness.

The last witness to testify was the children's grandmother, the mother's mother. The jury already knew that she frequently babysat the two kids, and that her apartment was often a drop-off location for the kids. The mother swore that the grandmother never used substances in front of the kids, and that her apartment was not a dangerous environment for asthmatic children.

The grandmother was called last minute by the mother as a rebuttal witness. As she took the stand, the grandmother leaned over into the microphone and cleared her throat. "Ahecchhhmm". It was a long expression of smoky phlegm. I don't recall exactly what the grandmother said in her testimony, but I remember she sounded like decades of three-pack-a-day inhalation when she said it.

After a half-hour of deliberations, the jury awarded primary custody to the father. He immediately started crying, while the mother sat motionless. It was a good result.

Picture it: Mother and father are in a custody dispute. Mother's not making a lot of money, but she's hustling as best as she can to take care of her kids. Father's a loafer. He actually was supposed to have primary custody, but skipped out, so she's been taking care of them for a couple years, and now she wants primary custody officially transferred.

He's fighting it because he's a narcissist. In many jurisdictions, in addition to the lawyer for each side, when there's a child involved, the court appoints a guardian who also represents the child. The guardian interviews the parents, interviews the child, does some basic investigating, and reports to the judge about their assessment.

In this case, the guardian said outright that the mother was probably the better bet, but he thinks that both parents should take a drug test just in case. Well, the judge has no problem with any of that, and sends the parents off to be tested right then. That's done, everybody comes back to the courtroom, where the judge reads the test. The results shocked even me.

Mother tested negative for everything. Father...tested positive for a powdery drug. But that't not the shocking part. See, this drug doesn't stay detectable for very long. So either the father used it very recently, or he was such a habitual user that it remained detectable for longer. Things really did not go well for him after that. Mother ended up with primary custody.

When I worked for insurance defense, I handled a case where a man reported his Rolex as stolen. He was adamant that he was at a hotel when it was taken. However, he had no proof he was ever at a hotel during this time. We went through the whole process and finally reached depositions. He gets sworn in, and eventually lets out where he really was.

He wasn't at a hotel, he was with his mistress, and he had accidentally left it at her house.His wife noticed he didn't have it on, so he immediately claims it must've been stolen etc. Yep, this man decided to hire an attorney and go through this whole circus just so his wife wouldn't find out about his affair. Needless to say, we denied the claim.

jessnod

My parents have a jewelry store, and the landlord was trying to squeeze them into signing a lease for nearly double than what the appraiser said it was worth. Problem was, the lease they signed said when they renewed the lease, both parties were to get their own appraiser, then meet in the middle of the two prices.

Well, the landlord didn't like what his appraiser said, so he refused to tell my parents what the appraisal was. For two year,  he sent every lawyer in town to try to kick my parents out. They tried everything, but legally had no leg to stand on. Well, unfortunately during this time, the landlord developed Parkinson's and his mind started to go.

We finally got him to do a deposition. That's where everything went to trash for him. It was like he drank a truth serum. He just told all. My parents lawyer would ask things like: "Why did you not show the appraisal to my clients?" And he'd say: "It wasn't what I wanted. I wanted them to pay more so I hired other appraisers, and paid them off to raise the price nearly double".

Another one was, "Why did you want them to pay you in gold that you would then sell back to them?" Remember: jewelry store. He said, "Oh, I didn't want to pay taxes". It was sad, honestly. By the end, his lawyer just had his head in his hands. We had a new lease within a month for less than we originally even offered, and he had to pay back 75% of our fees.

I had a client who was trying to get away from a horrible ex and filed for a restraining order. The ex shows up to the final hearing and is making a big fuss about a truck that they bought during their marriage. He said it was just his, and she had no rights to it because their marriage was void. This pinged something big in my head.

I asked him on cross-examination what he meant by that, and he said that he had already been married in another state when he married my client. He said that my client had no idea, but that it means their marriage is invalid and the truck was all his. Not only is that not true, he didn't even realize the enormous trouble he'd just landed himself in.

We promptly turned the transcript of the hearing over to the authorities, who were actively investigating him for bigamy. All for a truck. Which, by the way, my client kept.

Quaffle47

A young woman and a young man have a child. The young woman seeks divorce from the young man because he enjoys the "thug life". He had recently been taken into custody and charged for possession. The young man doesn't like her leaving him. He hires a local big-name top divorce attorney and gets a temporary divorce order entered saying she can’t have overnight guests of the opposite gender.

The young woman starts seeing someone new. The young man is very upset about this. He has his fancy lawyer ask for a hearing accusing her of violating the court order. He's also seeking full custody, on top of attorney fees. It's starting to turn into a mess, so the young woman, on advice from a mutual friend, hires me for this hearing.

I sit down with opposing counsel, and she basically tries to strong-arm me with her experience and lays out egregious terms. She says the mother must not only give up primary custody, but must have visitation with a supervisor and pay child support and attorney fees. She knows I'm a new baby attorney in town. She says she'll see us in court.

I go into the hearing with a copy of the guy's probation arrangement from his earlier charges. See, he's an idiot and hasn't told his attorney about this, and she is blissfully unaware. She calls him up, establishes how my client had her new boyfriend over on these different nights. The judge is VERY conservative and not pleased. But then I get a witness.

I ask him if he has a job. “No". What do you do for money? “Things here and there". Oh? Your lawyer is awfully expensive...Do you sell substances?" "...What?" "Have you ever sold substances to make ends meet?" "Uhhh no". I then introduce a copy of his guilty plea and straight probation sentencing. Judge is now staring daggers at him.

I lean over to my client sitting next to me, and whisper, "If you took a drug test today, be honest, would you be completely clean?" She says "Yes". I ask the young man, "When was the last time you used?" His attorney objects, but the judge overrules. Now I know I've got him, because I know this judge will test people on the spot and has done it many times before.

The disgruntled ex says, "It's been years, I'm clean". "So, if you were tested, you'd be clean?" "Yes". Opposing counsel asks the same of my client, and we agree. Judge has them both tested. He tests positive. My client is clean. Judge denies his motion, and asks me to send in new temporary orders where the young man is required to maintain employment and start paying child support. But then came the best part.

The icing on the cake is that the opposing counsel actually called me and left me a voicemail congratulating me on, and I quote, "Handing her butt to her for the first time in a long time".

gr33nm4n

I was involved in a pretty messy custody case. The other party was a mess and had kept the child from my client for weeks. He was playing lots of stupid games and kept requesting continuances. I requested a drug test, which the judge ordered. However, guy showed up, stood in front of the toilet for literally 2 hours, and claimed he couldn’t pee.

I was representing the plaintiff, so the burden was on me. I called multiple witnesses who testified to the defendant’s substance use. So, opposing counsel decides to call their client for direct examination and asks, “You don’t use crack or coke right?” That's a very stupid question for many reasons. Especially considering what his client did during his test.

However, I fully expected the defendant to just lie and say he was clean. After the question, there was a really long pause and then the guy said, “Yes, I do both of those". My head almost exploded. I didn’t ask any questions on cross-examination because I didn’t want to muddy the waters. I won, and the child is doing great.

I was in court for a hearing. The judge was already in a bad mood and asked why we were here for such a seemingly pointless litigation—without giving details, he was right. The barrister starts to make our case, and I'm taking notes about areas we need to further explore when I hear, "EXCUSE ME, WHY WERE YOU SO RUUUUUUDE TO ME?"

The client, who had been told to NOT COME, had come to court that day and was evidently incensed by the judge questioning the merit of their case. They berated the judge for about three minutes, with me and my co-counsel first stunned and then trying to shut them up, before he adjourned the hearing. It was an amazing sight to see. The case did not go very well, to my client's surprise and fury. Big sigh.

Where I live, a very, very environmentally conscious board controls municipal zoning rights. Their answer to anything that isn't 100% in compliance with the most stringent environmental codes is almost always "No". One day, this millionaire decides to move out to the area and buys an acreage. His plans for developing the land are absolutely ridiculous.

They include creating an artificial cave—so that he can host parties—by blasting one into a cliff using mining explosives. Not the most necessary of things. Needless to say, these actions were rather controversial amongst the community, and he had to have a public hearing in front of the zoning board to explain himself.

After a couple of pointed questions from the board, he loudly groused, "You know, where I come from, if we want to build a road and there's a lake in the way, we move the lake". That was about the point where I thought to myself, Yeah, you definitely just lost your case. Congratulations on passing into local legend, though.

I was trying a case where my client was charged with being a serial offender in possession of a pistol. The prosecutor has to prove a) he had a pistol and b) he is a repeat offender. The first part wasn't in dispute. The way to prove the second was to bring into evidence a certified conviction and sentencing order. This guy had been convicted several times in another state and once in my state.

The prosecutor was having some issues with getting a certified out-of-state order and just relied on the single in-state order, which he provided to me in discovery. My client pointed out to me that neither the DOB or SSN on the order was his. So at trial, when the prosecutor tried to introduce the conviction order, I objected.

The name was the same, but DOB and SSN were different than what was on the indictment. The judge agreed and refused to let it into evidence. Not guilty.

I had to cross-examine a custom-home builder who claimed he put more labor and materials into building the home than the contract provided for, and he was suing for these excess costs. I was asking him about an email with my client negotiating the price of the construction, and he says that he knew he couldn't build it for that price. My head snaps up.

The supervising partner’s head also snaps up, and the opposing counsel goes pale. I go in for the hunt at this point.  Me: You quoted this price? Builder: Yes. Me: You knew you couldn’t build it for that price? Builder: Yes. Me: You knew the homeowner was relying on that quote? Builder: Yes. Me: You knew the homeowner wouldn’t have signed the contract without that representation?

This is textbook fraudulent inducement and he had no idea. I couldn’t believe it. The builder got poured out in the arbitration, and he was slapped with sizeable punitive damages on top of it. Five minutes of testimony sunk his case because he volunteered information without being prompted. Some people truly amaze me.

CastIronMooseEsq

This was a case another prosecutor in my office had a few years back. A 30-year-old defendant was charged with the molestation of a child after he got his girlfriend’s 14-year-old sister pregnant. She actually kept the baby, so the authorities just waited and got a paternity test to get their evidence. No surprise, the defendant was the father.

The defendant wanted probation, but the prosecutor refused to offer it. He decided to plead guilty and have a jury trial on punishment. Here in Texas, you can choose to have the jury set punishment. Evidence mostly proceeded as expected. The victim testified to having consensual (aside from not being old enough to consent) acts with the defendant, getting pregnant, etc.

The paternity test was introduced. The defendant took the stand. His testimony made the room gag. His version of events was that he snuck into the victim's room at night, covered her mouth, and held her down while he forced himself on her against her will. It seemed like his own lawyer had no idea that’s the story he settled on.

The jury deliberated about 15 minutes before returning a verdict of 17 years, almost the maximum. But there was a secret meaning behind this sentence. When interviewed by the attorneys afterwards, one of the jury members said they decided on 17 years so the defendant would never forget the age of consent in Texas again.

Fuzerr

While doing disability hearings a few years ago, I represented a guy in a case that was back on appeal. Long story short, the original judge didn't follow correct procedure and screwed him over. This new judge apparently thought he could intimidate me and my client into withdrawing the appeal by threatening to take away all the guy's benefits. Little did he know, I’m not a moron.

I also hate people who work to torment others, and I had a fire in me to destroy this guy. The judge started the hearing by asking my client if he was aware that he could take all his benefits away. This was actually completely impossible, because six years had gone by since the original decision, and the judge could only reopen the decision within two years.

The guy was unmoveable on this issue. Also, the job he previously did, computer installer, was completely obsolete and physically impossible. His physical problems prevented him from lifting more than 20 pounds, and the computers he was installing during the 1980s were 50-150lbs. The judge didn’t think about that, and clearly didn’t read the case history.

So when the judge says to me, “Counsel, have you done your ethical duty and advised your client that he could lose all his benefits today?” I responded by looking at my client, and in a full voice saying, “The judge can’t do that". Then, without missing a beat, I looked back at the judge and said, “Your honor, I have advised my client that you cannot take his benefits away".

I told the judge we would waive all other procedural portions of the hearings and proceed to expert testimony. I then asked the expert two questions. First, “Would the prior job require lifting more than 20lbs?” And second, “Has the prior job existed as performed since 1999?” She quickly answered “Yes" then "No". Then on her own, elaborated all the reasons why.

The total hearing was six minutes long. The judge had no choice but to grant the original application, and the guy got $158,000 in unpaid benefits. He broke down into tears and said he could finally keep the promise to his wife to return her ashes to the beach they got married on in Hawaii. A dream he had years ago decided would be impossible. Best day of my career, so far.

SearchingforSilky

I represent tenants in eviction proceedings. Landlords being landlords, I have lots of "gotcha" stories. The most recent one was last week, in a classic "he-said, she-said" case. That is, the entire case depended upon whom the jury believed. When the landlord was sworn in prior to testifying, she unnecessarily said "Yes, on the Bible," when asked to tell the truth.

Her testimony, however, was evasive. She avoided answering almost every one of my questions. She even avoided answering some of her own lawyer's questions. During a recess, but still in the middle of her testimony, she was seen outside the courtroom, in full view of the jury, whispering with her lawyer and a family member about, obviously, what she was supposed to say on the stand.

When she got back up, the first thing I did was ask her what she was talking about with her lawyer and her family member outside the courtroom. I demanded to know whether they were telling her how to answer my questions. Her lawyer objected. The judge overruled the objection and ordered the witness to answer. The witness responded: "My life is my life".

During closing arguments, her lawyer tried to argue that she must have been telling the truth because she swore "on the Bible" even though she didn't have to. That meant, according to him, that she took her oath more seriously than the average person who wouldn't bother swearing on a Bible when not asked to do so. But I had the perfect response.

In my response, I agreed with the landlord's counsel that his client must take her oath to tell the truth seriously. She must have taken it so seriously, in fact, that she refused to lie under oath when her truthful testimony would have sunk her case. So, instead, she just refused to answer almost every question put to her. The jury came back in 30 minutes with a unanimous verdict in the tenant's favor.

incontempt

I work as a public servant in a judge's office, and since I have a law degree, I get to be with the judge in some of the hearings. Last month, we had a huge substance trafficking case. I'm talking about 20 or more people involved, months of investigation, undercover agents, videos, audio, the whole ordeal. The hearing lasted three days.

It was time for one of the defendants to be on the stand so the prosecutor could read the charges he was being accused of. The prosecutor told him that "He was being accused of selling, trafficking and carrying x amount of x substances, with the base of his operation being his house, where he lived with his partner". Oh man, his response.

He promptly said "Wait up, I was the one selling, she didn't do anything". His lawyer facepalmed so hard it's actually recorded in the audio of the hearing. He still pleaded not guilty.

mildepan

Someone I knew had a pro bono case where she had to defend a person who had been charged with an offense—I don’t know what, it is confidential. Even though the authorities and District Attorney could pretty much pinpoint the offense to her client, there was no evidence to tie him to it. It was circumstantial at best.

She had instructed him to shut up and let her do the talking during the trial, as from experience the client sometimes did not know how to answer a question properly and had the tendency to sabotage himself. She pleads and can show that the court has nothing on her client, and she feels that for once, a pro bono case is going her way.

After her plea, the judge thanks her for her plea and turns to her client. He asks if the client had something to add to the plea. Client looks at her, back at the judge, tears well up in his eyes, and he blurts out: "I'm so sorry, I'll never do it again!" She threw her notes and everything else she had in her hands at the client. She basically got screwed by her own client, who screwed himself even worse.

ILoveLactateAcid

The guy and his lawyer missed court appearances with little or no warning and with suspect excuses. It started getting ridiculous, and we kept pointing out holes in his story. For example, the client said he left for another country without knowing about the appearance, but his lawyer stood in court and said he told him beforehand.

Or all of a sudden he was in a former Soviet Bloc country for fertility treatments and it would ruin everything if he came back now. Or when he was visiting elderly relatives on another continent. Or he was going to the airport when he had to rush to the hospital yet showed us an admitting form in another language.

He also tried firing his attorney and saying he needed more time to brief a new attorney—who at the next appearance would say he hasn't been able to talk to his client, so he needs to adjourn. Or that he hasn't been paid and his client is basically a jerk, and he needs to be relieved. We kept saying to the judge he was doing it to stall, but the judge kept giving him the benefit of the doubt.

We even showed the judge other cases where he skipped appearances. Then finally, he didn't show up for an appearance where the judge had specifically told him, "I don't care if you're meeting with the Pope, I'm ordering you to be here". Boom, his answer was stricken, default judgment in full was granted to our side.

carriegood

I was a very new lawyer, with no bankruptcy experience. A partner sent me to bankruptcy court to try to make a claim as a creditor related to a $50 million building that was being sold. The Court handled my client's claim very quickly and easily...at first. The Court ruled we were not a creditor because our claim was against a tenant, which was correct.

So I could just sit back for the remainder of the hearing and watch the two premier bankruptcy attorneys go at it. One represented the debtor and the owner of the building; the other represented a secured creditor with a lien against the building. They absolutely hated each other on a personal level, and were arguing with great venom about the plan to sell the real estate.

There was a small break in the action while the judge took care of another matter. When we came back, the secured creditor attorney told the Court the following: His client (the creditor) had purchased controlling interest in the debtor (the owner of the building). He had been directed to fire the other attorney. He had been directed to withdraw the motion to sell the real estate.

He then did both things right there in the courtroom. I have practiced for almost three decades. It was the coolest thing I had ever seen, and was particularly noteworthy because the courtroom was packed with other attorneys watching, and those two attorneys absolutely hated each other.

FountainofR

My dad is a physician and is sometimes called as a professional witness in cases of malpractice. In one memorable case, a family was suing a doctor for something fairly frivolous, and my dad was a witness for the defense. The lawyer representing the family was cross-examining my dad, and brought up a chapter in a medical textbook and asked my dad to read a highlighted paragraph.

He does, and the lawyer says something to the effect of, "So, what you just read means ". My dad confidently replied, "No, it does not mean that". The lawyer says, "No but if you read xyz, the author clearly states ". Again, my dad says, "No, really, that's not what the author means".

The lawyer didn’t know what he was getting himself into. "How do you know that's not what the author meant?" Dad replies, "Well, because I wrote it". The judge basically facepalmed while the lawyer mimicked a goldfish and stared at the author's name on the chapter. Basically the best moment of my dad's professional life. And yes, the ruling was in the defendant's favor.

Linkcec

A wife filed for a restraining order because she wanted the house during her divorce. The husband has a good job, like $200k per year. The employer finds out about the restraining order and fires the husband. He was a very specialized employee, so the only job he can find close to the house and his daughter is $50k. Ooh boy, did this not go well. 

The house gets foreclosed. Child support is set at less than $500 per month. The wife has to get a job as a waitress.

Thencewasit

Sources: , 2, 3, 4

Henry Fonda’s childhood was downright bizarre. Born in 1905 in Nebraska, Fonda’s parents were strict Christian Scientists. This meant the entire family didn’t believe in doctors, and instead they learned to rely only on themselves for health matters and most other problems. This wasn’t the best environment for young Henry, and the signs started to show early.

As a pre-pubescent boy, Fonda’s “awkward stage” was worse than most. Not only was he short for his age, he was horribly shy—after all, his sheltered upbringing hadn’t given him a lot of practice in talking to strangers. He could barely look at a girl unless it was one of his sisters, and he learned to lock his emotions inside. As we’ll see, this would have devastating consequences for Fonda later on.

The early years of Fonda’s life were taken up with all-American pursuits like sports, helping his father at his print plant, and majoring in journalism at the University of Minnesota. Then everything changed. By the time he was in his early 20s, Fonda had shot up to a strapping six feet tall, and the burgeoning hunk joined the Omaha Community Playhouse.

He didn’t know it at the time, but this marked the beginning of the rest of his life.

The Omaha Community Playhouse was where Fonda made his name, and for good reason. Dodie Brando, the mother of legendary actor Marlon Brando, was the one who got Fonda to audition, and he took to the stage like a duck to water. Soon, Fonda became obsessive about everything in the theater, from set construction to stage production. But there was one big problem…

It was clear from the get-go that Fonda had talent to spare, yet there was a dark side to his talent. He was completely embarrassed by his own acting chops, and the only way he could get through a performance was by throwing himself into the character to hide “behind a mask”. If that sounds like an unhealthy habit, well, it certainly was.

Embarrassment or not, Fonda knew he could be a star, and he wasn’t going to let his talent go to waste. In 1928 he struck out further into the world of the stage, taking up with the well-respected University Players on the East Coast and racking up some bona fide professional roles. And as his star ascended, his personal life started heating up too…

While working for University Players, Fonda met the spitfire actress Margaret Sullavan, who would later become famous herself in Hollywood. It was a date with destiny. No longer the awkward teenage boy, Fonda fell in love with and wooed Sullavan, proposing to her shortly after. Still, the course of passion never did run smooth.

Fonda and Sullavan were young and in love, and they showed their affection with romantic grand gestures. The pair even decided to officially tie the knot on Christmas Day in 1931, with Sullavan barely in her 20s and Fonda only 26 years old. Unfortunately, the chic couple were also young and dumb, and the seams came apart quickly.

Where Fonda had spent his life learning how to keep his emotions hidden, Sullavan was a notorious hot-head. Surprise, surprise: They clashed horrifically. On one occasion, Sullavan refused to chip in for some 4th of July fireworks. Fonda, ticked off, complained passive-aggressively to another actor in front of her—and Sullavan’s response was nothing short of explosive.

Without a moment’s hesitation, Sullavan got up from the dinner table she had been eating at, grabbed a pitcher of ice water, and dumped the ewer all over Henry Fonda’s beautiful head. True to his repressed upbringing, Fonda didn’t even make a sound. He just walked out, while Sullavan, now satisfied, plopped back down at the table and continued eating. Is it any wonder these two were doomed?

Fonda and Sullavan tried their best to make it work, even moving to New York City to be together and look for work. Still, they met an embarrassing end. For all their efforts, they were only together for a paltry two months, separating before the honeymoon period was even over in early 1932. Oh, and it doesn't look like Fonda learned his lesson from failed marriage number one over.

If anything, the end of his time with Sullavan kick-started the most scandalous period of his life.

Without the feisty Sullavan around, Fonda was single and ready to mingle—and he had just the wingman for the job. Soon after the split, Fonda became roommates with yet another future star, fellow small-town boy Jimmy Stewart. The actors became fast, close friends…and also developed a reputation around town as lady-killers.

Soon enough, they took their act all the way to the top.

From then on, wherever Henry went, Jimmy followed, and they both moved to Hollywood in 1935. It changed Fonda’s life forever: Where in New York he had been scraping together pennies, in Tinseltown he landed a leading role in The Farmer Takes a Wife. Soon he and Stewart were wining and dining starlet Carole Lombard and living beside Greta Garbo.

In 1936, Fonda jumped right back into marriage, now with the glamorous but fragile socialite Frances Ford Seymour Brokaw. This was...not the best idea. Brokaw was a recent widow and was still reeling from the loss of her husband. Once more, the emotionally unavailable Ford had hitched himself to a woman boiling over with anger and pain…and this time he wouldn’t get off so easy.

Despite this fundamental mismatch, Fonda was determined to become an honest family man, at least at first. He and Brokaw had two children together, the future actors Jane Fonda and Peter Fonda, and Henry even interrupted his shooting schedule on his acclaimed film Jezebel to be at Jane’s birth in 1937. He tried his best in other ways, too, but as we'll see, things didn't go according to plan.

Over the next few, heady years, Fonda turned from promising upstart to Hollywood heavyweight. By the time he landed the 1940 classic The Grapes of Wrath—a role he had to elbow his way into over the more established star Tyrone Power—he had officially Made It, earning an Oscar nomination in the process. Then it all came crashing down.

In the early 1940s, WWII was ravaging Europe, and even the brightest stars in Hollywood couldn’t ignore it, least of all the honor-bound Fonda. Without much of a second thought, he left both California and his young family for the Forces. As Fonda snapped about his decision, “I don’t want to be in a fake war in a studio”. Sadly, though, he had so much to lose.

When Fonda came back from the horrors of WWII, he hadn’t so much changed as crystallized into a hardened, distant man. His family got it worst of all. Fonda had extreme difficulty expressing his emotions, and whenever he felt his wife or children were demanding feelings from him, he would have terrifying “outbursts of anger” that reverberated through the house. And that wasn’t all.

Fonda did a number on both his children in incredibly awful ways. While Peter Fonda claimed his father never said “I love you” or heard it back until Henry was elderly, Jane admitted that her father instilled in her the idea that, “Unless you look perfect, you're not going to be loved”. So, yeah, he wasn’t the best father…but he was an even worse husband.

Fonda was deeply unhappy in his marriage with Frances Brokaw, who, it became clear, was suffering from bi-polar disorder. It pushed him into the ultimate betrayal. Fonda was unfaithful, carrying on a long-term affair with society girl Susan Blanchard, a hot young thing who was two decades younger than him. And still, that wasn’t good enough for him…

In 1949, after 13 miserable years and two children together, Fonda approached Brokaw and told her he wanted a divorce. Never one for empathy, he then dug the knife in more. He admitted to her that he wanted to split because he wanted to be free to marry his mistress Susan. Ouch, Henry. His poor wife's reaction was beyond tragic.

Less than six months later, Brokaw was so distraught about the end of her marriage and her husband’s infidelity, she checked herself into the Austen Riggs Psychiatric Hospital for treatment for her depression. For months, Fonda’s wife tried to process the pain her cruel ex-husband had dealt her. Sadly, her suffering had only begun.

On April 14, 1950, just 10 days after she turned 42, Frances Ford Seymour took her life while still receiving treatment for her mental illness. Fonda must have been devastated at the horrific news, as well as what it meant for his young family—but all the same, his response to the tragedy has lived in infamy ever since.

When Frances passed, Fonda’s children Jane and Peter were only 12 and 10 years old. Thinking he was protecting them, Fonda told them a horrific lie. Instead of admitting the true circumstances of their mother’s passing, Fonda claimed she had died from heart failure. Maybe that’s forgivable, but his next actions sure weren’t.

Fonda was a man who did nothing by halves, and he took his dishonesty about Frances to the next level. Likely afraid of any “unnecessary” outpourings of emotion, Fonda didn’t even let his own children go to their mother’s funeral, instead putting on a hasty affair with just himself and his mother-in-law in attendance. Oh, but that wasn’t all.

Fonda’s final turn of the screw was a doozy. In order to completely hide the truth from his children, he cancelled all newspaper and magazine subscriptions to their house, lest they stumble across a story about it. Despite Fonda's efforts, he couldn't hide the truth. Young Jane found out about her own mother’s tragic end while thumbing through a magazine in a study hall.

As we'll see, however, there was still one bitter coda to Brokaw's story—contained in her final letters.

All this turmoil might have made Fonda think twice about his choices, but…it didn’t. Less than a year after his second wife's passing, Fonda did what he was planning to do the entire time, and married his 21-year-old mistress Susan Blanchard. As a sign of his devotion, the couple even adopted a daughter named Amy Fishman three years later. Unfortunately for young Amy, that’s when the fractures began to show.

Later on, Fonda's third wife made some disturbing accusations about her cruel husband. Although she was young and often felt hemmed in by the seriousness of marriage and motherhood, there were much deeper problems in the union, too. She claimed Fonda expected her to be a “geisha,” always perfect and always making sure nothing unpleasant would interrupt his life.

Soon after it began, the clock was already ticking on Fonda’s third disastrous romance. But his life was about to fall apart professionally, too.

In 1955, Fonda found himself in the middle of a violent and heartbreaking feud. For decades, he had worked with famed Western director John Ford on scores of classic films, including 1946’s My Darling Clementine, and had developed a close friendship with him. That year, he was starring in Ford’s upcoming WWII film Mister Roberts, and it was all set to be a grand old time—until it wasn’t...

Almost from the first days of filming, it was clear that Ford was out for blood. The aging director clashed with Fonda’s co-star James Cagney, who later called him “truly a nasty old man,” and it wasn’t long before Ford turned his ire on his long-term pal Fonda. In a now infamous altercation, Ford got so incensed he actually punched Fonda in the mouth.

There was no going back after that: Fonda dropped Ford as a friend and collaborator from then on, even after Ford apologized. Once you lose Henry Fonda, you never get him back.

In 1956, just three years after they adopted a child, Ford and his third wife Susan Blanchard were officially over, and Fonda was fully into mid-life crisis mode. Months later, he married again, this time to a beautiful Italian noble, the Baroness Afdera Franchetti, which is just about the most classic “fourth wife” name you could ever come up with.

As the 1960s approached, Fonda almost lost the best friend he ever had. He and Jimmy Stewart had remained bosom buddies through thick and thin, but disaster was on the horizon. While Stewart was a staunch Republican, Fonda was a committed Democrat, and the decade was rife with political tension just waiting to set them off. Well, set them off it did.

One day, Fonda and Stewart got into a massive, emotional argument about politics that matched any of his rows with Margaret Sullavan. It was so horrific, it nearly ended their friendship, which had already seen so much. The two actors only barely managed to patch things up, and even then they swore never to discuss politics again with each other.

But even this blow-up wasn't the most messed up part of Fonda and Stewart's friendship...

After Fonda's ex-wife Margaret Sullavan passed in 1960, her daughter Brooke wrote a tell-all memoir that revealed what really happened during Sullavan's marriage to Fonda. Everyone suspected that Fonda's good friend Jimmy Stewart had a thing for Margaret Sullavan, but Brooke revealed that Sullavan reciprocated his feelings. She claimed that her mother had a year-long affair with Stewart...while she was still married to Fonda.

Fonda’s most famous role today is probably his turn as “Juror 8” in 12 Angry Men, the man who passionately convinces everyone to vote “not guilty". The movie is an absolute legend today, but few know its embarrassing history. It was a flop when it came out and Fonda, who was also the film’s producer, swore he’d never be an executive again.

By the 1970s, Fonda was in his late 60s, and still at his work harder than ever. Actually, he was working too hard, and it came back to bite him. In 1974, he was performing in a play when he suddenly collapsed from exhaustion. But did this stop him? Nah. The old battleaxe got a pacemaker installed and returned to the play the next year.

As Fonda became elderly, his daughter Jane bought the film rights to Ernest Thompson’s play On Golden Pond. The reason behind this move was heartbreaking. Jane thought the play, which outlines the relationship between an emotionally distant father to his daughter, was the perfect way for her and her father to work out some of their own issues. One heartbreaking moment on set proved her right.

During a scene where Jane's character tells Henry's character that she wants to be friends, one tiny detail nearly made the notoriously stoic Henry Fonda break down. In the take that appears in the film, Jane Fonda decided to grab her father's hand. Her gesture was so emotional that Fonda turned away in an attempt to hide his tears. See? Underneath his cold exterior, Henry Fonda did have a heart.

On Golden Pond became a blockbuster, earning millions of dollars as well as snagging a handful of Oscar nomination, including a nod was for Henry Fonda himself. Finally, in 1982, he actually won the golden statuette—his first ever Oscar win. It was an incredibly special moment for an actor who had spent a lifetime making a name for himself in Hollywood. Yet even so, this triumphant evening was tainted with bittersweet tragedy.

By the time the Academy Awards rolled around that year, the aging and ailing Fonda was too sick to attend the ceremony. Instead, his daughter gave him a gut-wrenching tribute. Jane made her way up on the stage on behalf on her father, saying, “I'll bet when he heard it just now, he said 'Hey ain't I lucky?'" As if luck had anything to do with it.

When Fonda’s daughter Jane decided she wanted to get into acting, she asked her father for advice on his own methods. The legend’s answer was surprising. He got prickly about the entire idea of breaking down his thought processes and emotions, snapping, "I don't know, I stand there, I think about my wife, I don't know".

The ladies may have adored Henry Fonda, but he was still supremely unlucky in love. In 1961, his marriage to the Italian baroness Afdera Franchetti also went kaput. Still, he gave it one more try in 1965, entering into his fifth marriage with Shirlee Mae Adams, another girl decades younger than him. This time, it stuck, and they were together until the end of his days.

As Fonda turned into something of a veteran in Hollywood, his career only started to heat up. To this day, one of his most famous roles is as the villain “Frank” in the Sergio Leone classic Once Upon a Time in the West. But Fonda almost missed his chance. He initially turned down the part, until Leone flew all the way from Italy to the States to convince him.

Although Fonda’s work as “Frank” in Once Upon a Time in the West is now a template for big baddies everywhere, it could have been much different. In order to play the villain, Fonda had brought brown contact lenses to set to hide his world-famous blue eyes and make him look less innocent. It was Leone who rightly convinced the actor that the contrast between this horrible man and those baby blues would be electrifying.

Everyone loves a good tale of Hollywood sliding doors, but Henry Fonda has an enormous one. In the 1960s, spaghetti Western director Sergio Leone wanted Fonda to play The Man with No Name in his upcoming Dollars Trilogy, which includes the classic film The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The actor refused, and the part went to Clint Eastwood instead.

Fonda’s marriages and affairs were super messy, but they had nothing on some of the dalliances he turned down. While filming 1947’s Daisy Kenyon with Joan Crawford, Fonda’s co-star fell into uncontrollable lust with him, and she wasn’t shy about showing it. Get this: Crawford got the costume department to create a custom, red-sequinned jock strap, which she then presented to the star in a gift box.

Oh, but things got more awkward than that before they were through.

Being the “strong, silent” type, Fonda initially didn’t even acknowledge Crawford’s racy gift, so Crawford had to get creative. While they were doing a scene together where Fonda carried her up some stairs, she leaned in and asked him to model the underwear for her in private. As Fonda said, “When she whispered the invitation, I nearly dropped her".

When the dust settled on Brokaw's passing, the disturbed woman still managed to haunt Fonda. Before her passing, she had written no fewer than six goodbye letters to the loved ones in her life. But there was one bitter omission. She hadn’t written a single thing to Fonda himself. And Brokaw's therapist at the asylum thought she knew why…

Therapists are supposed to be objective, but apparently not when it comes to Henry Fonda. Brokaw's doctor got an incredibly chilling portrait of the actor through his late wife’s final sessions. Years later, the psychiatrist confessed that in her medical opinion, Fonda was “a cold, self-absorbed person, [and] a complete narcissist". Ouch.

As it turned out, Fonda had precious little time left after his landmark Oscar win. On August 12, 1982, the silver screen great passed at his home, surrounded by his children Jane and Peter as well as his current wife Shirlee. True to his no-frills form, Fonda’s last wish was that there be absolutely no funeral service.

Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

Josephine Baker is probably most associated with her golden banana-skirted dance, the “Danse Sauvage". Beyond the fashion statement, the act revolutionized how dancers thought about movement itself. To quote one scholar, “She used her backside, shaking it as though it were an instrument". To quote another, Baker had a "witty rear end". But the "Danse Sauvage" was far from the only scandal Baker caused. Let's put it this way: From the get go, this girl knew how to cause a scene.

Josephine “La Baker” Baker was actually born “Freda Josephine McDonald” in St. Louis, Missouri on June 3, 1906. Most peculiar for African-American babies at the time, she was born in a hospital—not at home by midwife—where her mother Carrie stayed for several weeks after her birth. This strange detail has led Baker's biographers to suggest that an unnamed benefactor footed the bill for Carrie’s stay...and that he did so out of more than just the goodness of his heart.

Considering the strange circumstances of Baker's birth, many scholars believe that the mystery sugar daddy was actually Baker's biological father, whose identity is a mystery to this day. On paper, Baker's father was listed as Eddie Carson, a vaudeville drummer, though evidence suggests her biological father was actually an unknown white man.

Even so, this was an unspoken truth in the Baker family. Her son and biographer Jean-Claude wrote that though he desperately tried to figure out Josephine's parentage, the secret of Baker's biological father ended "with Carrie, who refused to the end to talk about it". Sadly, Baker’s secretive identity as a mixed-race woman created a rift between Josephine and Carrie that would only grow as the years went on.

No surprise here, entertaining was the Baker family business. Her legal father, Eddie Carson, was a vaudeville drummer who would play anywhere and everywhere around St. Louis to make ends meet. Some sources claim that her mother Carrie was an nimble, alluring dancer who gave up her showbiz dreams and became a laundress. Either way, legend has it that little baby Josephine made her stage debut in one of her parents' song-and-dance shows at just one year old. Though she didn't know it yet, she'd go on to become one of the most iconic performers of all time.

Soon enough, Baker began dancing on street corners—but even though she loved the thrill of performing, the precarity of showbiz also followed. Baker stopped attending school before the sixth grade and during an especially tough time, she even lived as a street child. To survive, she would have to resort to rooting around garbage cans for food.

When Baker was still a child herself, she went to work for a white family whose matriarch treated young Josephine abominably. When Baker accidentally used too much soap while doing the laundry, her cruel boss punished her by burning little Josephine’s hands. As though that's bad enough, affectionate and kind-hearted Josephine was also barred from kissing her boss' white babies because of Baker's darker skin.

Teen years can be tough on mother-daughter relationships, but the tensions between Baker and her mother Carrie was worse than most. Carrie disapproves of her daughter's two divorces before the age of 20 (more on them soon) and her burgeoning entertainment career. Carrie hoped that her daughter would settle down, but Baker needed to be in the spotlight. At a certain point, mother and daughter just couldn't see eye to eye. Sadly, things would only get worse.

At the height of the Harlem Renaissance, Baker was a successful Broadway performer. In time, she was billed as “the highest-paid chorus girl in vaudeville” but success didn't come overnight. When Baker first auditioned to join the all-Black cast of Shuffle Along, the producers showed her the door for a cruel reason: She was "too skinny and too dark". But Josephine wasn't one to give up without a fight.

While Josephine worked long days as a dresser, she spent her nights studying the Shuffle Along routines and learning them by heart. Soon enough, all her hard work paid off. When one of the original dancers left the show, Josephine saved the day, and then some. When she performed, Baker would act silly and pretend not to know her moves. Later, in the encore, she would wow the crowd by performing the steps perfectly. Baker's professional life was going spectacularly, but her personal life was another story.

Josephine Baker started her temptress cred early, walking down the aisle for the first time at just 13 years old. She met her first groom Willie Wells while working as a waitress, but it wasn't meant to be. The young lovers' marriage lasted for barely a year. Barely a teenager at the time, Baker rebounded from her divorce by joining the Jones Family Band and promptly marrying someone else...just two years later.

Josephine always lived life to the fullest. At the age of 15, Josephine fell madly in love with another beau and decided to make things official yet again. On this trip down the aisle, Baker walked toward her latest conquest, Willie Baker. Although they split just four years later, Josephine would keep a part of Willie with her always. She used his last name for the rest of her professional life.

For years, Baker tried to win over her mother and repair their damaged relationship. She would always return home from tours with gifts and money for her mom and little sister, but no matter what Josephine did, she just couldn’t buy Carrie’s approval. Sadly, mother and daughter never quite repaired their fractured bond. Their disintegrating relationship was a major factor in Baker’s move to Paris in 1925.

Here's another reason for Baker and her mom not getting along. Baker made ends meet by appearing in some dicey productions. The young starlet would work in blackface comedy and minstrel shows. Her mother Carrie found these deeply offensive and never forgave her daughter for appearing in that kind of material.

Once she settled down in Paris, Baker rubbed elbows with the biggest names in art—and caused an absolute frenzy. Almost overnight, she became the toast of the town, and young men roamed the Paris streets dreaming of her lithe body dancing the Charleston while (barely) clad in bananas, boa feathers, and diamond chokers. Pablo Picasso jumped at the chance to paint her beauty, while the French writer and artist Jean Cocteau wanted her to star in films.

These days, Dita Von Teese is the big name in burlesque, but we'd never have her famous martini routine with Josephine Baker. Baker pioneered sensual dancing by performing sultry numbers clothed in just a single ostrich feather or, when she was feeling even more risque, less than that. While some people see exotic dancing as improper, Baker firmly disagreed. With her blend of silly expressions and sultry dance moves, her act was all about joy and freedom.

Why did Josephine Baker love France so much? The answer is simple: It was nowhere near as discriminatory as the USA.  When Baker and her fellow Black performers boarded a train, they were shocked to see that they could sit wherever they pleased. France's more accepting society made a huge difference to Baker's career. She became the first African American woman to take the lead role in a major movie, playing heroines in Zouzou, The Siren of the Tropics, and Princesse Tam Tam. Meanwhile, back in Hollywood, Black actresses were mostly stuck playing maids.

Baker's famous upturned banana skirt was designed by the famous French artist and critic Jean Cocteau, and the garment became an absolute sensation. When European toy manufacturers began to produce popular Josephine Baker-esque dolls, they immediately knew that they had to dress them in Baker's iconic banana skirt. Baker was at the top of her game, but the hit parade wouldn't last forever.

Josephine Baker collected colorful nicknames over her life. Throughout her long career, she was called "The Bronze Venus," “La Baker,” “Black Venus,” “Black Pearl,” and even the “Creole Goddess". Even couldn't resist her charms. He described Baker as being tall with "coffee skin, ebony eyes, legs of paradise, and a smile to end all smiles" and summed up her beauty by calling her "The Nefertiti of Now".

Baker knew how to keep all eyes on her. She had a pet cheetah named Chiquita, who actually had a role in the singer’s act. Complete with a diamond collar, the jungle cat would take car rides and holidays with her mistress and even sleep in Baker's bed.

During her time in Paris, Baker was a bonafide A-Lister. From her stage shows to her starring roles on the silver screen, "Josephine Baker" was the name on everyone's lips. Is it any wonder that by 1927, she was said to be the wealthiest Black woman in the world? But as Baker was ascending to the top of the A List, Europe was falling into its darkest era.

When Baker began her glitzy tour through Europe in 1928, she had no idea what awaited her. As she entered Vienna, Baker realized that she was deeply unwelcome. All over the city, cruel posters called her a "Black Devil" and urged the public to avoid her shows. Once so much more accepting than the United States, Josephine's beloved Europe had become just as discriminatory.

Later in life, Baker remembered how it felt for the Viennese people to hate her just because of the color of her skin. She said that as she traveled to her accommodations, she saw the streets lined with angry Venetians who screamed at her carriage. Baker recalled that their jeers immediately transported her back to a nightmarish time in her life: the race riots of her youth. Never one to back down, Baker knew that she couldn't just sit back and allow hate to reign in her beloved Europe.

Baker decided that she had to take action. By day, she would continue her performances, but by night, she secretly became a spy for the French Resistance during World War II. Baker often took advantage the trappings of her superstar lifestyle. Baker would use her touring schedule as a cover to help her get into contact with politicians and other officials. But her most dangerous act of rebellion was yet to come. 

Baker bravely used her mansion to hide weapons and provide safe haven for refugees and resistance fighters. On one occasion, this nearly spelled her doom. When the Germans learned about Baker's safe house, they paid her a visit. Ever the charmer, Baker held them at bay and got out of the sticky situation...all without the Germans realizing that a group of French resistance fighters were right under their noses.

Baker's espionage tactics included far more covert operations. She started out by simply writing intel on her hands and arms, but her methods became more complex quickly. The large piles of “sheet music” that accompanied her person on tours were really secretly coded intel. She would circulate the "songs" to Allied contacts spread across several neutral European countries. The trick was taking the sheet music and writing pertinent information on top of the music notes in invisible ink. 

During her days as a spy for the Deuxieme Bureau, Baker came up with an ingenious way to hide super-sensitive documents. She simply pinned secret photographs of Axis military instalments in a place where no official would dare to look: inside her underwear. Baker always dazzled the star-struck immigration officers too much for them to really check her stuff.

Josephine Baker had a strong reputation for being on the right side of history. Her work as a civil rights activist was so well-esteemed that the NAACP declared 20 May 1961 to be “Josephine Baker Day". After raising funds for impoverished Parisians during WWII, she also became the first American woman ever to be award the Croix de Guerre. As though that wasn't enough, in 1946, she received the incredibly prestigious Medal of the Resistance.

Josephine Baker was at Martin Luther King Jr.’s side and was the only woman who spoke at the 1963 March on Washington. In the wake of King’s untimely end five years later, his widow asked Baker to inherit her late husband’s position as leader of the Civil Rights movement. Mulling it over, Baker ultimately had to turn the position down—she didn’t want to risk the welfare of her kids. In her words, they were “too young to lose their mother".

Baker was one of the Jazz Age's most jaw-droppingly beautiful women, but if you asked her about it, she'd demur. Baker once said, “Beautiful? It's all a question of luck. I was born with good legs. As for the rest... beautiful, no. Amusing, yes". The famed writer Ernest Hemingway begged to disagree. He dubbed her “the most sensational woman anyone ever saw, or ever will".

It sounds like a tale of medieval chivalry, but it’s true: At the heigh of Baker's fame, two men duelled over her honor in 1928. While staying in Budapest, Baker was ogled and accosted by Andrew Czlovoydi, a Hungarian Calvary Captain. Baker’s manager and secret beau, Pepito Abatino, would not tolerate such ignoble behavior towards his Josephine, so he challenged Czlovoydi to a duel by sword.

Baker cheered the two men from her seat atop a tombstone as the suitors sparred in a local cemetery for 10 straight minutes. She did, however, put an end to the fight as soon as her lover Abatino received a shoulder injury. In the name of their beloved lady, the men agreed to wrap things up.

Baker had both brains and beauty. When asked about her risqué dance routines, she once quipped that it wasn't that bad, because "I simply didn’t have any clothes on".

Baker obtained French citizenship from her third marriage to Jean Lion in 1937 (more on that later). While the marriage petered out pretty quickly, Baker kept her new nationality, and sang its praises from the rooftops. One of Baker's most famous songs, "J'ai Deux Amours" ("I Have Two Loves") alluded to her double allegiances to her birth country, the USA, and her adopted home, France. But that's not what everyone thought the steamy song meant.

Fans and critics often interpreted "J'ai Deux Amours" as “Oh, she’s talking about her love for both America and France". But as time went on, people like Jean-Claude Baker, her biographer and adopted son, saw the subtext for what it was. Many critics believe that Baker was coyly singing about her bi desires. After all, it wasn't a very well kept secret. She entertained several female lovers, many of whom were just as famous as Baker or even more well-known...

However, there was a sad side to Baker's tempestuous affairs. It was segregation laws that forced Baker to stay in Black boarding houses, and this was where she tended to strike up romances with women performers. Although only one structural aspect of Baker's complex identity, according to Baker's son, these kinds of relationships were pretty common. "Lady lover friendship," as he called it, ensued from shared experiences. The performers had to stick together against bosses and discriminatory housing policies.

Baker was not a one-woman woman. She had affairs with performers like Clara Smith, Evelyn Sheppard, Bessie Allison, Ada Smith, and Mildred Smallwood.

Frida Kahlo is perhaps the most famous of Baker’s (rumored) female lovers. The Mexican artist met Baker on a 1939 visit to Paris. Awkwardly, Kahlo’s possessive husband was traveling with his wife at the time. Don't hate the player, Diego, hate the game.

If the song, "J'ai Deux Amours" didn't make it clear, Baker loved a double meaning. So it's no surprise that when she dipped her toe into the literary world in 1931, Baker decided to write an extravagant allegory. Her controversial novella, Mon Sang Dans Tes Veines ("My Blood In Your Veins") used a melodramatic love story to argue that being prejudiced against people of other races would only make someone miserable. If you want more details, you can read a summary of the intense plot line right here. 

Josephine Baker was both a lover and a fighter, and she seemed to have endless energy on both fronts. Amid all her flirtations with women and marriages to men, Baker still found time to strike up a passionate affair with her manager, Giuseppe Pepito Abatino. He passed himself off as a noble count but in reality, he was just a former stonemason who had the hots for his client. Abatino was so infatuated with Baker that he proposed marriage. While they never made it down the aisle, Baker and Abatino had a long, passionate affair.

Under Abatino’s management (among other things), Baker’s career and public image took off in Europe. The duo even opened a popular nightclub in Josephine's named, Chez Josephine. In her home country of America, however, people were less receptive and even threatened by her challenging act. Time magazine outright called her insulting names while other publications said her voice was “too-thin” to fill real venues like the Winter Garden Theater.

Despite Baker's haters, Europe's preeminent burlesque star returned to the USA in 1936 to become the first Black woman to lead the famous Ziegfeld Follies. Baker's historic performance should have been a highlight in her career, but discriminatory reviewers felt differently. They ran Baker's name into the mud, calling her "bucktooth," among other cruel names that we won't repeat. Sadly, that was nothing compared to Baker's next tragedy.

After Baker's brutal reception in the USA, she returned to France, only to find even worse news awaiting her arrival. Her lover and manager Abatino had passed. Wanting his beloved Baker to enjoy her time in America, Abatino didn't tell her that he was battling cancer. Unfortunately, by the time she got back to France, the disease had ended Abatino's life.

Devastated by the loss of Abatino, Baker sought comfort in the arms of another lover. She married the wealthy Frenchman Jean Lion in 1937 and quickly took up several daredevil hobbies as ways to cope with her grief. Baker learned to drive a car, ride a horse, and even fly her new beau's plane.

During Baker's time in Paris, she cultivated more than a few strange interests, but her most notorious was her collection of exotic and eccentric pets. A goat named Toutoute lived right above the dressing room of her nightclub while Albert, Baker’s beloved pet pig, ate scraps from her nightclub’s kitchen. It turned out to be such a robust diet that the kitchen door had to be broken down in order to let the singer’s prized pig roam freely. Sadly, Josephine's sweet gestures had dark roots.

When Josephine was a young girl, she worked for some cruel people. One of her bosses, a white woman, even burned Baker's hands when she made innocent mistakes. Because of this, Baker began to distrust people and instead spend her time with animals, especially injured creatures. Since she wasn't allowed to befriend her boss' children, young Baker would eat lunch with a disabled dog named Three Legs.

In 1941, Baker suffered a horrific miscarriage that ended in a complete hysterectomy and treatment for dangerous infections like peritonitis and septicemia. At the time, Baker's fans worried that the chanteuse might die, but Baker was a fighter. Rising above her brutalized health, the singer managed to pull herself together to tour across North Africa—and of course, to covertly continue her espionage work.

When Baker returned to America in the 1950s, she remembered why she'd left. As though the discrimination in France wasn't bad enough, Baker faced an even harsher society back in the United States. In a particularly humiliating example of the kind of cruel treatment Baker faced, a whopping 36 hotels refused to accommodate Baker due to discrimination.

When it came to Baker's romantic life, she had a full schedule, but not everyone could handle a woman like "The Black Pearl Of Paris". For example, in 1925, she and the Belgian writer Georges Simenon were the hot new pair. But things ended when Simenon began to feel insecure about Baker's wealth and fame. Even though she was "tantalizing," Simenon didn't want to be "Mr. Baker" Okay dude, your loss!

and Josephine Baker were close buddies. Together since 1951, the friendship began after Kelly defended Baker from racist servers at the famous Stork Club, who had refused to serve the black entertainer. The white actress angrily stormed out of the club in a show of solidarity for Baker. Kelly vowed to never patronize the Stork Club again.

Baker didn't find discrimination just at hotels and restaurants: It was right there in front of her at her own segregated cabaret shows. White men and women paid handsome sums to see the beautiful, exotic Baker on stage—but only if her Black brothers and sisters were separated from them. In response, Baker refused to perform for segregated audiences, and forced many clubs to change their implicit or explicit policies.

In her prime, Josephine Baker gave superstars like Mary Pickford and Gloria Swanson a run for their money. The three performers were the most photographed women in the entire world.

Baker often spoke eloquently about discrimination, but one of her quotes is especially prescient. The rebellious performer once said, "Surely the day will come when colour means nothing more than the skin tone, when religion is seen uniquely as a way to speak one’s soul; when birth places have the weight of a throw of the dice and all men are born free, when understanding breeds love and brotherhood".

Baker famously refused to perform in segregated venues in the US, even turning down $10,000 from The Stork Club, a Miami venue that asked her to make an exception. After Baker's firm denial, the club eventually bent down to her demands and hosted their first desegregated show. The entire city of Las Vegas began to integrate its audiences at her request.

It’s said that Josephine Baker received more than 1,500 proposals from men over the course of her life. That makes it all the more impressive that she got married only four times.

No one's perfect, including Josephine Baker. Despite her strong track record of being compassionate to people excluded from mainstream society, she had a big blind spot. Baker went on the record saying that she was terrified of maimed men. Justifiably, the French French Association of Mutilated Veterans wasn't pleased about her insensitive remarks and even filed a suit against her.

Baker’s 1951 homecoming to Harlem was the biggest event of the decade. Her show was sold-out and got rave reviews, reaching its apex with a parade in her honor that was attended by 100,000 people. To no one’s surprise, she won that year’s NAACP “Woman of the Year” award.

The singer’s return to the US was cut short due to a mix of discrimination, anti-Communism, and bad hospitality. Baker publicly denounced the conservative journalist Walter Winchell, who staunchly supported segregation. In return, Winchell did the worst thing possible, considering the sympathies of the time. He accused Baker of being a Communist sympathizer. The consequences of his words were equal parts swift and brutal.

Winchell's accusation was an incredibly serious charge during the paranoid "Red Scare" era. The American people were so perturbed that they hit Baker where it hurt. They revoked Baker's work visa and forced her to return to France. Rubbing salt in the wound, the USA barred Baker from re-entering the country for nearly a decade after Winchell pointed the finger.

On June 3, 1947, Baker walked down the aisle for the fourth and final time when she wed a French composer and orchestra leader named Jo Bouillion. But before you go getting weepy, this wasn't Baker's last set of "I do"s before she found her one true love. Sadly, she and Bouillon divorced after 17 years of marriage in 1961, shortly after Baker adopted her 12th child.

When Baker was finally allowed back into the USA, the country made up for its prior sins. It was in America that Baker struck up a relationship with an artist named Robert Brady. In her 70s, Baker finally found her one true love. She and Brady never officially got married, but they did privately exchange vows in a Mexican church.

But why didn't Baker, never averse to a trip down the aisle, wed Brady in public? The answer is a little sad: She knew that her track record with relationships wasn't the best and worried that the press would make fun of her new flame. Just this once, Baker wanted to keep her private life to herself.

Beating the likes of Brangelina by decades, Baker spent her 40s adopting 12 foster kids of many ethnicities and nationalities. She called her diverse family “The Rainbow Tribe" and for years, the multi-cultural kids lived in southern France alongside Baker's trademark exotic pets including cheetahs and monkeys. On the surface, the Rainbow Tribe seemed like an idyllic brood but after the children grew up, they told a different story.

Why did Baker adopt so many kids? She was out to prove that “children of different ethnicities and religions could still be brothers". The Rainbow Tribe lived on her estate of hotels, farms, and rides. Baker would charge admission to visitors who wanted to come in and watch her children play and sing. But her son Jean-Claude Baker believed there was a darker, more cynical reason for her generosity.

In Jean-Claude Baker's skeptical words, Baker didn't want a child, what she really wanted was "a doll". However, a softer take on the Rainbow Tribe's “quirky” upbringing comes from Baker's Japanese son, Akio. He gently described Baker as “a great artist, and she was our mother. Mothers make mistakes. Nobody’s perfect".

Ah, Jean-Claude. Everyone in the world might have loved his mom, but he didn't quite see the appeal. As an adult, he published a jaw-dropping exposé of Josephine Baker and in it, he did not hold back about Mommie Dearest. According to Jean-Claude, Baker would open the door without any clothes and disliked her rival icon Marlene Dietrich, who she called a "German cow". But Jean-Claude's most troubling revelation is this: In his eyes, Baker would step on anyone "to get where she wanted to get". Yikes.

Despite her many marriages and her numerous children, Baker never mixed up the two. She had no biological children from any of her four husbands. Because of Baker's hysterectomy, all of her children were adopted.

Despite all Baker's success, she and her Rainbow Tribe fell on such hard financial times that in 1969, Baker had to give her precious home up to her creditors. This is where the dark side of fame becomes hard to ignore: When anyone else hits rock bottom, it's usually a fairly private moment, but not for Josephine Baker. When she lost her home, photographers captured a heartbreaking photo of Baker locked outside in the rain, staring forlornly into her bleak future.

When Baker's dear friend Grace Kelly heard that Baker was in trouble, she immediately stepped in to help. The Princess of Monaco did her best to smooth things over with the creditors, but to no avail. Baker ended up losing her beloved château, but even then, Kelly refused to let her dear friend starve. Princess Grace took care of Baker, arranging for her to have a villa right in Kelly’s adopted country.

According to legend, when Baker was in her prime, a would-be suitor asked her to go steady with him. When Baker declined, he killed himself at her feet.

In April 1975, Baker returned to the stage for Josephine a Bobino 1975 to celebrate her 50 years in the spotlight. Her old friend Princess Grace Kelly financed the revue, along with Kelly’s husband Prince Rainier and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Its opening night was an unbridled success. The theater was filled to burst with celebrities like Sophia Loren and Mick Jagger, and when Baker got on stage, the audience greeted her with a standing ovation. Their support moved Baker so much that she began to cry.

Just four days after performing in Josephine a Bobino 1975, Baker tragically suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in her hotel. When she passed, the legendary performer was surrounded by rave reviews of her final iconic show, with many of her friends saying that Baker passed "of joy". 

Towards the end of her life, Baker converted to Roman Catholicism. Accordingly, she was given a full Catholic funeral service at the L'Eglise de la Madeleine, complete with a 21 gun salute that honored her heroism during WWII. 20,000 of Baker's fans attended the lavish French funeral, however, when the time came for Baker to be buried, she did not stay in her beloved Paris. Instead, she was interred nearby in her BFF Grace Kelly’s adopted home of Monaco.

Baker's legacy lives on even to this day. Performers like Beyoncé Knowles, Laverne Cox, and Diana Ross have paid homage to Baker through their own banana skirts. Plus, in 2003, actress Angelina Jolie admitted that she modelled her own diverse family on Josephine Baker’s. In her words, Baker was “a model for the multiracial, multi-national family she was beginning to create through adoption". Now that’s a committed fan.

But the biggest way that Baker lives on is through her support of justice. It seems fitting to end this article with one of her trademark quotes: “You know, friends, that I do not lie to you when I tell you I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents.  And much more. But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee, and that made me mad.  And when I get mad, you know that I open my big mouth.  And then look out, ‘cause when Josephine opens her mouth, they hear it all over the world". They certainly did. Rest in peace to an absolute icon.

Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, , 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22

Born Alexandrina Victoria on May 24, 1819, Victoria’s rise to the throne was sudden and unexpected. Her father was the younger son of the king, and no one thought his line would get anywhere near the crown. Upon her birth, Victoria was a measly fifth in line for the throne—but the little girl was quickly baptized into tragedy.

One of Queen Victoria’s nicknames was the “Grandmother of Europe” because so many of her big brood made advantageous marriages with monarchies all across the continent. If you were a royal in the 20th century, chances are you were related to Queen Victoria. But as we’ll see, this wasn’t necessarily a good thing…

When Victoria was a child, all the royal heirs passed away one by one, most of them from heartbreaking ends. In just four short years, three of Victoria’s cousins perished, then her father and her grandfather passed within a week of each other. By 1830, 11-year-old Victoria was next in line for the throne. And more misfortune was just around the corner.

Victoria called her childhood “melancholy”—but it was even darker than that. Her mother, Duchess Victoria of Kent, was notoriously controlling, and developed the “Kensington System” to raise her daughter. This system forced Victoria to isolate herself from playmates and family alike, rendering her dependent on mommy dearest. As we’ll see, this did not end well.

Queen Victoria was a short woman, standing just 4'11" tall. But hey, it's not the size of the girl in the crown...

Victoria’s uncle, then King William IV, absolutely despised her mother. When parliament decided that the Duchess could be Victoria’s regent, William’s response was unforgettably petty. At a banquet, the elderly William stood up and publicly proclaimed that he would live until Victoria was 18, just to ensure her mother would never come to power. Now that’s a commitment.

Many historians attribute the stereotypical morality of the Victorian era to Victoria’s mother, and the duchess was obsessed with keeping Victoria “pure.” Since King William had illegitimate children, the duchess thought he was “an oversexed oaf” and even denied the king of England the opportunity to see his niece. Is it any wonder Victoria became so maladjusted?

Life as the heir to the British throne isn’t all luxury and gallantry. In order to sell Victoria as the next monarch, the duchess forced her daughter to go on a series of exhausting tours around England. They worked a treat, and the crowds quickly fell in love with the young girl—but this came at a heartbreakingly high cost.

In October 1835, in the middle of one of these tours, Victoria took ill with an intense fever. Unsurprisingly, her mother used the opportunity to push her own gross agenda. Throughout the malady, the Duchess of Kent persistently badgered the weakened Victoria to bend to her will. Somehow, the girl held on to her resolve…but she’d need it.

When she was 16 years old, Victoria’s family started making plans to marry her off. There were two rivals for her royal heart: Prince Alexander of the Netherlands, who King William IV backed, and Prince Albert, who her maternal uncle King Leopold I of Belgium supported. But when Victoria saw Albert, all bets were off.

It was clear to everyone that Victoria was immediately smitten with Albert, but her private diaries go into very personal detail. The future monarch was a lovestruck teenager, writing that Albert was “extremely handsome…his eyes are large and blue, and he has a beautiful nose and a very sweet mouth.” As for Prince Alexander? He was “very plain.” Better luck next time, bud.

Victoria and Albert may have bonded through shared family trauma. Albert’s own mother was a piece of work, having divorced his father to go live with her illicit lover. She died without ever seeing her son again. Oh, and just to make things interesting, Albert’s father then got remarried to his own niece. Bet he and Victoria had a lot to talk about.

One of the legends about Queen Victoria is her reportedly dour saying, “We are not amused.” This circulated even while she was alive, but she vehemently denied ever speaking it. In fact, when it came to her personality, nothing could be further from the truth. Many servants reported that their queen was often “immensely amused and roared with laughter.”

In the end, King William IV held onto his promise, and Victoria turned 18 in May 1837, when he was still alive. A man of his word, William then promptly passed less than a month later, turning little Victoria into a Queen of the United Kingdom. According to Victoria herself, she found out the news while she was still in her dressing gown.

When Victoria started her reign, she was naïve and desperate for any help. She found it in the Whig prime minister Lord Melbourne, who quickly took the inexperienced queen under his wing. Childless, Melbourne saw Victoria as a kind of adoptive daughter—but their relationship also led to Queen Victoria’s first scandal.

Victoria does have one bizarre claim to fame that still exists today. Back in her day, Victoria was scandalized at the fact that when British lawyers wore their silk stockings, she could still see their leg hair sticking out of the tights. In response, she imposed a royal dress code: All barristers had to double layer their stockings.

England hadn’t had much practice with queens, so there were some very awkward moments at the beginning of Victoria’s reign. For one thing, people expected the young, unmarried woman to live with her mother, despite the fact that the two didn’t get along and, well, she was queen. So Victoria came up with a disturbing solution.

She kept the Duchess at Buckingham Palace, but relegated her to a remote, out-of-the-way apartment that she refused to visit. Ouch.

History often paints Victoria as a lovesick puppy when it comes to Albert, and while she was certainly deeply—and eventually tragically—in love, even as a young queen Victoria kept her wits about her. When Prime Minister Melbourne suggested that Victoria could get away from her controlling mother if she married the prince, Victoria dismissed it as a “shocking alternative.”

On October 1839, Prince Albert came for his second and most important visit with Victoria in England. Now, you might think the “Victorian” era is synonymous with conservative and backwards politics, but get a load of this. On October 15, 1839, Victoria was the one who proposed to him. Go get your prince, girl.

Victoria’s personal diary spared no detail when it came to her wedding night. As she writes about their union: “I NEVER, NEVER spent such an evening!!! MY DEAREST DEAREST DEAR Albert…He clasped me in his arms, & we kissed each other again & again.” The girl had it bad, and I think we can all imagine what came next.

Well, actually, we don’t have to imagine: Victoria found out she was pregnant mere weeks after her wedding. Her reaction was not what you might expect. She was actually furious, writing to her grandmother, “It is spoiling my happiness; I have always hated the idea, and I prayed God night and day for me to be left free for at least six months.” But then it got even more chilling.

In the same letter to her grandmother, Victoria confesses that if she ended up having a “nasty girl,” she would drown the babe. Um, let’s just sit down and think this one through Vicky. But keep in mind, she was in her twenties at the time, and knew the fatal risks of childbirth. Sadly, this didn’t get any better…

Astonishingly, Albert and Victoria had a whopping nine children together: Victoria, Albert, Alice, Alfred, Helena, Louise, Arthur, Leopold, and Beatrice. All of these children survived into adulthood, a huge feat for the time.

Despite having nine children, Victoria was hiding a very unlady-like secret. She absolutely detested child-rearing. Not only was she miserable about her pregnancies, not a whole lot after that pleased her. She thought newborn infants were ugly, and had a deep aversion to breastfeeding. But again: NINE CHILDREN. Can you blame her?

Victoria and Albert have an idealized relationship in history, but all was not well in paradise. Albert struggled with being a husband but not a master, and particularly clashed with Victoria’s old, beloved governess Baroness Lehzen, whom he called “The House Dragon.” Eventually, the situation reached a disturbing climax.

One day, Albert put his foot down. He accused the baroness not only of mismanagement, but also of putting his children in danger. Victoria wasn’t one to back down, and the couple had a furious argument. In the end, Victoria chose to be a submissive wife over a ruling queen, and sent Lehzen off packing. Tragically, this wasn't the last of their problems.

Victoria was always a survivor, but in 1840, this was really put to the test. In the first few months of her marriage, a pregnant Victoria was riding in a carriage to visit her mother when a mentally ill teenager named Edward Oxford shot at her twice. The queen was unharmed and authorities immediately detained Oxford…but Victoria had a target on her back.

All in all, Victoria survived a mind-blowing six assassination attempts—and by the time the second one happened in 1842, she was downright blasé about it. In May that year, John Francis aimed a pistol at her while she was driving along The Mall in London, though his gun failed and he ran away. Unfazed, Victoria came up with an ingenious plan.

The next day, Queen Victoria took the very same route again, albeit with a bigger escort, as a ploy to draw out her assailant once more. Francis took it hook, line, and sinker. He shot at her again, and was immediately taken in by the authorities. Queen Victoria: 2, Stupid Criminals: 0. This lady had balls of steel.

Victoria ruled for 63 years, an overwhelming span of time that only her great-great granddaughter Queen Elizabeth II surpassed.

When Victoria was giving birth to her eighth child and youngest son, Leopold, in 1853, she made use of a new scientific breakthrough: chloroform. She was actually so pleased with the effects of chloroform that she used it again when she gave birth to the baby of the family, her daughter Beatrice. But Victoria’s decision was super controversial.

At the time, chloroform was seen as ridiculously radical, and even medical professionals thought the queen was off her rocker to go through with it. Worst of all, the Church believed that the pains of childbirth were a woman’s “duty” to suffer through, and that Victoria was engaging in a heretical act. Did she care? Heck no.

Queen Victoria’s private diaries reveal heartbreaking truth. It’s very likely that after at least some of her many pregnancies, the queen suffered from postpartum depression. In a missive to her uncle, she called her second pregnancy “the heaviest [trial] I have ever had to endure.” To make matters worse, her husband Albert’s response was not understanding…

During Victoria’s lowest periods, Albert was not a supportive spouse. In his own letters to Victoria around this time, he complains about her moods and her lack of self-control, sneering at her crying over a “miserable trifle.” Not great, dude—though I’m glad my petty arguments haven’t been immortalized in quill and ink.

When Victoria got married, she went the very unusual route and chose to wear a white wedding dress; at the time, most people wore colorful dresses for their nuptials. Although Victoria wasn't the first person or even the first royal to wear white on her wedding day, she very much helped to popularize it as a concept, and most people credit her with the trend.

During the lowest periods of her depression, Victoria was pushed further to the brink than most people can imagine. She reportedly began to hallucinate, seeing spots on people’s eyes that would suddenly transform into worms, and soon feared she was losing her mind. Prince Albert had to take Victoria to Scotland to recover.

Sometimes Queen Victoria’s aversion to child-rearing and her undying devotion to Prince Albert was a lethal combination. In 1856, while Albert was away on a trip, the unhappy queen wrote, “All the numerous children are as nothing to me when he is away.” Unfortunately, this feeling only worsened as some of the children grew older.

By far Queen Victoria’s favorite child was her youngest, Princess Beatrice. Yet this privileged position came with chilling obligations. As the baby of the family, Victoria intended for Beatrice to never marry and instead devote her life to taking care of mommy. This made Beatrice’s betrayal sting all the more.

Prince Albert was unusually involved in his children’s lives, especially for the standards of his day. He was present for all of their births (this really blew people’s minds) and took it upon himself to play games with them while they were growing up. But don’t get too many warm and fuzzy ideas: Albert was also a big proponent of corporal punishment.

In 1884, Princess Beatrice fell in love with Prince Henry of Battenberg. Knowing that her royal mother would never accept their union, the rebellious Beatrice got engaged in secret. When Queen Victoria finally did find out, she punished her beloved daughter in no uncertain terms, refusing to speak to her for six months.

In the end, Queen Victoria agreed to “let go” of her daughter on one rigid condition: Beatrice and her husband would have to live at home so they could always attend to the queen. Having no other choice, they agreed. But as we'll see, all this was nothing compared to what Queen Victoria did to her least favorite child.

Traditionally, the Royal Family sends gifts to the Presidents of the United States as a token of their friendship. In 1880, President Rutherford B. Hayes received a particularly special gift from Victoria: A wooden desk built out of the wood from the HMS Resolute, a retired ship. US Presidents use the desk to this day.

Though very few people realized it at the time, the royal family was hiding a rotten core. Today, we know that Queen Victoria was a carrier of hemophilia, an often fatal disease that hinders blood clotting and caused many sufferers to bleed out. This sounds serious, but the personal consequences to Victoria were even more devastating.

Because of the complexities of genetics, only male haemophiliacs suffer dangerous side effects. So while Victoria’s daughters Alice and Beatrice inherited the gene, her son Leopold was most at risk when he discovered he had it, too. It led to every mother’s worst nightmare. Leopold died at the tender age of 30 after a cerebral haemorrhage. Sadly, that wasn’t all.

Victoria being the “Grandmother of Europe” sounds nice—until you remember her silent but deadly genes. Most infamously, haemophilia popped up in Victoria’s great-grandson Alexei Romanov, leading his mother to beg Rasputin to heal him. It got so bad, people began to call haemophilia “the Royal disease.” Not a great legacy—but this is where the story gets mysterious.

Strangely, none of Victoria’s ancestors, including her father the Duke of Kent, suffered from haemophilia. This means she must have been the first of her line to have it. Some historians have used this to make a scandalous claim: Victoria was an illicit love child. Her mother, the theory goes, had an affair with a haemophiliac man and passed the baby off as the Duke’s child. The truth, however, is even more bizarre.

Since most haemophiliac males don’t make it to adulthood, it’s unlikely that Victoria was the product of an affair—what probably happened cosmically bad luck. In about 30% of cases, haemophilia is a random mutation, usually when one or both parents are older. Wouldn’t you know it? Victoria’s father was over 50 when he had her.

Especially later into her reign, Queen Victoria was not afraid to show her displeasure, and there was no one who displeased her more than liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone. Victoria called him “half-crazy” and a “ridiculous old man,” while she disparaged his government as being “the worst I have ever had.”

If Beatrice was Queen Victoria’s favorite, Prince Albert’s beloved child was their firstborn, Vicky, who he praised as “very intelligent and observant.” In fact, his affection manifested in kind of creepy ways. He once gifted his wife with a brooch made out of one of Vicky’s baby teeth. Um, just stick to roses next time.

The “bedchamber crisis” of 1839 was Victoria's biggest scandal. The Whig Prime Minister resigned that year, and Victoria reluctantly invited Conservative leader Robert Peel to form a minority government. But there was a catch: Custom dictated that Victoria also had to fire her beloved ladies-in-waiting, who were married to Whigs, and hire Conservative women in their place. This is where Victoria rebelled.

In a totally unprecedented move, Victoria refused to fire her girls. And if this doesn’t seem like that big of a deal...it very much was. Peel was so offended, he actually declined the position. Of course, he had the last laugh: When he got a majority government in 1841, the queen was finally forced to toe the party line and boot out her Whig ladies.

One of the many titles Victoria held during her lifetime was Empress of India. However, despite this position, she never once visited the country.

Later in life, Queen Victoria met Indian servant Abdul Karim and soon promoted him to her personal clerk and closest confidant; his story is in the film Victoria & Abdul. This infuriated Victoria’s family, who were convinced that Karim was using her. Sadly, after Victoria passed, they dealt him a heartbreaking betrayal. They deported Karim back to India.

Over the six attempts on her life, Queen Victoria was injured once—but it was the very definition of a “flesh wound.” The likely mentally-ill officer Robert Pate once got close enough to her carriage to hit her with his cane, crushing her bonnet and giving her a light forehead bruise. To that, Victoria says: “Chump change.”

Victoria wasn’t the most popular with the Irish during her reign, who were going through that little thing we know today as the Irish Potato Famine. Despite the bad PR, the queen personally donated the equivalent of 6.5 million pounds to the relief fund. It wasn’t enough, and the Irish still sneered she was “The Famine Queen.”

One of the lesser-known firsts of Victoria’s reign is that she was the first British monarch to ever travel by train. Not only that, when she got her own royal train car, it was the first in the world to have a bathroom.

Believe it or not, no reigning British monarch had ever entered the country of Spain before 1889. This changed when Victoria, while visiting the south of France, temporarily crossed the border into Spain. Leave it to her to break a record so casually.

By January 1901, Victoria's other son Alfred had passed, and the queen felt her own end coming too; she suffered from rheumatism, and had nearly gone blind from cataracts. On January 22, the great Queen Victoria finally died at the ripe old age of 81, and at the eminently sensible time of 6:30 pm. Vicky wouldn’t have it any other way.

Queen Elizabeth II is famous for her love of corgis, but Queen Victoria had her own soft spot for pups, too. As one of Victoria’s very last wishes, attendants brought her favorite Pomeranian Turi to her deathbed to keep her company.

Although the queen’s first son Albert, or “Bertie,” was a long-awaited male heir, he proved to be Victoria’s greatest disappointment. For one thing, he wasn’t the brightest bulb in the drawer: He didn’t realize until he was 10 that he, and not his sister Vicky, would become ruler. Yet he also brought lasting tragedy to the family.

After a mediocre career as an officer, Bertie really went and broke his parents’ hearts by taking up with the—gasp—actress Nellie Clifton. Prince Albert in particular was so angered by the news of his son’s licentiousness, he traveled all the way to Cambridge where Bertie was studying to confront him. This had a bitter end.

Prince Albert was already in poor health before he traveled to chastise Bertie, but after he came back he took a turn for the worse. His chronic stomach pains—most people now believe he was suffering from Crohn’s—became fatal. He passed just weeks after the confrontation on December 14, 1861. But Victoria's troubles were just beginning.

Queen Victoria blamed Prince Albert’s demise almost entirely on her son Bertie, once even writing, “Oh! That boy... I never can or shall look at him without a shudder.” She never forgave him, and even denied him any political power or position until the day she died and he became king. Mothers: do not get on their bad side.

To say Queen Victoria took Albert’s death badly is an understatement. Aside from blaming and all but disowning her son Bertie, she sunk into a deep depression and, most infamously, wore black for the rest of her life. This last habit earned her the mournful nickname “The Widow of Windsor.” Except that was just the tip of the iceberg.

Overcome with grief,  Victoria retreated from public life. Eventually, she refused to perform all but her most essential royal duties—and the British people definitely took notice. A protester even pinned a cruel notice at Buckingham Palace that read: "These commanding premises to be let or sold in consequence of the late occupant's declining business.”

Another consequence of Queen Victoria’s extended period of mourning is something we can all relate to. While inhabiting her “Widow of Windsor” role, the grieving Victoria began emotional eating. Soon after, her size ballooned, leading to the popular myth that the always-short Victoria was now as wide as she was tall.

In the long years after the death of Prince Albert, Victoria insisted that her servants keep his rooms continually prepared, as if he was just going to walk through the doors one day. Aides always placed a bowl of hot water, for shaving purposes, on a side table, and laid out a new change of clothes on his bed.

Victoria’s lifelong mourning of Albert is notorious, but most people don't know that it extended to her own funeral. In contrast to her permanent black, Victoria requested that she wear a white dress and her wedding veil when she was laid to rest. She had waited decades to reunite with her beloved Albert, and she wanted to meet him as a renewed bride.

In 1878, Queen Victoria was due for another vicious tragedy. That year, her second-eldest daughter Princess Alice died of diphtheria when she was only 35 years old. But that wasn’t even the cruellest part. Alice had passed on December 14, the anniversary of Prince Albert’s own demise. Victoria called the coincidence “almost incredible and most mysterious.”

As twisted as her childhood was, there was a more sinister figure in the young Victoria’s life: Her mother’s confidante, Sir John Conroy. William IV nicknamed Conroy “King John” for his outsized influence, and he helped the duchess come up with Victoria’s punishing “Kensington system.” But that’s just the beginning of the nightmare.

According to palace rumors from the time, Conroy wasn’t just the Duchess of Kent’s confidante; he was also her lover. Here Victoria’s mother was preaching chastity and Christian values, but in her off-hours she might have been bonking the help. For her part, Victoria disliked both of them—and she would get her brutal revenge.

In the spring of 1861, after a lifetime of strained relations, Victoria’s mother died. When she went through the duchess’ letters, Victoria made a heartbreaking discovery. She found out that her mother had actually “loved her deeply.” This made her blame Sir John Conroy all the more for turning her mother against her during her youth.

Early on in Victoria’s rule, one of her mother’s ladies-in-waiting, Lady Flora Hastings, fell ill. Her symptoms were immediately disturbing. There was a noticeable growth in Lady Flora’s abdomen, and many whispered that she was pregnant...with Sir John Conroy's baby.  It was an instant scandal—and then the plot thickened.

Queen Victoria was all too ready to believe the gossip. After all, Conroy had made her childhood a nightmare, and Hastings had often been her strictest disciplinarian. Victoria made it clear she believed the rumors, legitimizing them even further. It got so bad, Lady Flora even agreed to submit to a medical examination. The results shocked the queen.

The doctor who ran the exam confirmed that Lady Flora was actually a virgin, making it impossible for her to be pregnant and freeing Sir John Conroy of any culpability. The "good" news immediately undid all the malicious gossip, and left Queen Victoria with a lot of egg on her face. But it was about to get so much worse.

Lady Flora passed soon after this scandal; her autopsy revealed that the “swelling” had been a massive tumor on her liver. So now Queen Victoria was responsible for tarnishing the reputation of an innocent dead woman. It turned both public opinion against her and her ally Prime Minster Melbourne; crowds even jeered that Victoria was “Mrs. Melbourne.”

When Victoria became queen, she didn’t forget about the people who helped her—and she certainly didn’t forget about the people who hurt her. The moment she accepted the crown, she did the Christian thing and used her power for revenge; she had her nemesis John Conroy “banned from her presence.” Heck yeah, Victoria.

Everybody knows today about Victoria’s love for Albert, but history tends to forget the illicit man in her life. In the 1860s, Victoria started really relying on her Scottish manservant John Brown. The press had a field day, printing “slanderous” rumors that they had a secret marriage and calling Victoria “Mrs. Brown.” But the actual evidence is more scandalous than "slanderous"…

Victoria heaped praise on Brown both publicly and privately, and when Brown passed in 1883, she devoted much of her time to writing a biography on him. Oh, never heard of it? That’s because its contents were so juicy, she destroyed them. Her private secretary read a draft and demanded she wipe it out or risk confirming the romance rumors. Oh, but that’s not all.

On the surface, Victoria’s funeral was a tribute to Albert. But in private, it was something else entirely. Though She had Albert’s dressing gown beside her, her body concealed a dirty little secret. In her left hand, carefully hidden from her children via a bouquet of flowers, Victoria clasped a lock of John Brown’s hair and a photograph of her strapping Scotsman. Vicky, you naughty girl.

Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

We are going to call my boyfriend in this Jeff. So, I've been dating Jeff for four years. I have known him since high school, but I didn't realize he was a fool until this incident. This incident happened two years ago and we were two years into our relationship. We moved into an apartment and everything was just going great…so far. Until all of a sudden, he revealed his true self to me.

After work one day, I stopped by the store to get some stuff for dinner. I had gotten very little sleep the night before, and I had accidentally locked my keys in my car. They had fallen out of my purse, or I thought I put them in my purse, I honestly don't know how I did it. I am surprised I even got to the store. My car windows were up completely, so there was no way of somehow jamming something in there to unlock it.

However, I remembered I had a spare key at the apartment, so I called Jeff to stop by the apartment on his way home from work and bring me the spare key for my car to unlock it. He was about to get off anyways, and by the time I was done shopping, he'd be off work and almost at the apartment. I thought it was going to be so simple, but it all went so wrong.

Me: hey, I accidentally locked myself out of the car, can you bring me my spare car key? Jeff:......how did you even do that? Me: I honestly don't remember, something involving my purse, can you bring me my car key please? I'll get you pop tarts. Jeff: just unlock your car. Me:....I can't, my keys are locked in the car. Jeff: no you can unlock it, just stick your hand through the window and unlock it.

Me: no I can't, my window is up. Jeff: get a coat hanger. Me: I can't, my window is COMPLETELY up, there is absolutely no way I can get anything through my window. Jeff: yes you can just stick your hand through the window and unlock it! I honestly couldn't believe I was actually having this conversation. Me: listen to me very carefully.......My window is completely rolled up, meaning there is no way for me to put my hand through the window and unlock it, there is no way to put a coat hanger through the window because the window, all the windows, are COMPLETELY rolled up!!!

Jeff: well I don't know what you want me to do about it. Me: BRING. ME. MY. SPARE. CAR. KEY. Jeff: WHY?! I honestly thought he was messing with me, but he really sounded aggravated and like I wasn't understanding him at all Me: I will tell you later, please bring me my spare car key from the apartment please. Jeff: Ok fine I don't see why you need it.

I hung up, because DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH. I go inside and get my shopping done, I see his car pull into the store’s parking lot and I head outside to meet him. That’s when I get an idea. He hands me my spare key. Me: come here Jeff Jeff: Oooo am I going to get a kiss?! ......no Me: look into my car Jeff. Jeff looks into my car Me: do you see my keys in there Jeff. Jeff: yes? Me: try to get them out Jeff.

Jeff tries to open my car door. It is locked. Jeff: I can't it's locked. Me: try to get them out without my spare car key. Jeff then proceeds to look for a window cracking. There is none. Jeff: I can't there isn't a way to stick my hand or anything in there to unlock. At this point, I am staring at Jeff. He doesn't understand why I am staring at him.

I handed him my keys and told him to show me how to get the car keys out now. His response made me want to hit myself in the head. He then unlocked the door, rolled down my window, locked the car, shut the door, and then reached his arm through the OPEN window and unlocked it. Jeff: see like that, unlock it like that! At this point, I had such a massive headache from him not understanding why it was literally impossible for me to do any of that.

I just put the groceries into my car, I got into my car and I drove home. That night at home, he asked if I was mad at him. Me:.....I wouldn't say mad.......more like.....frustrated....annoyed.....tired......baffled. Jeff: well I can understand, especially if you couldn't simply unlock your door like I showed you today. Two weeks later, we decided go to the downtown area for our date night. Before heading downtown, we had to get gas. I was waiting in his car when he rolled down his window and unlocked it from the outside by sticking his arm through THE OPEN WINDOW

Jeff: seeee like that, next time your keys are locked in your car, unlock it like that. I really thought about just getting out of the car and beating him with the bag of candy he bought me from the gas station, but I don't believe he would understand why I was beating him. He later brought it up to my mom at dinner and she also tried to explain to him why his idea wouldn't work AT ALL, but he was determined to make sense of it, when he couldn't because the WINDOW WAS ROLLED UP.

That was two years ago, I am still very much dating him to the point we are engaged now. I love him deeply, he is a good man. He just happens to be an idiot.

FinancialElephant5

Some background info: This woman I know, Shelley, is a 37-year-old with an RN degree in the Philippines. We work at an assisted living home. She was hired in November, but called out for three months before finally showing up. Which is when my company made a stunning realization. She was now heavily pregnant, something no one knew about.

Beyond that, she’s awful at her job. These are some of the things she’s done: A resident was prescribed a sublingual medication, because they were unable to swallow. Shelley nearly gave the medication with applesauce. For anyone who doesn’t know, sublingual means it needs to be absorbed under the tongue. Which you are taught very thoroughly in our certification classes.

A swallowed dosage means the resident could have received a way higher dosage or a much much lower one. A medication error like that could mean extreme pain or worse. Also, some medications need to be refrigerated. We have three fridges that are all labeled with very large signs. She put the medication in the specimen fridge, where we had urine samples.

She then left it there for days without telling anyone, and did not give it to the resident like she was supposed to. And that wasn’t even the worst. A resident of mine had pancreatic cancer. She and I were talking about the female resident’s state when Shelley asked if the resident was lying about her condition. Given that we had a doctor’s diagnosis and scans to prove it, I said no.

She said, “But only men have a pancreas, how can she have that cancer?” She was thinking of the prostate, a completely different thing. Another one: A resident has Fentanyl patches that are to be changed every 72 hours. Shelley had been throwing the used patches in the regular trash cans. Fentanyl patches come with express warnings to avoid dumping them in the trash.

If a dog, kid, or bunny were to come across it, they will die if they chew on it or even stick it on themselves. It’s written all over the box, on our documentation sheet, and even on a sign in the residents’ room. We have a lot of dogs in the facility and disoriented individuals, and trashes are often left unattended. Last but certainly not least…

A resident has four eye drops that are required to be given over the course of 20-45 minutes to ensure their effectiveness. The resident has a camera in her room to ensure this time elapses. The family came in very upset this last week, because Shelley kept going into her room for one eye drop, and never going back to administer the others at any point.

When she was confronted by the family and the Director, she said she did go back in for the eye drops. Despite nonstop video showing that she never went back in and the resident never left. She still insists that she went back in and that the video is “lying".

Aavoldie

I lived in a fraternity, and Jim was my roommate. To be fair, Jim is brilliant with anything related to computers. To be equally fair, Jim is brilliant with absolutely nothing else. Jim has decided that the five desktop computers he has somehow fit under his twin bed are no longer sufficient. Jim decides to custom-build a monstrosity of a computer to replace the desktops.

While I was gone at class, Jim has decided that there is not enough space in our room for the ogre he is building, so he moves MY bed out into the hallway. Jim is gone at the computer store when I get back and see this. But I got my revenge. I return the favor by moving my bed back in and his bed out to the front yard. A fraternity brother is taking a nap on it when Jim returns and pitches a fit.

He keeps tripping the circuit breaker. His computer is drawing way more current than it was designed for. Jim tries to solve this problem by placing a gas generator precariously on the window sill and plugging into that. This works until a variety of bugs and one very confused squirrel attempt to make our room their new home. I tell Jim the generator has got to go, which of course results in him pitching a new fit. Then he does something truly idiotic. 

Jim has hired an electrician to install a new circuit for our room for his computer. It is winter, and the average temperature outside is in the negatives. Our room requires no heater. The computer is so large and energy-intensive that if we DON'T open up the window with the snow outside, the room turns into a sauna. Our fraternity rents our internet from the university.

I'm on door duty. The IT guy knocks on the door. He tells me that he thinks there is either an error or a hardware malfunction, as it shows our single house is consuming a substantial portion of the entire university's bandwidth. I show him to the router box. He confirms that there is no error. Our house is indeed consuming a large amount of data.

He tells me I have 72 hours to solve this problem or the university will both throttle our speed way down and put a cap on overall data. I head straight to Jim. He is trying to argue that the billion files he is downloading are encrypted, so IT has no idea what the data is. It takes a while for Jim to understand that IT doesn't care what he is downloading, but that if he continues this behavior there will be NO internet for him or anyone else in the house.

Jim now works for NASA.

Kazbob48

About a month and a half ago, my boyfriend came to visit me at school. He was there for lunch, too, and somehow carrots were brought up, so he said, “Oh, I’m allergic to carrots". My friend right next to us then piped in with: “What do they put in carrots that you’re allergic to?” It still gets brought up to this day; he’ll never live it down.

lookingforpeyton

I have this friend who is basically nice but very dumb and often says things that make me cringe hard. Here is a sample convo: Me: I made my son mussels marinara for dinner. Him: Ewwww, seafood. It makes me gag. Me: Hey, the kid likes it. Tonight I'm going to make pasta salad. What would be a good ingredient to toss in? Him: How about tuna?

Me: I thought you didn't like seafood. Him: Tuna isn't seafood. Me: WHAT?!? Him: It comes in a can. How can it be seafood? Me: It's literally called tuna fish, dude. FISH means SEAFOOD. (At this point, it must be noted that he is a department manager in a grocery store, which boggles my mind) Him: Oh. Well, maybe you're right. He is just another dupe, taken in by the Chicken of the Sea propaganda campaign.

PhasmaUrbomach

So, I didn't know this person very well, but was assured by friends she was exactly your typical description of a bimbo. I soon found out how stupid she really was. One night I got to meet her. We were going to eat some fast food before going out, and she joined us for the meal. I must explain, that in French, French fries are "patates frites" (fried potatoes) but that we usually only call them "frites" (fried/fries).

So we were all eating our burgers, fries, or poutine when she ponders: "I really wonder what fries are made of? Flour?"

a_dozen_of_eggs

This woman works in HR. Why is it that no matter where I work, HR is the most clueless person in the company? I work at a privately owned company of ~300 people.

The day after a company-wide meeting on not opening spam emails and reporting suspicious behavior, she sent an email with the subject "Look what you did!!!" to the entire company, in reference to the donation we made to a charity when we paid a dollar each for a special jeans day. Tons of people reported the email to IT thinking she got hacked.

At like 11 o'clock last night, she sent out an email to everyone in the office with the subject "OMG, Jason?!" because she was in a meeting way earlier that day where a JSON file was talked about for like a minute. JSON is a file format that programmers use, and for some reason she read up on it and emailed a bunch of us in her confusion.

No one in the office is named Jason. I just talked to our CTO and several people have already verbally asked him if it's a spam email or just this lady being herself.

MayorSotch

I worked with a clueless guy. Nicest guy, few eggs short of a flock. He was consistently late for meetings. Like, 20 minutes late for client-facing discussions. We eventually figured out the ridiculous reason. It was that when the (British) project manager said “half-past-ten” or “half-nine,”  he understood it as 10:50 or 8:50. He would interrupt to say, "Hey, you guys started without me!"

He was denied our health insurance bonus ($250 gift card if you get a physical and are deemed healthy), because he was a smoker. "I'm not a smoker," he said...with a pack in his hand! This led to a discussion about how it wasn't bad for your health. Our company dealt with a lot of asthma clients.

He would miss, on average, about four workdays a month. One time, we called to see where he was. His response boggled my mind. "Oh, I forgot it was a workday". It was Tuesday. He had been at work the day before. He once locked himself out of the office nine times in a week. He worked four days that week. His back hurt, so he took his wallet out of his pocket, which had his card key in it, so he was locked out after a smoke break.

This happened, on average, more than twice a day. For a week. He was a diabetic and went into a diabetic coma on the way to work one day. He was hospitalized for a week, and thankfully recovered. We asked why he hadn't taken his insulin; he said "Well Big Pharma is just trying to keep you sick, you know?" We work at a pharma company.

I was hired later, so I was salaried and he was hourly. I was mad that he got paid about $400 a week more for taking on-calls, which is something I had to do anyway. He was mad that I could, according to him, "leave early and still get paid". He managed to talk himself into salary, and out of $400 every third week for doing the same amount of work.

He was a sovereign citizen and believed that accepting a social security number made you “government property,” and tried to not get a birth certificate or social security number for his children. I asked him how having an SSN had negatively affected his life, and he couldn't identify much besides "Well the government owns you!" At the time, he hadn't been fired because we were short-staffed.

He was actually OK at his job, aside from the reliability issues. Eventually, he was let go when we got our staffing situation figured out. I eventually moved on to another role, and he asked me to pull some strings at my company, and get him a job referral. I told him that, unfortunately, we weren't hiring, because I absolutely didn't want to vouch for a guy who was late so often he had to check in with the office manager when he did show up.

He also fell for an iTunes gift card tax scam to the tune of $5,000. His wife was a tax accountant and he didn't think to consult her. If he received an email with an attachment, he would print the attachment, scan it, and then email from the all-in-one printer. This, of course, removed the attachment from context and removed all the info attached to the email.

If a document was super-urgent and he was worried someone might not get it, he would print out a copy and put it on the person's keyboard. He did this a few times. It had the worst possible outcomes. He did this once when the affected party was on maternity leave for 12 weeks, and for me, when I was in Europe on business for three weeks.

He printed something out and put it on my desk instead of forwarding me the email "...to be sure I got it quickly".

persondude27

My next-door neighbors have two pitbulls. They are super cute and are giant teddy bears…well, that is until you try to come on my porch or their porch and they don’t know you. If that's the case, they will stand there barking their heads off but ultimately they do nothing. All bark no bite so to speak. So I was outside getting ready to start shoveling snow.

My husband was gathering the garbage to take out and then he would be out to help. So I was shoveling what I could while waiting for him. The dogs were out on their porch for a bit and I was talking to them. Saying their names “Duke” and “Princess". Some guy who does not live in the neighborhood was out for a walk, I guess. He stopped and asked me why I called them that.

I said it's their names. He said, “Yes, but why did you name them that?” I explained that they are not my dogs, and that they are my neighbors’ dogs. That I just know their names from speaking to my neighbors. At that point, I started trying to look busy while cursing my husband under my breath for taking so long. I am nervous about talking to strangers generally.

I glanced up and the man is still standing there just looking at the dogs. I said, “They just bark, they can't get out and even if they did, they are harmless. You’re fine". The man said, “Well this is just so ridiculous". He pauses and I try to ignore. After a few seconds he said, “Who the heck would name a pit bull Princess?” I sighed and said, “Why not?”

At this point, I was thinking he was going to be one of those pit bull-hating people who found it stupid that anyone would give it a nice name. But what he actually said still haunts me. This grown man looked at me and said, “But Princess is a girl’s name". I was confused and said, “Yeah....she's a girl". Then, again, this full-grown man looked at me and laughed.

Not a quick haha kind of laugh. Like a 30 or 40 second long laugh, then said: "Pit bulls can't be girls". I just said “Um what?” He repeated this. I said, “How do you think pitbull puppies get made? This man told me breeds weren't made. Two random dogs had babies and their breed was assigned depending on things like gender, muscle mass, and other physical and personality characteristics.

Pit bulls, Dobermans, Rottweilers, Labs, retrievers, and some others are always boy dogs. Pomeranians, Poodles, Yorkies, and other small dogs were females. This man seemed to be older than me so I'm guessing 50s. He seemed put together…but this man thinks a bunch of breeds are only male and another bunch are female.

I then ask him to explain cross breeds like Labradoodles and Puggles. He looked at me like my hair was on fire. At that point, I quit. I went inside and told my husband a crazy man is outside and we should just stay in for a bit.

Meowow912

Frank was a senior in high school and was assigned to do a report on an animal local to our area. The area being a small town in Canada in Ontario that borders with Buffalo, NY. Fast forward two weeks when the reports were returned to the class. He was sad to see he received a grade of F. He said that he put a lot of effort into it and couldn't understand why he got such a bad grade.

I asked him to see his report to see if I could figure out what may have happened. What animal local to Southern Ontario did he choose to do his report on? A friggin giraffe! I was laughing and confused about how he could pick a giraffe as a local animal when I got his answer. He had seen one just the other day while driving! Realizing where the story was going, I stifled laughter as I explained to him that yes he saw a giraffe, but it was at the small local zoo.

15 years later and I still don't think he realizes why he failed that project. Frank was the kind of guy who would try to save a fish from drowning.

axe154

I had helped this woman, my sort-of friend, set up a computer about two weeks earlier. I was naturally surprised when she called stating her computer wasn’t working. I thought about it, trying to figure out what may have gone wrong in my installation. I asked a few questions just to get a general sense of what happened. After a lot of question-asking, I decide to just go over and take a look.

When I arrive, she opens the door. Her: You need to fix my computer. Me: That’s what I’m here for. Her: You ruined it so it’s all your fault. Me: Ok? I go over to the desk where I had set the computer up. I instantly notice what’s wrong. The actual tower is missing. Confused, I look around. Me: Where did the tower go? Her: The what? Me: The big box that was sitting down here?

Her: OH, I threw that away. It took up too much space. At first, I was confused that she had thrown the actual computer away. All she had was the monitor, mouse, and keyboard (which were not plugged in). I simply let out a chuckle and explained to her that without the “box,” her computer wouldn’t work. It took a while to convince her, since her (also idiot) brother had messed up her understanding of technology.

Luckily, the tower was still sitting outside her kitchen, and after cleaning it up a bit, it was up and running. I returned home shortly.

Rand0mGlitch

I went to college in Central NY where my school was situated on the banks of Lake Ontario. For those not from the US, it’s one of the Great Lakes and is between the US and Canada. As for the “great” part, it’s huge—approximately 50 miles between the countries at its widest. Thus standing at the bank where my school is, you cannot see the other side.

My mother and my aunt drove me to campus on move in day. Having never been to the school before, I directed my aunt to drive the long way along the edge of campus so we could get a good look at the lake. The view was impressive. The following conversation however, reminded me solidly why I needed college and to move far away from my hometown and my idiot family.

Mom: “What’s that river?” Me: “That’s LAKE Ontario, mom". (?!?) Aunt: “I wonder if you’ll see whales". Me: (joking) “I don’t think they come this far inland". Aunt: “What if I got you a good pair of binoculars?” Me: “If you can find a pair that can see the Atlantic from here, I’m gonna be really impressed". Cue several minutes of explanation about giant lakes and the fact that a whale wouldn’t survive swimming up a freshwater river all that way even if it was large enough to accommodate a whale.

CirrusMoth

I worked this one woman. Technically, she was well-educated with a master’s degree. But some of the things she said were...interesting. Sitting in the office, we’re all typing away getting on with things. Out of the blue, she says, “Guys, imagine we were in the war". I’m confused. “What do you mean?” Her: “Like, we are as we are right now, working at our desks, typing away, but it’s WWII and stuff is going off outside".

I’m even more confused. “So working on our computers during WWII?” She, enthusiastically mistaking my confusion for understanding: “Yes! Can you imagine?!” Me: “There weren’t computers like this then". Her: “Um, yes, computers were invented when electricity was invented in the early 1600s. Keep up". I’m completely dumbfounded.

Bonus story: We’re all at an outdoor bar having afternoon drinks. She suddenly screams and ducks. We all look around and she shouts, “Did you guys not see that giant seagull dive at me?!” Patiently as I could, I say, “Um, a seagull didn’t dive at you. A bumblebee flew past you". Her response? “Oh yeah, I always get those two mixed up".

disco-pandas

I worked with this guy at a pizza shop in high school. Super nice dude, funny, but the man was dumb as rocks—which in part contributed to why he was funny I guess. One afternoon, we are in the middle afternoon lull of the day. So a couple of us go outside to smoke. Our boss comes out and as always, he tries to give fatherly advice. Sees us all puffing and goes, “I don’t know why you guys do that, it’s terrible for you".

This idiot of ours goes, “Nah man, it’s totally good for you". We all think he’s making a funny retort to try and deflect the obvious critique from our boss. So we all laugh a little. No fooling, this kid hears our laugh and goes, “No. I’m serious. It’s good for your bones. They have like some sort of calcium in them..."The boy was so serious. Took probably three weeks of us bringing in research and medical books to show that it's not good for your bones.

Hoping he’s okay out there in the big wide world. Bless his soul.

KatnissEverBeans

So this woman is a peculiar breed. She appears to have been involved in a freak accident that removed all common sense and basic understanding from her mind. What makes her stand out from the crowd is her ability to maintain her opinion even in the face of irrefutable evidence. Here are some of her best: First up, Ireland is a myth.

She believes Ireland is made up and a conspiracy theory because “potatoes come from the store, not disgusting mud". She is British and we both live in Britain, however I am Irish. I showed her my Irish passport and photos of me in Ireland yet she still thinks it’s photoshopped?? That's just the tip of the iceberg with her. Three months ago I caught her crying and I asked her what’s wrong.

She said she didn’t have long to live. I obviously asked her to elaborate and she said, “She was giving herself a tattoo with a highlighter and a needle and was told she would get ink poisoning". She ended up going home and writing a will on her Instagram story. She lived. She also had a huge crush on a guy we both knew. She decided to ask him out because, hey, she deserves love too.

She decided to message him on Instagram so if it backfired she could “say her friend sent the message,” her words not mine. She accidentally found the wrong account of a guy with the same name. A married guy. She refuses to accept it was the wrong person and messaged them every day until she was blocked. She is terrified that if there is a nuclear conflict, the wind might blow the missile the wrong way and “hit us".

She refuses to believe that London is in the southeast of England because “when she went there the satnav pointed forwards". She believes Northern Ireland shares a border with England and when shown proof she proclaimed the maps are all drawn wrong. She doesn’t know what a birth certificate is and says she never got one.

She greeted a French exchange student with bad German and shouted, “Speak English or find a new job” in France at a French ice cream man. She is a vegetarian, or so she says, but allows herself to eat pork, chicken, and beef as “they don’t count". I don’t know what counts. She laughed at me when I said gelatine is from cows and is in gummies and said that “gummies come from factories, dummy!”

She also doesn’t realize cows live after being milked and assumed they cut the cow open and there was just a bit of it called milk.

--username-is-taken

This guy is also not the brightest when it comes to technology. I learned this after this experience. A couple of days ago, the guy messaged me asking why he didn’t receive a “forgotten password” email. I ask him some questions such as “did you send the email to the right account?” just trying to help out. His response went something like this:

“Well, I signed up with my Google account and did the steps. Then it sent an email, but since I used my google account, not my email account, I can’t change my password". I was confused at first, and then realized what was going on. He doesn’t know that Gmail is a PART of Google. He had made a separate account for EVERY different service google has to offer.

The reason he wasn’t receiving an email was because he was waiting for an email on an entirely DIFFERENT account. I tried to explain to him that’s not how it worked, yet he insisted he was right. His argument was literally: “The ‘G’ in Gmail doesn’t stand for Google, it stands for global. You should know this since your dad’s an IT". I just hung up and contemplated life.

Rand0mGlitch

This woman could only be described as a story topper. She has a requirement, nay, a compulsion to turn the conversation back to herself when the spotlight shines on someone else. This narcissistic quality means that it’s almost comedic to see how far she’ll dig herself to gain attention. If you’re telling a story about saving a cat from a tree, she’ll say she’s done it too but also broke her arm while doing so.

Don’t ask where her cast is, it healed really fast. Recently, a friend of hers was describing her rather cancer-friendly family tree. With her history, she has more knowledge of it than the regular person and was telling the group about it. But this woman wasn’t having that of course. Below is a paraphrased conversation. Her: I’ve had cancer. Friend: Oh that’s unfortunate, what type?

Her: (stuttering) The doctor called me over the phone and told me it was some kind of bone cancer. Friend: Wow, that serious! What kind of chemo did you go through? Her: Oh it only lasted a few months, I took radiation pills. Friend: Right...So after contracting one of the worst cancers out there, she conveniently managed to beat it with pills that would probably give her more cancer…if they even existed in the first place.

She’s a medical marvel.

ButtontheBunny

So a few co-workers in a different department than mine were talking together, and one brings up how there is already snow in Idaho. One of them shows the other a photo on their phone and says "I can't believe there's already snow in Idaho. It's October!" Now, this fool is within earshot of this conversation and decides to chime in. He reveals the strangest detail".

But it's not October in Idaho yet..." The other two are just flabbergasted and it takes them a moment to process what they just heard before they can tell him how wrong he is.

VotekRacing

This guy a good, sweet dude. He'll give you the shirt off his back without thinking twice, but this dude isn't the sharpest tool in the shed. In fact, if he was an axe, he'd be so dull and blunt of an axe that you'd mistake him for a sledgehammer. In any case, I have to frequently remind myself how much of a good guy he is because the stuff he says and does is beyond frustrating.

I bet that a few hours spent with him could get even the enlightened Lord Buddha to break into a meltdown. All those years of meditation it took to reach nirvana down the drain...He needs to take out his driver’s license whenever someone asks for his date of birth and he will STILL mess it up. “It’s the 4th of the 16th month of 1993.. so that's April 4, 1993 right?"

Usually the other person just loses their patience and asks, "Sir, just read me the individual numbers from left to right". He has never eaten Chinese food. There is nothing wrong with that, but whatever was going on in his brain is clearly wrong. I was thinking about ordering some Chinese food, so I asked him what he wants. He tells me he doesn't like Chinese food because it's too spicy.

So I was like ok, I'll get some noodles and some beef or chicken that's not too spicy. I start naming your common Chinese takeout dishes, and he has no idea what I’m talking about. I get nothing but a glassy-eyed gaze from him. I ask him what he ate last time that was so spicy. The dude starts naming some Indian food dishes. Kebobs, biryani, and stuff.

I was like, that's not Chinese food, that's Indian cuisine. He's not having any of it and a little argument breaks out. Turns out that the Indian restaurant is in Chinatown so it's gotta be Chinese food according to him. He then calls a mutual friend he went to that restaurant with and puts him on speakerphone and asks him to tell me that yes, in fact he has had Chinese food and that definitely was a Chinese restaurant.

The mutual friend completely loses it and starts laughing like a psycho while trying to explain to him that just because a restaurant is in Chinatown does not mean it can only have Chinese food. I lose it too. His face turns all red in anger and I could swear I saw his head swelling up ready to pop. He drives for Uber and so do I, as we both try to make our way in life.

Now, Uber deposits your earnings into your bank account automatically at the end of the week. If you want your earnings before that, you can instantly cash out. Uber takes a 50 cent fee for instant cash out. This guy shows me that he has $1.83 in his earnings and asks me how much will uber take if he cashes out right now. I tell him 50 cents, so if he does cash out right now he will have $1.33 deposited in his account.

He says, "Oh my god that's almost half my money! Tomorrow I’m planning to make 50 dollars so I'll cash out then so Uber will only take like 10 dollars and give me 40 dollars! Uber is so greedy. If I cash out now they take half of my money but cashing out tomorrow, I only have to give way less than half of 50 dollars!" At this point, my natural instinct is to educate the fool but I know that if I attempt to do so, I'm entering into a world of hurt.

I give it a shot. I tell him that no, no matter how much money he has in his earnings, Uber will only take 50 cents for each cash out. If he cashes out now, Uber takes 50 cents from 1.83 to give him 1.33. If he cashes out tomorrow with 50 dollars, uber will take the same 50 cents from his 50 dollars and give him $49.50. Anyway, I try a little while longer, but he can't get beyond Uber taking half of his money if he cashes out right now.

One day, he and I are talking about dental hygiene. We both agree that brushing after every meal is a good idea and it works well to prevent cavities. Flossing? Yes flossing is a good idea too. So far so good, but then I pull out my bottle of mouthwash. This is where it all falls apart. I tell him mouthwash is good too, it helps bad breath and all the germs in your whole mouth, especially the parts where we don't usually brush.

He’s is like, "No way, someone said to do mouthwash but I don't do it! I never do it because it's just a way for the dentists to make more money! It has chemicals and stuff in it that messes up your teeth and helps the germs to make even bigger cavities, rotting your teeth! They want you to mess up your teeth so you can go back to them and give them your money!"

At this point, I'm flabbergasted, and I ask him where he got that idea from? I show him my mouthwash bottle and how it says it's antiseptic.....but nope, he’s not having any of it. He's full of confidence that he knows it's a conspiracy for them to get our money and all that antiseptic and prevents gum disease stuff on the bottle is a lie! Never use mouthwash because it destroys teeth! But I knew how to get him.

Now I'm like ok so what about toothpaste? Look, this toothpaste says whitening and that it's anti-cavity. If the dentists and all these companies want to mess up our teeth, then they would put tooth harming chemicals in our toothpaste too? If we can't trust the mouthwash then how are we supposed to trust the toothpaste? Look the toothpaste and my mouthwash are both made by Colgate!  It's the same company!

He then takes the tube of toothpaste and starts reading it. I can see like maybe two brain cells light up. About 10 seconds later he has a eureka moment. I swear to all that is holy that he then said, "Look here! it says made for sensitive teeth which means they didn't put evil chemicals in it and right over here it says Extra Fresh! Which means they only use the most natural and the most freshest ingredients to make this! So it's totally natural and good for your teeth, unlike that lying mouthwash".

I then as him what if the toothpaste label is lying like the mouthwash label is lying? He tells me that I don't understand what he knows and that I should trust him about this. Ok.... He is also an automobile "expert". He popped the hood of his car that was running and sprayed WD-40 all over the engine. He read somewhere that WD-40 is good at cleaning grease so he decided to empty like two whole cans of WD-40 all over everything while the car was running. It ended exactly the way you think it would.

A few minutes later, lots of hot, black smoke started coming out from in there and he freaked out. Did he quickly take the key out of the ignition and turn the running car off?... Nope. He ran inside the building, filled a big bucket with water in the bathroom, ran down three flights of steps with that heavy bucket of water, and then poured all that water all over the car's engine.

I guess it kinda worked, the smoke definitely stopped. The car also stopped running. In fact, you can't turn the car on now. Turn the key in the ignition? Nothing, no engine sounds, no clicking sounds, nothing. Maybe it needs a jump? Nope nothing again, battery is fine. It's been a few months now and that car is sitting right outside in the same place getting all rotten and rusty.

I told him to save a little money and have a mechanic check it out. Nope, he doesn't want to do that because mechanics fix one thing but mess up your car more so that it breaks down again after a few months and you’re forced to pay that same mechanic more money. That's alright though, because he is confident he can fix it himself. This also went horribly. 

Because he is so confident he can fix his own car, he walked into an AutoZone and asked an employee to give him the tools that are for fixing cars. "What specific kind of tools, sir?" "All the tools that are used by mechanics to fix cars when they are not working!" He walked out of there with no tools but he was definitely angry that AutoZone was messing with him. They just want his money.

A few months ago, he went to visit his uncle in another country. Before he left, he asked me what kind of gift he should get for his uncle? I replied with the usual, you know stuff like clothes, perfume, wallets, or some electronic device. He, says what about a gun? I could buy him a nice one! I'm like what the heck?? ..... OK, say you get one for him, how do you plan on taking it with you to give to him?

You know, since you're getting on an airplane to travel there? He says no problem. It's safe in a holster and I'll also have a permit to show to the airplane people. After hearing this, I was like WHAT THE HECK? You can't do that! You are gonna get tackled to the ground. Best case scenario, they are gonna ban you from stepping foot inside an airplane, any airplane ever again!

YOU CRAZY?! How do you not know this? He just brushed it off. Oh, and: He and I went to Walmart to buy cleaning supplies for our apartment. We go stand in the checkout line and he whispers into my ear, "Hey that chocolate, is that a Snickers? Can you pick one up for me?" I tell him to pick it up himself because he’s literally standing right next to it.

He whispers again, telling me to do it. I’m like whatever and I pick it up and put it next to our stuff. He then says that the Snickers should be next to me or that I should hold it. At this point, I’m like do you want the Snickers or not?! Why are you whispering in my ear? What's wrong with putting the Snickers bar right next to the other stuff are buying?!

Apparently, he was afraid that the people around him wouldn't view him as the masculine tough guy he thinks he is if they found out that the Snickers is for him. I pick up the candy bar and loudly say mmmmm I love Snickers and this is for me! His face turns red and once again I swear his head size was swelling up. He thinks he knows geography. He will say dumb stuff like "Florida is north south of New York" "Chicago and Atlanta are touching but Chicago is left".

He is also guilty of the classic "Girls pee from the butt". The first time I thought he was joking, the tenth time not so much. He refuses to believe otherwise because he's very "Knowledgeable about human autonomy". Sometimes I wish he wasn't such a nice, sweet guy so that I could flip my wig and call him an idiot. Because that’s what he is.

SuckKarmaAndSuckYou

I was on a yoga retreat two years ago when I met a girl named Autumn. She was the kind of girl who is Instagram fit, owns healing crystals, and goes to Coachella. Very much a free spirit, flitting her way through life. On the first night of the retreat, the group dinner was a vegan version of a Malaysian curry that is traditionally made with chicken.

Upon hearing this, Autumn announced to the table, "I don't eat chicken. The way chickens are farmed in the US is cruel and barbaric. They're kept in cages". The table: *collective shrug* Ok, fair enough. Autumn: I'll eat hens though! The table: *collective head scratching* But hens are chickens. Autumn: No they're not! They're totally different animals.

The table: Male chickens are called roosters, and female chickens are hens. At the end of the day they're still all CHICKENS. Autumn: No, chickens were invented by the U.S. government. Chickens aren't real animals because corporate farming has perverted them. The table: *crickets chirping* Autumn: But I'll eat chickens when I visit third world countries, because they're well treated there.

No amount of explaining or arguing could convince her that hens are in fact, chickens. Or that chickens are real animals. Talking to her was like repeatedly running into a brick wall. Eventually, we all gave up and went to bed.

WatchGirlfriend

When I was in eighth grade, my teacher struggled mightily to convince a girl that bees are pretty much normal insects, but when they sting you, they’re injecting a toxin that hurts as defense mechanism. The girl did not believe her. Instead, she thought that bees buzzed because they obviously contained electricity and the sting was therefore actually an electric shock.

In college, there was this girl, Kristy, who was part of my friend group but I didn't really know her. She seemed nice but apparently somewhat lacking in the common sense department. One time we were hanging out with our friend who was an Italian exchange student, Dee. She was texting one of her friends in Italy and for some reason I don't remember, and the girl asked to see the messages.

I tuned into the conversation just to see absolute shock and confusion on Kristy’s face and she said, "Wait, why do you write to him in Italian?!?!" We were all there like, ok what is going on here? Dee explained that as she was Italian and her friend was Italian, that's just how they communicate because...in Italy people tend to speak Italian. I can never forget this girl’s response.

Kristy then comes out with, "I don't get it. You speak English, so surely it's easier for you to speak to him in English, rather than translate everything to Italian???" And here's the kicker: "Do you understand everything he says to you even though it's not in English? Wow, that's amazing". Bear in mind she wasn't being one of those "You're in {insert country here} so you should speak {language}" people.

She genuinely didn't understand and she was trying but eventually just gave up like, "This is so confusing, I don't get this at all". I still can't believe this conversation actually happened, or how it happened but there we are.

Permalink

This guy, Dave, had an employment history that was rather sparse and spotty, but our good-hearted supervisor decided to give him a chance. Dave was given a schedule that he found confusing even though it was the same every week. He frequently called in, and was puzzled as to why that would be a problem. On one occasion, he agreed to cover another employee's shift, then failed to show up.

When reached at home, he at first denied having agreed to work. When it was pointed out that he had signed off on the schedule change, he suddenly remembered. But his explanation for why he couldn't come in made my head explode. He just said, "Oh right, well, I've been drinking so I can't come it". He was very surprised when he received a write-up for this incident, because, after all, he'd only agreed as a favor to the other employee and it wasn't fair that he should be blamed.

Part-time employees, like Dave, were eligible for paid vacation after one year. Within his first few weeks of being an employee, Dave began putting in vacation requests for the immediate future. He could not understand why these requests were denied. Upon noticing that the scheduler would write VACATION across the posted schedule when an employee had (approved) time off, he tried writing it in himself, apparently thinking no one would notice.

This was not successful. Dave once tried to call in with the explanation that his neighbor had had to go to work so Dave had promised to wait for the refrigerator repairman on his behalf. Dave was told this was not a valid excuse and if he wanted to have a job he would have to come in. This was a very progressive workplace, so when Dave requested to wear make-up and women's clothing, he was treated respectfully and told he could dress as he wished as long as his clothing did not interfere with actual job duties.

This was a serious request, and was treated as one. We had an employee who advertised her services as a lesbian dominatrix. We had no problems with non-traditional sexuality. However, he asked if he could wear dresses. We worked with dogs, and the job was quite physical, and it was explained that a dress would not be practical. Shorts, capris, split skirts—all these were suggested alternatives.

He then asked if he could wear high heels. No, Dave, you cannot walk the dogs in high heels. Meanwhile, another employee abruptly stopped showing up for work. We were not particularly surprised, given that she had been warned about her attendance, but it did leave us short-handed. It broke Dave's heart to see us all working so hard, and he went to the supervisor and told her he knew where the employee lived, and he'd be glad to go talk to her and try to get her to come back to work.

The supervisor said, "Dave, we don't want her back. She's not shown up in nearly a week. She doesn't have a job anymore". Dave was stunned. "You mean—you can get fired for that?" The supervisor said that was the moment she knew Dave was hopeless. "Yes, Dave, you can get fired for not showing up for work". A few days later, Dave, despite many warnings as to what would happen, called in yet again.

When he turned up the next day, the supervisor met him at the door and informed him he was fired. He did the "Oh, you" wave, laughed, and walked right past her. She actually had to chase him after him—through a lobby filled with clients—and tell him she was serious and he needed to leave the property. I’m still not sure he got the point of it today.

scream-and-gobble

So I’ve had a friend since college who’s a great guy. I love him to pieces, but I’ve occasionally considered ending the friendship because his wife, Lucy, is so jarringly dumb. For the life of me, I do not know what he gets from her. Ok, I do, she’s one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen in real life. But even still, I don’t know how he does it. She’s sweet, she means well, but there are sandwiches more intellectually stimulating.

A while back I had a friend visiting, Camden, and Lucy was dropping her kids by to hang out with mine. I invited her to stay for a bite to eat because yes she’s exquisitely dumb, but she’s perfectly friendly. Camden’s been trying to break into acting and he recently had a bit part on a TV medical drama. So I brought it up, saying, “Camden just recently had a small role as a doctor on this show".

Lucy went “Ahhh, that’s so exciting! Congratulations! That must not be easy, to get a job there. So, what kind of doctor are you?” And he explained, “Oh, it was a very minor role, I didn’t get a speciality or anything, I didn’t even get a name". Oh my god, her reply nearly ended me. She laughed and went, “Well, we all feel that way when we first start, regardless of what job. Just keep working hard, and you’ll get all that stuff over time. But don’t sell yourself short! It’s not easy to be a doctor".

He took the compliment and went into how he went about playing the role, the body language he tried to adopt for the intensive care unit, that sort of stuff. Then she cut him off and went, “Actually, you know what, if you wouldn’t mind, my son has actually had this oblong cyst developing on the small of his back for a couple weeks now. I’d really appreciate if you could take a look".

So we both laughed, thinking she was joking, and I was impressed with her uncharacteristically high-level joke. But then she actually started to call her son over. It’s just like her to start a funny joke and then take it way too far. It took us too long to realize what was happening. Camden, confused and weirded out by the whole thing, started saying, “Oh, no, uh... heh... they didn’t teach us any medical stuff for the part. I can’t, like, help you with this".

I jumped in and changed the subject, but she left shortly after. I’d long since given up on trying to explain to her why some jokes are funny and others are not, so I thought I’d let it be, even though she seemed kind of miffed when she left. Later she came back to pick her kids up, and by then Camden had gone home. As she was leaving she remarked, “You know, it was very rude of your friend not to at least look at my son’s cyst. It would have taken him, like, ten seconds. I hate how doctors think they’re above helping anyone unless they’re getting a check. Didn’t they take an oath to always help anyone who needs medical advice or something?”

So, as I processed the pure bitterness in her voice, I realized she genuinely and truly thought Camden was a medical doctor. Convinced I must be misunderstanding her, I further reiterated, “No, no, he’s an actor. He played a doctor. On that show. You’ve seen the show". (It’s not a small production, it’s like Grey’s Anatomy or House, everyone knows of it.) And, even angrier now, she said, “Of course I have, I know all about it. It’s one of the best hospitals in the country, why do you think they put it on TV? Being in the spotlight like that, you’d think he’d try and be a little more professional with people. That’s all I’m saying".

The surreal mix of entitlement and delusion in her statement left me dumbstruck and I decided I must still be misinterpreting this somehow, because there was no way any grown adult who votes, drives, works, and has kids of her own is that stupid, not even her, so I just let her leave rather than risk offending her further or embarrassing myself.

As soon as she was gone I called my friend, her husband, to try and catch him before she was home. I relayed the whole series of events to him. His answer made me beyond annoyed. “Oh that. Yeah, it’s a problem. But it’s not entirely her fault. Often times those shows use stories ripped from the headlines of the actual news, you know? So you can see why she gets mixed up sometimes".

She bumped into Camden at my anniversary party not too long later and asked him, with genuine concern, if a character on the show who’d been in an accident—again, on the show—was recovering well. He tried telling her in plainer terms, “I don’t...work there. I’m not a doctor. I just played one that one time". And she said she was so sorry to hear he’d been let go, and where was he working now?

So, if you wonder how our country ended up where we are, know that she has a bachelor’s degree from an accredited college and holds a job with several subordinates and partial responsibility over our city’s water supply. So…advocate for education reform whenever you can, and enjoy these twilight years of the great American experiment.

loslaslon

Milo is a very good friend of mine; he really is a sweetheart with a heart of gold. The poor guy is just dumb, to this day has said some of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard. Milo was telling me how he has had many pregnancy scares with his ex-girlfriend. He also informed me that she had not been on birth control and they would not use anything else.

I informed him that was stupid and that’s why he’s probably had so many scares. I wish I could make this up, but this 100% happened and we still tease him about it often. He gets around, so I’m curious if he has any little kids running around. I hope they have more brain cells than their dad does.

caitsarito

Malcolm had just graduated high school and landed a job in my team. Our recruitment company had stopped working with us because we had poached one of their employees, and I suspect they placed him with us as one last piece of revenge. He was on a one-year business admin traineeship, and seemed to think he was going to run his own business one day.

Now, Malcolm was nice enough. He showed up on time, he wore professional attire, he tried to sound professional on the phone. But he had one fatal flaw. Unfortunately, he had an incredible lack of common sense and a complete inability to comprehend the most basic instructions. Despite us showing him the correct way to do things several times, he would still do things like:

Take other people's staplers because he couldn't figure out how to refill his own, bend paperclips out of shape to the point that they no longer even held the pages together, and saying, "But I like it this way" when he was questioned. Instead of folding letters in thirds with the client's address in the plastic window, he would fold it in half, then in half again, and crumple the envelope to try to cram it in

While setting up his voicemail message, the automated instruction voice told him to say his name. He gave an entire voicemail speech instead. My boss told him to fix it. He did the exact same thing again. He walked away when he jammed the printer, even though its screen shows very specific instructions (with pictures) on how to fix it. He got chewed out by a regional manager for this one. And he was just getting started. 

He also told stories about being hospitalized for drinking too much water, and jumping into his car while someone was stealing it because he always just left the keys on the seat. I kid you not, he was actually proud of himself, telling us all about how he was questioned by the authorities. He once asked me how to "print a website" (this was on work time, and the page was called "How to Start a Business").

I clarified that you would have to print each individual page, and he looked defeated. Halfway through his time here, we realised that he needed to be told not to sleep at his desk, to which he said "it makes the day go faster". He would almost always leave 15 minutes early every day (my boss worked different hours) until he had it explained to him that he is paid to be at work, working.

He once loaded up a manager's car with the wrong boxes of pamphlets, but couldn't even calculate how many we needed to recover, because he wasn't counting how many boxes he'd taken in the first place. This seems like a normal mistake…until I tell you one thing. I had set them up for him on a shelf, shown him, then taped on a post-it note saying "For [manager's name]".

At one point, I caught him trying to send spreadsheets of our customers' sensitive data to the external company that graded his coursework. I had to explain that no, you can't give out clients' full names, dates of birth, addresses and contact information to people who don't work here. He accepted a call from reception and told them it was okay for them to send a client to our locked floor.

We're just head office processing the paperwork; clients aren't supposed to show up here. Then when the doorbell rang, he didn't even get up to answer it. I had to do everything I could to converse with them without letting them in, meaning I wasn't able to go back inside to grab business cards for the consultants who could help them. Then there was the disgusting stuff.

This kid kept chewed-off fingernails on his desk, and he spilled toner on there, which he ignored until we moved offices. I counted. He just never asked, or Googled, how to clean it up. Guys, he straight up left it there for almost five months. After that, he was only in our new office for six days before his placement was finished, and managed to spill some kind of sticky, oily goo all over his desk and inside the drawers, ready for his replacement.

He proved over and over that we couldn't trust him with anything even mildly difficult, so he only ended up performing about 15-20% of the role. Then one day he told my co-worker "this job is too easy" and that he was looking to pursue higher education in the field. This was a shock to us all, as his coursework was returned most of the time for errors.

The weirdest thing I saw was when we had flimsy envelopes that needed a piece of tape in each corner to secure the contents. He would place the two pieces of tape on top of each other. It seemed like every time we tried to teach him something, half of it flew right out of his brain. We tried different learning styles, hoping maybe if we wrote it down, or sent pictures, or got him to press the buttons himself a few times, that he would start to get it.

No dice. I told my boss about one of his mistakes that I discovered after he left, and she told me "some brains you just can't work with". He finally finished up with us a few months ago, and I'm still trying to adjust to working with his competent replacement. What do you mean, you know how to follow patterns, problem-solve, and refer to notes?! I will never take common sense for granted again.

enbied

My roommate, Drew, was in a wildlife ecology course required for her degree. She was very excited by the material and couldn’t wait to start. Two weeks into the semester, she comes home raving about how the professor is a “pig". After some prompting, she revealed that he said leggings are unprofessional in the workplace. Therefore he is a pig.

In response to this affront, the next week she drops the class—presumably (?!) without giving the decision any thought at all. The following week, she is outraged to find an email saying her scholarship has been revoked, citing the fact that she was now at 8 credit hours, no longer a full time student, and thus ineligible for the $50,000 Dean’s Scholarship she had SOMEHOW been awarded.

Drew spent the rest of the semester complaining, did nothing to fix the situation, and did not register for any classes next fall.

NaturalAntelope

Oh man, my friend Mark. When on a road trip to the US, we asked him if he brought his own toilet paper and proceeded to convince him that toilet paper isn't a thing in the US. It was only at the border when he looked at the trunk and realized we hadn't brought toilet paper either that he caught on. He also thought unripe oranges (which are green in color) were called “Greenges".

At midnight, he looked at the sky and said "WOAH the sky is black!!" and then pointed to the moon and said "What planet is that? The sun?" It was a half-moon that night. When asked to name the Great Lakes, the only one he could name was "Lake Mississippi". We live in Canada where we have to memorize the great lakes for like grade 6 geography, so most people can name at least one.

He thought Matte was pronounced "Mah-tay" because "it looked French and all E's in French have an accent". He would never NOT fall for the "gullible is written on the ceiling" trick. I once got him three separate times in the span of 10 minutes. At a beach in South Ontario, he pointed to the small lake and said, "What ocean is that?" It's about a 10-hour drive to the nearest ocean.

cosmicshamwow

My college roommate freshman year. He's the kind of person who should have perished at 10, but somehow survived to his 20s. And the most infuriating part? He's the only child in a family that's so rich he'll never need to work a day in his life. I got trapped in a contract that had me paying rent on the place regardless of if I stayed, and I couldn't afford to move out.

He somehow had a girlfriend back home. They agreed to have an open relationship while he was at school, but he dumped her when she mentioned having coffee with another guy. During that time, he somehow managed to seduce 2-3 different girls a week and still thought he was the victim of a cheater.

He found possibly the single biggest idiot alive, besides him, to date. He got sued for child support. He tried to change his major to one that the school didn't offer. He got in trouble for taking pictures of Jehovah’s Witnesses and tried to argue freedom of the press. He wasn't even remotely affiliated with a news agency.

He woke up at 4 pm and thought it was 4 am. He went to any given class maybe once a week and didn't understand how he could be failing. His GPA was 1.2, I'm still amazed it wasn't lower. This was all during one year.

IronOxide1510

When I began trying to become vegan, my mother fully supported me. In fact, she made a vegan version of one of my favorite dishes of hers (a simple dish with rice, chicken, and soybean sprouts). I assumed she switched the chicken with tofu and happily ate it, but I mentioned it still tasted quite a bit like chicken. I almost choked on my food when I heard her reply.

She told me that she put chicken in it and then took it out just for me, that way it will still taste good. Bless her heart. I didn't get mad at her, of course, she was genuinely trying to be helpful, but I will never let her live it down now that she realizes how ditzy she sounded.

aajiro

One girl brought her friend to the ER after she had pepper sprayed her as a joke. She told us that they thought that "it was bad only for men".

Biraccola

I teach at the college level. Years back, I taught a freshman/sophomore class that met every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. One Wednesday, I gave a chapter exam. It was easy. I had a word bank of 25 terms and concepts at the top of the test, and the 20 questions of the exam were different definitions or descriptions of those terms. All the students had to do was match the corresponding term from the word bank to its definition or description, with five unused terms left over in the word bank.

All the correct answers were right there. That Wednesday, almost half of my class was missing. There was a university function going on and no one thought to mention it to me (this was before emails were prevalent). I gave the test anyway. This one guy, a real fool for the entire semester, was there and took the test. He answered all 20 and got them all wrong. A zero. How's that even possible?

That Friday, I told the whole class that those who took the test Wednesday did not have to show up for class Monday. Those who missed the test because of the school function were to show up and take the test Monday. As I let class out, I called the failing guy to me and told him that as far as I was concerned, he was not there Wednesday; he was to show up and take the test Monday.

He looked at for a second and said, "Huh? Oh! Oh, thank you, Mr. Deacon". I didn't even bother making a new version of the test. It was just the leftover copies of the original test. This kid took the test Monday. Again, he answered all 20. And again, he got all 20 wrong. And he answered all but maybe two or three of them differently. When I handed them back out, I gave him both of his.

At the end of the semester, he tried to pay me with $100 to give him an A in the class.

DeaconPlayback

We had a large assembly where a law enforcement officer came into school and explained what to do if the students saw or shared inappropriate images online. This one kid, Jamie, raises his hand to ask a question. “Sir, what if we see something inappropriate online but enjoy watching it?” “Well, curiosity can be a healthy thing..." Oh my god, the next words out of his mouth were legendary.

“It was a woman. With a dog. Then I watched a video where a kid from [rival school] got beaten up. Hilarious". The whole room was stunned. Another time, Jamie was short of the bus fare home so decided to take it from another kid by mugging him. While wearing his uniform, complete with logo. In front of witnesses and security cameras.

He also claimed he had a disorder that meant he would flail his arms wildly like an octopus when he was afraid. We called his mother. He did not have any disorders, but he still kept shouting, “Oh my arms! I’m so afraid!”  When told to do some work. That’s not all, either. He insisted his mom did not allow him to wear socks as an excuse to get out of sports. We checked. His mom laughed.

His final straw was when my friend led a school trip to a horror attraction (jump scares, fake zombies etc.). When an actress jumped out pretending to be a monster, he shouted “Oh my arms!” did his flailing, and punched her in the stomach. The lights were all turned on and the manager asked the whole group to leave. He started laughing and thought he’d get away with it as he’d “convinced everyone about his fake disorder".

He said this in earshot of my friend, the teacher in charge. Sigh.

chumpydiplodocus

My roommate Kat is a germaphobe. She presses cross walk buttons with her elbow and won't use public bathrooms unless it's an emergency. That doesn't make her stupid, of course. But she comes home and refuses to clean anything. Ever. I found mold growing in the bathroom and asked why it doesn't count as gross to her. Her answer floored me. "Because it's my gross, my germs don't count".

She believes that washing dishes with soap lowers your immune system, so she just rinses them and puts them away. Even if they've sat there for a week with food on them. She only does the dishes when we run out of them, and since I work two jobs I can't always keep up with it. However, she scrubs the parts where someone's mouth touched because “ew someone else's germs".

I pull cups out of the cabinet with old dry milk in the bottom and that does not bother her at all, because at least the rim was scrubbed. So now I wash everything before I use it and after. She threw away all our food once because she found a bug in the cabinet and was worried it was all contaminated. One bug, and everything had to go, even sealed cans of soup…gone.

She believes everything she reads (Like the soap thing.) One day, we're doing laundry and she puts her work shirt in the dryer. Before she'd been adamant they could not go in the dryer or they'd shrink and get ruined, so I asked her what changed. She read online that the plumbing is all connected, which means that the toilets and the washing machine are connected and there's poop flowing into the washing machine.

The only way to clean the bacteria of the poop out is to dry them at high temperatures in the dryer, so she cannot skip the dryer anymore because she does not want poop on her clothes. She brought gloves to change the laundry into the dryer and wouldn't believe anything when I told her that wasn't true. I wanted to scream. It didn't help that we lived in an apartment complex and you could hear people in the apartment above the laundry room and sometimes you'd hear a toilet flush and water flowing through pipes in the ceiling.

The night before we moved, we threw a party where someone spilled a drink on the carpet and offered to clean it up. She replied, "We're moving, don't bother!" I rushed over with supplies and said, "I want my security deposit back!" I cleaned it up while she just shrugged. She made more money than me but couldn't afford her phone bill.

She had a bare minimum plan where texts and data cost after a certain point. She couldn't afford the more expensive plan, so she just paid around $600 in overages every month because she always went over the limits. She was also a few months behind so if she missed a payment, her phone would get shut off immediately and the late fees kept racking up with it all.

When she got her paycheck, though, we were loaded. She'd spend lit on anything and everything she wanted and have no thought of next week. Then the following week, she'd be poor with $20 in her account anxiously waiting for payday and wondering if she could survive only to spend it all again once it came. No savings and no back up plan.

She started dating a guy because she was afraid of saying no to him. Got into an abusive relationship and then couldn't leave because she was afraid of what he would do. That part was more sad than anything else and I did everything I could to help her escape. She's okay now—Well, at least safe from him. I can't really promise she's okay, as I moved away.

Permalink

When I was going through basic training for the Army, I knew I would meet some really dumb people. And I did. But they were your garden variety of stupid. The kind of guys you see in the movies. Not bright but good guys that learn, nonetheless. Then there was Rudy. We weren't in the same platoon or even the same company, but we stayed in the same barracks.

So one day I'm polishing my boots and getting my gear ready for training the next day when out of nowhere I'm hit with the horrible smell of feet and corn chips. It was powerful. I had to say something, so I walk through the barracks looking for the source. Eventually, I happened on Rudy. Rudy was sitting on his bunk eating a bag of chips (not corn chips) and talking about getting into Special Forces (Rudy was fat).

His gear was strewn about and he looked like we hadn't all been in training for three months at that point. Also, chips weren't allowed so how he got those I have no idea. It was about that time I'm guessing the drill sergeants had detected the offensive odor of what I'm hoping was Rudy's feet, too. Suddenly the whole room is aswarm with round hats and screaming.

The protocol when a higher ranking soldier, like a sergeant, enters the room is the first person to see them yells "AT EASE!" and everyone stands up straight, feet shoulder width apart and hands behind your back. I did this, everyone else did this and we did it quick. There was one obvious problem. Rudy did not do this. Rudy decided to stand up at his leisure, still holding the chips and eating them.

The drill sergeants then proceeded to lay into Rudy, who was visibly nervous and apparently his reflex to being nervous is to CONTINUE EATING HIS CHIPS. So here's Rudy getting screamed at while munching away until the drill sergeant, who was doing their best to dissect his forehead with their round hat, told him to drop the chips.

Then they start yelling at him to drop and beat his face (push-ups). Rudy then gets down and does 10 or so and then starts to struggle. Meanwhile, we're all still standing there having to watch this, waiting for our turn. It goes on for another 5 minutes until finally the drill sergeant ends it and takes the chips. They tell him to get some water in him because they're going to screw him up in the morning and then start walking away.

They tell us all to carry on but Rudy…Rudy makes a fateful and horrible decision. Rudy decides that was the moment to ask for his chips back. The last drill sergeant then turns around and tries one last time to slice Rudy’s head open with his hat while yelling at him from kissing distance. It was ugly. The drill sergeant eventually got the impression that he got his point across (he didn't), tells Rudy to put away his gear and leaves.

Once the drill sergeant was gone, Rudy notices one last chip on the ground directly next to his smelly foot. Yeah, he ate it. Then he threw all his gear under his pillow (and it wasn't the kind of stuff you can hide under a pillow) and lays down on it, somehow unaffected by the fact that his neck was now a 90 degree angle. By this time, the smell was making my eyes water so I left.

I remember thinking, "Please God don't let this kid be in my unit when I get to regular duty". One month later, I arrived at my new duty station and get assigned a barracks room. I'm stepping out to go take a shower when who steps out of the room across the hall? Rudy. He was assigned to the same company as me. I'd spend the next four years serving alongside this kid, even saving his butt once.

hashtajlove

Me and this girl, Suzy, were in Single Award Science together. Typically at the school I went to, we had to do two sciences at GCSE, but for those of us who were less confident or proficient, we did Single Award: a tiny amount of all three main subject areas. We were having a discussion about plate tectonics. At this point Suzy gets a frown on her face and goes: "Miss. Miss!"

Teacher: "Yes?” Suzy: "So right…to find that out, they must've had like....You know not a drill but like a REALLY BIG drill. Yeah?" Teacher: "Well.. not really, no it—" Suzy: "THEN HOW DO THEY KNOW?! God you can't trust ANYONE can you?" This is great for two reasons. One, the fact that she NEEDED to clarify she didn't mean your pathetic little handheld drill.

This hypothetical drill is one THICC BOI. And two: Her faith in trusting people after the knowledge that a big drill wasn't the answer? Gone. Bye. Never trust people they'll only disappoint you. Another day, we were talking about space. Our teacher said something like, "The number of galaxies probably exceeds 200 billion!" Suzy stands up.

She got up and goes, "No Miss, I'm sorry. I'm not having that". Me: "What do you mean you're not having it?" Suzy: "No, that's just not on like. That's absolutely out of order. Bang out of order". At this point, I'm losing my mind. I've been in the class for almost two years and I can't hide the laughter anymore. Suzy: "Where are they Miss? Where are there that many?"

Teacher: "Suzy. Sit down". Suzy: "No Miss! Show me. I need to see them. I can't get it if I don't SEE them". The conversation did not get better after that. Lastly, Suzy and I also had Art together. Suzy dropped her paintbrush and it rolled slightly under a desk. She bent down to get it and just SMACKED her head off the desk top. It made such a loud noise that we all looked up like, "Girl are you okay?"

She just kinda crumpled, curled up into a little ball on the floor. Inconsolable for a moment. Finally, her friend is like, "It's okay! Just stand up we'll get you an ice pack!" Suzy sniffles a little, "okay..." and tries to stand way too fast and slams the back of her head right off the corner of the SAME DESK. It felt like...tragic vaudeville. Probably because that’s what it was.

Flipflopsarelame

I own a mid-size bowling alley with about 10 employees. This guy, Loel, was 19 when this happened (under a year ago, maybe eight months). I hired him after losing two employees in a week, so I was desperate for somebody. He did so much damage. First, he was caught humping a bowling ball in the break room. Loel intentionally "forgot" to put oil on the lanes because he read somewhere that "it would make the ball blow up" and he thought that would be cool.

Loel eventually got removed from anything except for serving food and drink. I figured this would be OK. Oops, that was a mistake! Pretty soon, on the first day I put him on duty serving food for a full shift, a woman comes up to the counter and asks to see a manager. Confused, I ask her what happened. She tells me her pizza is too dry to eat.

You know where this is headed. I go to check on Loel, but he blocks the entrance to the back room with his body and yells to the woman at the counter "we used a new tomato sauce". I immediately panic—this is clearly a lie. We don't make our own pizzas, they're food service. I push past him, and discover he is serving the customers WEEK OLD pizza that has been sitting in a cold dry room.

Loel tells me "I didn't want to waste food and I thought you would be mad at me". We had a Christmas party one time and Loel literally tried to go down the chimney of the business, but the kid couldn't get down further than his waist. The firemen came to get him out. We found him playing one-person soccer with our plastic food containers, running after them and trying to kick them into "goals" like the pinsetter on the bowling lanes.

I was using the toilet once when Loel walks into the bathroom and stands outside my stall calling 9-1-1 to report I was dead. I tell loudly, "HEY I'M ALIVE IN HERE!” Loel tells me, "You weren't moving, I thought you were a goner. Sorry". Officers still had to check it out and search the whole place. Oh, and Loel bought a taser and used it on himself while on the job.

Loel told me he bowled a 300, with no proof of course. He got super defensive when challenged, up to the point of sending me a photoshopped picture of a 300 claiming it was his. Then he told me it was "just an example and his LOOKED LIKE THAT IT WAS ONLY AN EXAMPLE I SWEAR" and starts crying. My business partner (Call him Rob) who I worked with for 20+ years was left in charge alone with Loel one night when I went home and the others weren't in.

While I'm home, I get a text from Rob: "I hate ’Lubesuckers,’” among many other horrible words. Turns out Loel took his phone. Then I fired Loel, that was too much. Still the worst employee I ever had.

Careful_Improvement

Well, this friend of mine is not normally an idiot. On the contrary, she is a very smart woman with a university degree in the health field. But I guess we all have our moments sometimes. Back in 1995, we were one year away from graduation, and exhausted, so three of us decided to take two weeks in summer to go to relax on a beach in Brazil.

We rented a small apartment and were enjoying our very deserved holidays. One day, taking a stroll on the beach, we start seeing plenty of jelly disks, perfectly transparent and round, washed up on the shore. One-time my friend said: "I wonder what those are". I had a sublime moment of inspiration. I answered her, "Silicone breast implants".

She looked at me like a deer in the headlights and said NO WAY. Yes! I affirmed. And proceeded to explain that the health system in Brazil is very dodgy, so women go to have very cheap plastic surgeries that are so botched that they end up losing the implants while swimming on the sea, but they don't care, they just go and have it done again.

She gave me a blink-blink look, said "Geez..." and carried on walking. The third friend looked at me with a stern face, and I whispered, "Leave it". At the airport, at the end of the holidays, I felt bad and confessed they were just jellyfish. She didn’t speak to me for a long time.

Churfirstenbabe

So I was at work yesterday (I’m a stocker) and was working in the coffee section of the store. Then, this lady came to me with a Nestle coffee that said “Decaf” on the package. She proceeded to ask me what Decaf meant, so I told her that Decaf stands for Decaffeinated. She stood there for a couple of seconds, and then said, “So it has more coffee?”

I said “No, it means that the coffee is decaffeinated,” and she said once again, “So, it has more coffee right?” At this point I was shocked. How can someone who drinks coffee not know what caffeine is? So I said, “You know what caffeine is, right? It’s an active ingredient that coffee has. Well, this coffee doesn’t have it in it". She was processing what I said, then took a regular coffee up.

She replied with, “Oh, so Decaf is stronger than this one?” At first I honestly thought she was messing with me, but I could see on her face that she was literally confused, so I just said “emm, no, Decaf is ‘lighter’ than regular". She just said “Oh, okay” and grabbed the decaf. Maybe she’ll notice what I was talking about when she drinks her morning cup and doesn’t feel awake at all.

Undesirable_11

So, I used to work in a little local burger chain, and the managers were notorious for hiring just the dumbest, worst types of people, ever. But this one was... a whole new level. Some examples: She did not know the difference between a lemon and a lime. I asked her if she remembered her colors? Lemon yellow, lime green? I watched her face contort".

OH! Is that way they're called that?" She did not know if cheese came on a cheeseburger. She also didn’t know there was more than one type of cheese. She asked what kind of chips come on a Frito pie. For those who don’t know, Frito pies are literally just a bunch of Fritos brand corn chips, chili, and cheese. It's a very big thing in the region we live in, they're at every event imaginable. How she was confused about it, I'll never know.

We had to wear disposable gloves to cut and handle jalapenos, at least to show trainees how to do it. I usually never did, but we had too many accidents of dumb people touching their eyes after touching jalapenos. She did exactly that, because she thought that they were tiny bell peppers, even though I told her several times that they were jalapenos and spicy.

She did not know how sweet tea worked. She didn’t understand why we brewed it hot and then added sugar. She told me several times that the tea wasn’t cold, so how would the customers enjoy it? She also didn't understand how we knew how much sugar to add. She kept asking if that was enough or too much, and how would she know when she got it right?

We had a giant measuring cup with a clearly marked line on it. I told her several times that if she filled it up to the line every time she made a batch of sweet tea, then it would always be right. She didn’t seem to believe me. Yeah... she lasted about two weeks before we got absolutely sick of her and fired her. Thank goodness for that.

toria_23

My boyfriend went to his grandmother’s place in New Hampshire last summer. He went over to help her with some house work over the summer. She lives by a heavily wooded area, and my boyfriend likes to bike in woods. So he decided to take a nice bike ride in the woods, except he doesn't know his way around the woods. He called me before he left for the bike ride to tell me he'd be going for the ride.

I get a call an hour later from him, saying he got lost in the woods. I was confused because I was under the impression that he knew his way around those woods because he grew up playing in them. So I said to him, "If you didn't know the area, why would you go biking in it?" His answer was baffling. He replied, "Well, all woods have the same layout".

My thoughts went blank at this and I'm speechless because I don't know where he got that idea. Then he said something that really made me worry. He said "Anyways, I figured I'd call you first to keep you aware of what’s going on. I have to go now, I have to call my grandma to see if she can find me". Now I know me and him agreed to try and maintain an open line of communication, but this isn't what I meant by open line of communication.

On one hand, I appreciate that you thought of me first, but on the other hand he should try to get back home first. So, I end the call after telling him to focus on getting back home.

zephonistasthis06

So backstory, I have a cottage on a lake and work at the marina as a summer job. I’ve been around boats all my life and know a fair bit about watercraft. For those of you who don’t know, a jet ski doesn’t have a propeller, but rather a small turbine like a jet engine. This has some pros and cons but the main problem with jets is that they don’t like sucking up debris.

So it’s a general rule of thumb for the operator not to start the engine in shallow water so as not to suck sand into the engine. Anyway, I was manning the gas pump when I see a guy pull up on a brand new RXP-300 Sea-Doo. This is the fastest Sea-Doo on the market and worth over $15,000. Immediately, my stomach drops. I can tell that he’s not very experienced because it took him three tries to dock.

I fill his tank and he gets back on the Sea-Doo. I see him insert the key and I warn him about starting the engine in shallow waters. Me: “Hey, you might wanna pull your machine out a bit. You don’t wanna suck sand into your engine". He just looks at me really condescendingly, as if to say: What do you know? You’re just a dumb kid. So he starts the engine and it protests loudly.

He starts revving it and the grinding just increases in volume. I can see the water around him become murky as the engine kicks up ever more sand. The best way I can describe the sound is ice cubes in a blender. All the while, he’s smirking at me as if he’s saying “Yeah, suck it, my engine is fine!” Just then it struck me. This was the type of guy who thought he was better than anyone else because he was rich.

So he pulls away in his struggling Sea-Doo and I see that he has forgotten to pull in his rope and it’s now trailing behind him. I ask him to come back around and I’ll toss it in as it passes. He does so, but undershoots the dock. So in his stupidity, he throws it in reverse and backs over his own rope. The rope gets sucked in the impeller and stalls his engine.

When he gets to shore, the rope may as well have been a steel beam it was so tight. He then asked if it would be fixed later today, to which my boss replied with a stern look saying: “Dude, nobody could fix that, your turbine is totally shot and because of that stunt you pulled back there, your wear ring is probably spent from all the sand. You’re gonna need to swap out the whole thing".

The look of absolute defeat on his face was priceless. We did have to swap out the entire turbine assembly, costing him a small fortune.

Stressed_Fish

This is the story of my nephew's disastrous adventures, how my family demanded I cure him of stupidity, and how he was fired from each of his jobs. My family is kind of strangely staggered by age. My older brother is 37 and I'm 19. He's my only sibling so I am, by extension, my nephew's only uncle. My nephew is also 19, my same age. This is actually a big problem.

Because we’re close in age, my parents expect me to understand my nephew and to figure out what's wrong with him. Infuriatingly, they expect me to be an uncle/mentor figure to him AND relate to him as a teenager. For context, let's go back to his younger years. The first true act of stupidity that my idiot nephew pulled was his cyberattack on my dad's business site online.

He was only 14 when he did this. By "cyberattack," I mean he went onto my dad's website (my dad sells sports memorabilia) and posted inappropriate videos to the comment section of the site. No, not just a little, 7,000 image comments’ worth using a bot he found online. Next was his genius 16th birthday stunt. At his party, he had a pool. He also had a garden gnome.

He decided the best move for maximum coolness with his peers was to somersault off of a makeshift diving board made out of glued together 2x4s. Not only jump off the diving board, but do an acrobatic display with a gnome at the same time. He leapt off the diving board. Keep in mind there were seven other people in the pool and 3 more out of it but nearby.

As he kicked off the board in reverse, plunging head and back first, he slammed his feet into the gnome and kicked it straight up. As he crashed into the water, the spinning gnome experienced gravity. It slammed into his leg, which pulverized and put him on crutches for three months. He was lucky he didn't kill one of his friends with a gnome to the head.

On his first day of real work this January, he was working at a gas station. He decided, since it was cold that day, that when he showed up, his best work attire would be a heavy coat and balaclava. That's right, he wore bank robbing clothes "because it was cold". They almost called the authorities until the inevitable "It’s me" when he pulled the mask off.

He is a big video gamer and actually has had some success on twitch playing Minecraft, he has 500 subs. Why anyone would want to watch him do ANYTHING is beyond me. He probably digs straight down and mines at night. Anyway, here's a few of his misadventures in gaming. He was caught trying to play "real life Minecraft," as he put it, for YouTube.

That means going in the backyard with a pickaxe and digging holes in the lawn. He bought a jar of borscht (Russian beet soup) at a grocery store and drank it on stream while playing CSGO. I don't play it but he says it has lots of Russians and he wanted to show "Super Slav Energy". Next was his attempt at taking the SAT instead of ACT.

He refused to study for his ACT retake and scored 8, an improvement from 6 on his first try. My school offered SAT for students who failed at ACT. He got a 660, which he called "hard work". He also was caught in the shower giving himself a vinegar enema as "punishment for failing" after the ACT retake, when he came home from taking it.

He once went to a bank with a stack of CDs because he wanted a CD (Certificate of deposit). He also jumped on my brother's (his father's) knees while he was sleeping and ran out of the room. My brother woke up groaning in pain and my nephew just admitted it out of the blue. Another time, he tried to ski in the house. That's right, skiing indoors.

He put snow from outside on the stairs, came barreling down, and slammed face first into the Christmas tree, which collapsed like his hopes of making the nice list that Christmas. The last story I can think of was the time he decided to do a "boogeyman impersonation" last weekend. I don't care that I’m a grown man. I freaked out on him over this one.

He jumped out of my closet at 2 am during Thanksgiving this year. That's not the big deal. The big deal is I had thought I was alone in my room for three hours, in pitch black, before he (wearing red lightbulbs clipped to his glasses) leaped out of my closet shrieking like a banshee and yelling in a shrill voice, "I’m gonna eat you". Hope you got a kick out of hearing about my idiot nephew.

gulagblyat

I met and quickly fell in love with Barry when I was a freshman in college. We decided that things were getting serious, and decided to move in together. All of this was a mistake. Still, I've learned quite a lot from the experience.  Barry has somehow always had strokes of luck, which I think in hindsight is the only reason why he is in existence today, because the boy ain't bright.

He lucked out somehow and bought a 1987 Acura Legend with 50,000 miles on it for $1,500 in great condition. There is only one problem with this: Barry is a horrible driver, to the point to where he ruined that car. One of his friends once told me, "If you let him drive that car, it's going to end up being a $1,500 car". He's driven over curbs and destroyed tires.

He's driven the wrong way in one-way traffic a few times, including rush hour. He's even smashed out the driver's side window in a fit of rage. Eventually he would turn that poor car into a horseshoe by running a stop sign and getting it t-boned because he was crying. At the time that I was dating him, we lived within walking distance of our university, on a semi-quiet street behind a Walgreens, in a tiny house that can only be described as a shack.

This tiny house was behind even an even more tiny apartment "quadplex," four tiny apartments just big enough to be considered livable. I worked for Walmart as a call center operator, within what I would call "walking distance," but others would not—if I walked to work, it was a 30 minute walk. Barry did NOT work. In fact, he never kept a job longer than it took to get that first paycheck.

After Barry got the car, he'd drive me (he would never let me drive). There was one night where I was cooking and I needed a few last minute things. Barry volunteered to go to the Walgreens. Usually, he'd walk. It never took more than five minutes, but on this night, he decided that he would take the car for this 60 second drive.

He comes back after some time, and the night proceeds as normal. The next afternoon, I'm getting ready for my shift at Ye Olde Call Center. As Barry would be driving me to work, I took my time getting ready. You know how it is. When we walked out the door, I knew something was very wrong. The parking spot where the Acura would be was surprisingly empty.

This was after he smashed the window out of the driver's side door, so I assumed that someone finally decided to make off with the thing. We looked all over for it. It was nowhere to be seen. We ask our neighbors in their tiny apartments. Nope, nada. I had to call into my job to explain why I was going to be late: "You see, I think the car's been taken,” I told my manager.

I doubt she believed a word I said. So, Barry calls the authorities and reports the car as missing. While we are waiting for officers to arrive and I'm standing in the empty parking space in disbelief, a strange look comes over Barry’s face. "Wait," he tells me, "I think I know what happened to the car. You wait here".

He takes off down the street in a hurried walk. Five minutes later, a brown Acura Legend with a busted out window comes flying down the street, with a sheepish-looking Barry in the driver's seat. Barry had forgotten that he drove the car to Walgreens and left it there, and had walked back to our house.

OrphenZidane

So about 15 years ago, I was going out with a real idiot. This was before the days of social media, and many families used to put birthday announcements in the newspaper. Since I was turning 18 that year, I often used to look through these and see if any of my old school friends were in there. I was looking through them one day with my boyfriend looking over my shoulder and he started laughing.

I asked what he was laughing at and he pointed to a photo of a toddler beaming with a crown on her head, and the announcement saying “Happy 18th birthday Kelly!” I asked whether he knew this person and the reply was, "No, but no way is she 18. She looks about 5!" Took me a while to explain that families often dig out old photos to embarrass their offspring on momentous birthdays.

Fraisy1218

So, the idiot in this story is my own dad. As much as I love him, he's a crazy weird man, in the best sense, but should probably be locked up for his own good. This one happened in January, on my sister's birthday. For her birthday we were all going to head to my parents’ and have an old fashioned “kids” party (yes, she's in her 20s) with the family, while decorating her cake, my mother and her were talking about her feeling ill and not drinking.

My mom immediately guessed she's pregnant (my sister didn’t actually want to tell them yet). My sister admitted that yes she was, and my mom was over the moon for her. While hugging and celebrating, they hear a weird noise behind them, turning around to find my father spraying the glitter cake spray into his eyes and all over his face, for no reason.

This resulted in his eyes/face swelling up. To this day, he still won't explain WHY that was his reaction, and why he did it because he's actually excited to be a grandad. He's just weird.

JustAnotherSadGurl

So I went to high school with this guy, Greg. Our school was very tiny, only 120 people including staff, and this particular guy’s antics would spread across the school at near light-speed. We all eagerly awaited the inevitable “GOD DAMMIT GREG” from day to day. He would habitually lean on the back two legs of his chair, despite falling violently almost every single time he did it.

He got his phone taken away nearly two-dozen times in a four week span IN THE SAME CLASS. He sat directly in front of the teacher and never tried to hide his phone, or even put it on silent. He once meowed at a teacher for an entire class period. Yes. Meowed. Like a cat. He was baffled as to why he was kicked out of said class. That wasn’t even the most clueless thing.

Not once. Not twice. But THREE TIMES, Greg put a Cup-o-Noodles in the microwave without water in it. He started a fire each time, the smell was indescribable, and he got the student lounge taken away from all of us. Thanks, Greg, thanks a lot bud. But here’s the main event. Greg, by no laws of god or man, should ever have been allowed behind the wheel of a vehicle any larger or faster than a Big Wheel.

I can’t even count the number of accidents he had, big and small, and it’s a miracle he made it to 17 years old. He’s still kicking now, don’t worry. Naturally, his parents bought him a shiny new sports car; what every teenaged dingus deserves! One morning, on his way to school, Greg came frighteningly close to ending a fellow student, who was riding on his scooter, ON THE SIDEWALK.

He didn’t even realize he’d hit him, and kept driving. Thankfully, the kid wasn’t badly hurt at all and nothing lengthy came out of it. Unfortunately, this was something of a regular occurrence for Greg. The second he got in his car, every other student was in immediate danger, and a couple more minor accidents happened. Greg. Should. Not. Drive. You should know where this is going.

Now I mentioned our school was small, and that meant most of us had very close relationships with our absolutely amazing teachers. Even Greg. We could speak very openly and frankly with them, and they would do the same in turn. So I’m walking back in from lunch one day, and I see Greg speaking with one of our teachers, and it looks very intense. I hadn’t seen him at lunch, and apparently he was in some deep trouble. As I get closer, I can hear the conversation

Teacher: Greg, if you don’t pull your head out of your butt, you’re going to kill one of these kids, or yourself. At the very least you’ll lose your license. Get it together. Greg: I’m a good driver, though! I swear! T: I’m sure you are buddy, but if you can’t stop dicking around long enough to look in the rear-view, or god forbid, out of the WINDSHIELD, bad stuff is going to happen. You’re lucky it hasn’t yet. I’m just asking that you pay attention. Can you do that for me? Just open your eyes a little wider or something?

G: Yes sir...I’m sorry, I know.. T: Alright, now go get yourself some lunch, buddy, I’ll tell your next period why you’re late coming back. You’re smarter than they give you credit for, Greg, you just have to prove it. Scooter Kid is sitting 10 feet away barely stifling laughter. Greg slowly mopes his way out the front door. I wait a minute and approach the teacher to try and get some more details out of him. Then came another huge twist.

Before I can reach the teacher, the front door bursts open and another student comes in screaming “GREG ALMOST RAN ME OVER JUST NOW, SOMEONE NEEDS TO TAKE HIS CAR AWAY” At most, two minutes had elapsed since the end of Greg’s conversation with the teacher. I have never seen a man leap into action so fast, and with so much anger.

This teacher was a former officer in the late 80s. He did not mess round. Greg’s head was about to roll. By the time I got outside it was mostly over, but apparently Mr. Teacher man stopped Greg from leaving the parking lot, pulled him from the car, put him in some kind of arm-bar, and was currently pouring vinegar in his ear with words I only wish I could remember.

It was incredible. While I agree that a teacher should never touch a student like that, I think this case might be something of an exception. Greg was seriously going to kill someone someday. Not much changed for the rest of Greg’s high school career. He drove a little slower, for sure. He had perfect attendance, somehow, graduated just before I did, and I didn’t hear much about him after that. Until maybe a year ago, a Facebook post pops up.

Greg....sweet, simple, lethal behind the wheel Greg, is now a licensed airplane pilot. He flies all the time. Keep an eye on the skies, friends, especially if you’re on a scooter.

beachdwarf

I'm a welder, and these are stories about someone back when I was still in welding school. Let’s say his name was Mike. Despite having the mental capacity of a zooplankton, he somehow made it through the first part of welding school, but he left in a blaze of glory. This was the first day of the Welding and Cutting fundamentals class, the first class of the program.

We were all told specifically to wear flame resistant jeans and leather work boots because we were going to be working with sparks and bits of sharp metal. Mike shows up in basketball shorts and sneakers. The instructor just sent him home and told him to come back next class with proper gear, not a huge deal. The next day when he walked in the room, I almost burst out laughing.

He shows up in jeans and cowboy boots.  A lot of welders wear pull on boots, but cowboy boots were a bit of a stretch. The instructor just kind of rolled his eyes and said it was ok. Fast forward a bit, and we are doing an introduction to using a plasma cutter. The instructor tells Mike that he needs to make sure he pulls his jeans over his boots, and not have his jeans tucked into his boots, as they were at the time.

Mike does, but as soon as we break up to go to the different booths and practice, he tucks his jeans back into his boots again. He said and I quote, “Screw that, it looks cool this way". Those of you who are welders can see where this is going. Let me explain, a plasma cutter shoots a stream of sparks straight downward, and once in a while, a blob of molten metal will fall down onto the floor.

To clarify, you aren't supposed to stand with your feet right in the blast zone of the sparks, you're supposed to step back a bit so the sparks and stuff land in front of you. A few minutes in, I hear screaming. It’s coming from Mike’s booth, and I turn to see him hopping across the shop trying to yank his boot off and screaming all kinds of profanities.

A blob of molten steel had fallen down inside his boot and was now burning his foot. He gets his boot off and runs outside to the sink, and I can hear him running his foot under the water. The instructor hands Mike the first aid kit and says, "Remember when I said you need to pull your jeans over your boots? That wouldn't have happened if you had listened".

Then we’re onto the first day of MIG plate welding. Mike is in my class again, lucky me. Did I mention that in addition to being as dense as a pile of rocks, this guy was also a complete douche-nozzle? Anyway, for those of you who don't know, a MIG welder has two knobs on the front of it, one that controls the voltage, and another that controls the speed the welding wire feeds out of.

You need to set both of them properly depending on the thickness of the metal you're welding, and what position you're welding in. Mike was completely incapable of understanding this. His response was the definition of stupid. He would just crank both settings up all the way all the time. Understandably, the welds he made were awful, and he couldn't understand why.

The instructor figured out what was going on and set the knobs properly for him. The instructor left, and within a few minutes, Mike’s welds sounded terrible again. MIG welding with incorrect settings makes a very distinctive noise. The instructor went over to see what was going on, and Mike had turned both knobs all the way up again.

This repeated several more times over the course of the class. Every time the instructor told Mike not to touch the knobs, and he kept doing it anyway for who knows what reason. Partway through the Stick Plate Welding class, we were practicing working in the 4g welding position, which is overhead. Imagine the joint between the wall and the ceiling.

As you can imagine, working in this position means your hands have a lot of sparks and bits of molten metal falling down on them, and stick welding produces more sparks and spatter than other welding types. Mike was having trouble doing this, and he said that he was having trouble controlling the rod as he was welding, and that's why his welds were bad.

So, for some reason, he decided to do something incredibly dangerous. He decided to take off his gloves and weld with bare hands so he could have better control of the rod. Mike struck an arc, and very quickly realized that his hands were being absolutely destroyed by the heat and sparks and spatter coming down on them. Why he thought that would be a good idea, I have no clue.

On at least 25 occasions I can think of, Mike has tried to weld with his welding helmet either flipped up on top of his head, or off his head completely. Several of them resulted in him seriously burning his eyes. I was honestly surprised this idiot could still see at the end of welding school. But when it came to Mike, he saved the worst for last.

This is when Mike lit himself on fire. The pants and jackets welders wear are made from cotton, and are treated with a chemical that makes them fire resistant. This doesn't mean that they will not burn, just that they will self-extinguish when the heat source is moved away. So here's what happened. Mike comes in, puts on his jacket, and starts to weld.

After a minute or two, I hear a huge commotion across the welding lab, and I look to see Mike running frantically around screaming with his chest and the arms of his jacket engulfed in flames. I think you remember stop drop and roll? Well, Mike tried the vastly inferior scream, jump around, and try to hit the flames to extinguish them.

The instructor told Mike to stand still, and blasted him up and down with a fire extinguisher. I'm pretty sure Mike had to go to the ER to get treatment for burns all over his upper body. We later learned what really happened, and I was shocked. See, Mike had kept his welding jacket in his car next to a jerry can full of gasoline. The jerry can fell over on the way to class, and some of the gas spilled out and got all over his welding jacket.

He wore it when he welded, and a spark hit the gas and set the whole jacket on fire. When asked what the actual heck he was thinking, Mike said that he thought it wouldn't matter because that jacket was fire resistant. It is, but not when it's freaking soaked in gasoline.

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This is a story about a woman I had the displeasure of knowing. Apart from going camping alone and using her phone as a flashlight, this is one of the stupidest things she's ever done. This happened about four years ago. She was thinking about buying a laptop because she wanted to use a computer wirelessly instead of her desktop PC.

She asked me for my opinion about what to get. I'm not an expert when it comes to PCs and laptops but I have a good understanding of them. I'd been friends with her for about three years at this point and I knew that she wasn't the smartest knife in the drawer, so part of me was dreading this. But on the other hand, I wanted to see how this would play out. It was more bizarre than I could have prepared for.

HER: "I'm thinking about buying a wireless computer. What do you think I should get?" ME: "Wireless computer? Oh, like a laptop?" HER: "Yeah, a laptop. But it has to be wireless".

ME: (trying to make sure I was on the same page as her) "You can use a laptop wirelessly but it still needs to be plugged in to charge". HER: "Plugged in? I'm buying a WIRELESS laptop". (she said "wireless" loudly and slowly as if I didn't understand the word).

ME: (giving up on trying to understand what she was getting at, knowing from past experience that it's like talking to a brick wall) "Um, ok then. What do you want to use it for? And what's your budget?"

HER: "I want to use the internet, play video games and do some video editing so it needs to work fast. I can only afford about $300". (Australian $). ME: "You'd be hard-pressed to get a new laptop that does all that for under $900. You might find a used one for that price but I doubt it would be much good. My laptop cost $4,000 and it does everything I need it to".

HER: "Can I just have yours then?" ME: "What? No, sorry". This conversation went on for well over 30 minutes with her debating to me about the price and not understanding why I don't just give her mine because "that's what good friends do". She ended up leaving, saying she'd "figure it out herself". A few days later I got a call from her that made me want to scream.

ME: "Hey, What's up?" HER: "I bought a wireless laptop yesterday and it's stopped working. How do I fix this?" ME: "What have you been doing on it? Have you downloaded something you shouldn't? What's on the screen now?" HER: "It's black on the screen. I turned it on when I got home and set it up. It was working fine last night but when I went to check on it this morning it wouldn't turn on".

ME: "Ok, don't panic. Bring it to my place and I'll have a look at it. Bring the box too". She lived two blocks away so she was over 10 minutes later. She only had the laptop with her but no charger. I had a feeling that it was just out of batteries but I tried turning it on just in case. Nothing. ME: "Where's everything else it came with?" HER: "This is all that was in the box".

ME: "Where's the box?" HER: "I didn't think I needed the box so I threw it out".

ME: "Please tell me you kept the charger? Bin collection was last night!" HER: "What charger? I bought a wireless laptop". ME: "Wireless doesn't mean cordless. It just means that if it's charged you can use it without the charger until the battery goes flat". HER: "What are you talking about? The man at the store said it was wireless". ME: (internally face palming) "It's the same as your phone. If you don't charge it, it goes flat, which is what's happened here. You need to charge it".

HER: (not listening to reason) "I'll just buy a new battery. This one's probably broken. Do you have a spare battery?" ME: "A new battery? Do you know what a computer battery looks like? They don't just sell them cheap at the store like remote control batteries. They're expensive". HER: ....(gives a blank stare). ME: "You needed that box. It has the charger, the instructions, and the warranty information".

HER: "But I didn't need the box. I only needed the laptop. This is supposed to be WIRELESS!" (saying 'wireless' by emphasizing every syllable). At this point, I gave up trying to explain it to her and she never asked me about computers after that and I still don't understand where her logic was coming from. I wonder if she ever got a charger? Who knows.

fredzred

Let me start by saying my mom is a generally nice and fairly smart person. She is, however, not very good at slightly more complicated biology (anything over common knowledge) as her job just had nothing to do with it. My dad, however, studied medicine for a while and both my sister and I were taking biology classes in high school.

Anyway, my mom has been donating blood for decades and she instilled in my sister and me the desire to start donating as soon as we could as well. In my country, you can sign up to become a blood donor at 18, and the first time you go they just take a little blood to do some testing. It's only the second time that you actually donate blood.

Because it would be my first time to actually donate blood, my mom and I went together. Meanwhile, my sister stayed at home with my dad. My parents divorced when I was six because they just didn't fit together. They were still on speaking terms and relatively friendly with each other, however. There was never any betrayal going on, just plain not-getting-along.

So when we got to the blood donation center, we got handed a questionnaire with the important data for the doctor on it, including your blood type. I have 0-, both my parents have 0+, something my mom knew but I didn't. The donation went well and we headed back to my dad's place to pick up my sister. My mom was nice and happy the whole time. And then something changed.

As soon as we walked into the living room where both my dad and my sister were chilling on the couch, she suddenly said to my dad: “Explain this! Our son has 0- blood and I don't! How is that possible!!" She was very clearly implying that somehow my dad cheated on her and that's why my blood was different than hers and my dad's.

She wasn't screaming mad or anything, but all three of us just stared at her until my dad said, ''Well if something happened there, YOU'RE the one to know!" After my mom put 2 and 2 together we just laughed, and later on I explained to her how genetics work.

OscarThePoscar

Source: 1

Born into a wealthy but strict family, Grace Kelly was, surprisingly, not the star of the show. Compared to her three robust siblings, she seemed the weakest of them all: skinny, sickly, and terribly shy. Shrinking in her family's shadow, Grace retreated inward and used her imagination to escape the feeling of being the odd one out.

In her childhood fantasies, Grace was the princess of her own story. Of course, she had no idea that these dreams would become her twisted fate.

Grace grew up in a massive home, decked out with luxuries every little princess could want. Her parents raised her as a devout Catholic and sent her to the best schools. But for any privileged child, the pressure of perfection often breeds rebellion—and Grace was no exception. Going against the grain, she bent the rules in a startlingly unholy way.

There was always a war within Grace. On one hand, she wanted to please her parents, but on the other, she wasn't averse to being a downright hellraiser. She dated the bad boys and preferred acting over sports. However, her dreams of becoming an actress elicited a disturbing reaction from her father who, at the time, considered the profession "a slim cut above streetwalker".

But did this barrage of disapproval stop Grace Kelly? Not a chance.

Although Grace Kelly is considered one of the most stunning Hollywood actresses, she wasn't always considered the belle of the ball. Growing up, her friends always saw her wearing headscarves and glasses, her slim figure hidden away by bulky sweaters. In fact, they never considered her to be a great beauty. Of course, once they began to see Grace Kelly appear on screen, they couldn't believe their eyes.

You see, after moving to New York to attend drama school, Grace Kelly underwent a serious transformation. She worked hard on her elocution, nailing her signature accent: slightly British and softly rounded. But her voice wasn't her only bargaining chip. Grace took control over her image—and when she stepped behind the camera, she had the power to make jaws drop.

In no time at all, 20-year-old Grace Kelly morphed from a timid schoolgirl into a gorgeous leading lady. She became a sought-after model and began acting in commercials. She was refined and glamorous, and one of her old friends admitted to seeing her in action and thinking, "My heavens, that's our Grace"? It was a Cinderella story in the making—but sadly, it did not promise a fairytale ending.

At her father's insistence, Grace Kelly stayed at the Barbizon Hotel for Women in Manhattan—and for one sobering reason. Her parents believed this female-only residence would help keep Grace out of trouble. But they were sorely mistaken. Most scandalously, Grace was reportedly "fond of dancing to Hawaiian music down the hallways...and given to shocking her fellow residents by performing topless".

Oh, but that was only the beginning.

Along with her reckless antics at the Barbizon, Grace also took on an unsuitable lover. Theater director Don Richardson taught Grace at the college and knew that she was destined for greatness: "The camera did more than love her. It was insane about her—just like I was".  Unfortunately, Richardson's devotion to Grace wasn't enough to win her parents over.

When she brought her beau home to meet her family, it ended in disaster.

When it came to her relationships, Grace's family was usually the nail in the coffin. Don Richardson was simply the first boyfriend in a long line of disappointments. You see, no matter who she fell for, her parents staunchly refused to give her their blessing unless the match was exactly what they envisioned for her. But although she felt stifled in her love life, she could take consolation in one thing...

Her career was about to catapult sky-high.

Although Grace had no trouble bagging parts in television, she truly believed that theater was the nobler pursuit. In 1951, the 22-year-old traveled to Denver to perform in summer stock and this is where Hollywood came knocking. Her first big break? High Noon—a Western where she played opposite one of Hollywood's most notorious leading men, Gary Cooper.

Of course, Grace couldn't resist the charms of her love interest. Behind closed doors, her libido raged out of control and sparked the first of many scandalous affairs.

Gary Cooper set the stage for Grace Kelly's turbulent love life. He was exactly her type: decades older than her and married. She tended to go for strapping, authoritative men that were reminiscent of her father. What's more? Cooper certainly had no problem kissing and telling. Later, he revealed, "She looked like a cold dish with a man until you got her pants down, then she'd explode".

Grace Kelly's red-hot beginnings in Hollywood unleashed her naughty side—and it would only spill over into her next project.

Although Grace didn't receive rave reviews for her performance in High Noon, she still managed to catch the eye of director John Ford who described her as having "breeding, quality, and class". So, when Gene Tierney dropped her role in his upcoming production, Mogambo, Ford turned to Grace Kelly as her replacement. And so began another scandalous production.

Mogambo's hot Nairobi setting promised a slick adventure for the Hollywood newcomer. Coming from wealth, Grace could afford to be picky about her roles. After all, she had options. However, she really wanted to be in this particular production. She later said, “Mogambo had three things that interested me: John Ford, Clark Gable, and a trip to Africa with expenses paid".

Again, Grace had her head turned by the picture's suave leading man—and boy, did things get heated.

Rumors about an on-set affair began to swirl and when Grace's mother caught wind of them, she sprang into action. She wasn't about to let her daughter be debauched by Gable—and flew to Africa to chaperone her. Of course, this didn't do much to quash the passion brewing between Grace and Gable. Although she never outrightly admitted to the affair, the actress later made an infamous statement about their relationship.

Grace Kelly certainly knew her way around a star-studded cast. Regarding Clark Gable, she said, "What else is there to do if you're alone in a tent in Africa with Clark Gable"? However, although Grace mooned over her mustachioed lover, Gable didn't reciprocate the intensity of her feelings. Naive and head over heels, Grace simply assumed that their romance would continue after filming wrapped. She was so, so wrong.

Once the actors returned to the hustle and bustle of LA, the heady, dreamworld of Mogambo faded. Supposedly, Gable found Grace too clingy—and unceremoniously dumped her. At that moment, the young actress's heart shattered. But it wasn't long before she dried her eyes and forged onward. After all, she had even bigger fish to fry.

While nursing her disappointment over Gable, Grace Kelly had one of the most fateful encounters of her life. Enter: Alfred Hitchcock. Although not initially impressed with the actress, Hitchcok sensed something smoldered beneath Grace's icy persona. "She's a volcano covered with snow," he stated. But disturbingly, there was a chilling side to his adoration.

Hitchcock wanted Grace for his next picture, Dial M for Murder. Although he didn't intimately pursue her, as he did some of his other leading ladies, Hitchcok relished in his control over her. Moreover, the production itself threw some painful curveballs her way. Most notably, it took five days to film a particularly aggressive scene where Grace's character is handled brutally.

The consequences were startling.

By the time Hitchock got the shots he needed, Grace Kelly was black and blue—covered in bruises. Still, this wasn't enough to taint the actress's experience on set. After all, she had a very warm place to rest her tired head at the end of the day. Unsurprisingly, Grace took up with her dashing leading man. This time, it was married actor, Ray Milland—and their romance was, by far, the messiest yet.

Grace Kelly may have truly fallen for Milland, but he'd been married to the same woman for more than 20 years. This spicy slice of infidelity caused some serious backlash for the actors. Apparently, when his betrayed wife discovered the affair, she threw Milland out of their home. Some reports even claimed that Milland was ready to leave his life for Grace, that is, until he came to a chilling realization.

Milland quickly backtracked on his divorce plans once he realized just how much one would cost. Consequently, Grace watched as another lover slipped through her fingers. Even worse? The press had gotten wind of her affair and decided to crucify her for it. Most infamously, gossip columnist Hedda Hopper dug into Grace Kelly in the worst way imaginable.

Hopper was extra vindictive when writing about Grace's affair with Milland, characterizing the actress as a nymphomaniac. With the press out for blood, the elegant actress became a homewrecker in the eyes of the public—and it almost destroyed her career. And yet, despite the whispers, Grace was able to rise above her sordid reputation.

Even more impressive? She did not give up her penchant for scandal.

By the time she waltzed onto the set of her next Hitchock film, Rear Window, Grace Kelly's reputation preceded her. This time, her handsome leading man was none other than the beloved 46-year-old Jimmy Stewart. It seemed like just the kind of match Grace would warm to—but although she found Stewart wildly attractive, she never got a chance to lay a finger on him.

Jimmy Stewart's wife, Gloria, was paranoid about her husband working with the gorgeous blonde—now well known for seducing married men. Of course, it didn't help that Stewart himself admitted a soft spot for his co-star. He later said, "Everybody just sat around and waited for her to come in the morning, so we could just look at her".

Gloria, wary of Grace Kelly's powers of seduction, made sure to keep a close eye on her.

Yup, Gloria wasn't taking any chances. To ensure that her husband stayed on the straight and narrow, Gloria drove Stewart to work every day, stayed to watch the day's takes, and then drove him home. With eagle eyes like those on set, it's no wonder that Jimmy Stewart was one of the only actors she failed to ensnare. But no matter. It wouldn't be long before Grace was back to her maneating ways.

By the time she'd finished Rear Window, Grace Kelly had certainly cemented her name as one of the most glamorous stars in Hollywood. But she wasn't satisfied with being just a pretty face. When she read the script for 1954's The Country Girl,  she knew that this was her chance to prove that she had actual talent. The role was gritty and opposite to the demure parts she usually played.

However, there was one thing standing in her way.

Grace's studio did not want to loan her to Paramount for The Country Girl. Her response was downright brilliant. She reportedly said, "Well I'm terribly sorry to hear that. I'll tell you what I will do, I'll give you my address so you'll know where to send your Christmas cards". The threat worked perfectly and only minutes later, she had the part.

Not only did Grace Kelly nail the difficult role, but behind closed doors, she also entertained the affections of two different men.

The rumored affair that Grace had with William Holden was more serious than it seemed. Some say he even considered leaving his wife to be with Grace. However, it was never meant to be—and for good reason, as she was also wooing her other co-star, Bing Crosby. This particular dalliance led to one of the juiciest pieces of gossip in Hollywood.

Reportedly, on the night Grace Kelly won an Oscar for her performance in The Country Girl, Bing Crosby traipsed his way to the front of her hotel room door. He had hoped to spend the night wrapped in her passionate embrace. Little did he know, he was in for a rude awakening. He found more than just Grace in her bed; he discovered her sleeping with none other than the notorious ladies' man, Marlon Brando.

Grace Kelly juggled her affairs like no other and presented herself to the public as a wholesome figure. In fact, her ability to maintain a good reputation baffled some of her peers. Zsa Zsa Gabor, a maneater herself, stated, "She had more boyfriends in a month than I had in a lifetime. She went to bed with anyone she fancied at the time".

Still, when it finally came time for Grace Kelly to truly fall in love, it ended horrifically.

Fashion designer Oleg Cassini had fallen for Grace Kelly after seeing her in Mogambo. And, while in California, he struck up a friendship with her—but it was destined to be so much more. When Grace traveled to the south of France to begin filming one of her most famous films, To Catch a Thief, she left a heartstopping note for the distinguished designer.

According to Cassini, Grace's note read: "Those who love me follow me". And yes, you guessed it, Cassini rushed to France to be with her. In remembering his relationship with Grace, Cassini later commented, "I must say they were the most enchanting days that I've ever had at any time in my life". In fact, he loved her so much—he proposed.

Sadly, Grace and Cassini had no clue that their heady bliss was about to take a chilling turn.

No matter how famous she became, Grace Kelly still yearned to impress her parents. Unfortunately, when she presented them with Oleg Cassini, they were far from impressed: They disapproved of his previous marriages and Russian background. As a result, their vicious criticism of her fiancé dealt the fatal blow to her engagement. But the heartbreak didn't end there.

Although her parents might not have known it at the time, there were even darker rumors surrounding their daughter and Oleg Cassini. According to Hollywood gossip, Grace had become pregnant with Cassini's baby and then had an abortion. On the heels of her broken dreams, the actress smiled through the pain and attended the Cannes film festival in 1955.

It was a trip that changed the course of her life forever.

While at the Cannes film festival, Grace Kelly received an invitation to nearby Monaco. There, she would come face to face with its prince, enjoy a tour of the palace, and smile for the cameras. Prince Rainier III, then 32 and single, welcomed Grace into the palace gardens and showed her his private zoo. By the time she'd finished her visit, a sizzling connection had sparked between the two of them.

This time, however, was different from all the rest.

Grace Kelly left the splendor of Monaco thoroughly impressed with its prince. Following their happy interlude, the two of them started a secret correspondence—and they grew closer and closer. Then it was time for the moment of truth. At Christmas, Grace invited Rainier to her parents' place. This is where she made the impression of a lifetime.

Grace Kelly wowed Rainier with her down-to-earth personality. Beneath her sparkly exterior, she was humble and refined. He, in turn, was intelligent and charismatic, and, of course, a royal. If any man was going to impress her parents, Rainier was the golden ticket. After spending less than a full day with one another, the prince asked the eager actress for her hand in marriage.

After a string of disappointing romances, Grace had finally brought home a man that delighted her social-climbing family. Rainer was Roman Catholic, had never been married before, and was only six years older than Grace. It was a tailor-made fairy tale—but it came at a high price. Prince Rainier did not want his future wife to be entrenched in Hollywood.

And so, Grace had no choice but to make a huge sacrifice.

News of the impending royal wedding rocked the headlines, but Grace had one more obligation to MGM before waving goodbye to her old life. She certainly went out with a bang. Grace Kelly's final film was High Society, and her role was eerily appropriate. She played a high-class debutante on the verge of marriage, and, throughout filming, donned her 10.47-carat engagement ring.

Many were disappointed when the prince announced that High Society would be Grace's last moment on screen. But rest assured, her greatest acting role was surely the one she took on as Princess Grace of Monaco.

Although Grace Kelly adored being an actress, she later admitted that she didn't enjoy the movie star publicity. That said, the press she endured in Hollywood was nothing compared with the royal attention she received leading up to her wedding, and beyond. Nervous and with every eye upon her, Grace entered into this strange new world—blind to the dangers that lurked in the distance.

When Grace Kelly walked down the aisle, her stunning wedding dress immediately made fashion history, even inspiring Kate Middleton's gown. Kelly's show-stopping white dress featured 25 yards of silk taffeta, 100 yards of silk net, and priceless antique rose point lace. To top it all off, the veil showcased thousand of small precious pearls, each of which had to be sewn in by hand.

Sadly, not even a beautiful dress could save this day from turning into an actual disaster.

The day of Grace's wedding was a nightmare. The paparazzi was out in full force and voracious mobs of people overwhelmed the couple on their special day. In fact, they loathed the memory so much—they refused to even look at their wedding photographs for a year. After the frantic nature of their nuptials, the newlyweds escaped to their honeymoon.

Her new life was meant to be her "happily ever after"—but, as Grace quickly learned, it was more like a horror story.

Rainier knew his people wouldn't accept a movie star princess, so, almost immediately after the wedding, he banned all screenings of her films. This was a brutal order for a woman so passionate about acting. Not performing took a terrible toll on Grace, eventually causing her to suffer from depression. But this wasn't her only source of melancholy.

While you'd hope that Grace Kelly would be able to talk to her husband about her feelings and maybe reach some kind of compromise, it doesn't seem like that was an option. Rainier could be cold and withholding, and he was profoundly disinterested in Grace's creative pursuits. For instance, when Grace hosted an annual poetry reading, her husband didn't attend for years in a row.

And then, to make matters worse, there were her nasty in-laws. Rainier's family was just as apathetic as the prince himself.

To become a princess, Grace had to leave behind her family, friends, and successful career. Completely isolated for the first time in her life, she had no clue just how lonely she'd become. Not only did she find it difficult to adapt to her new home, but her husband's family also gave her the cold shoulder. Then, nine months after this new adventure began, things got a lot more complicated.

Before marrying Rainier, Grace had to undergo a fertility test because producing an heir would be a huge part of her new role. Well, she certainly came through in that department. Less than a year after marrying, she and Rainier welcomed their first daughter, Caroline. Then, a year later, she made her prince's dreams come true by giving birth to a son, Albert.

Sadly, no amount of parental bliss could fill the chasm rapidly growing between Grace and Rainier.

To her dismay, Grace began to realize that she and her husband had very little in common. While Rainier was often sour-faced and wrapped up in business affairs, Grace became the face of the royal family—and the people of Monaco adored her. Her star power transformed the nation into a magnet for tourism. Property values soared sky-high and its dwindling power began to climb once again.

But although Grace certainly revived Monaco, it did not return the favor.

By 1960, Grace had hit an all-time low. Grappling with the death of her father, the princess had only more loss on the horizon. Over the next couple of years, she suffered multiple miscarriages. But that wasn't all. After having her children, the princess wanted nothing more than to return to acting. But her controlling husband kept her trapped in Monaco.

Six years into her marriage, it seemed like Grace Kelly's dream of returning to the screen was about to come true. The palace made a stunning announcement: The princess would be starring in a film directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Grace looked forward to playing a role in Marnie—but only months later, her hopes came crashing down.

In the end, Grace Kelly did not make a triumphant return to Hollywood. She claimed that due to scheduling conflicts and the need to be with her children, she'd have to turn down the role. Hitchcock, on the other hand, was not convinced. He stubbornly believed that it was "the conservative element in Monaco" that had foiled the princess's plans.

And when it came to disappointments, the princess's royal life wasn't done twisting the knife in.

The press did not back off from Princess Grace and her family, and it was a hard reality that she never really got used to. They went after her children. And even worse? They fueled the heartbreaking rumors that Prince Rainier had many mistresses on the side. Of course, Grace had her fair share of scandalous whispers to contend with. In fact, there was a rumored affair that continued to rear its head.

No matter how far from Hollywood she got, it would never be finished with her. Many believed that she'd had an illicit dalliance with To Catch a Thief co-star Cary Grant. Some even suppose that she continued to see Grant after she'd entered the royal family. Still, while these bombshell rumors have never been confirmed, Grant had no qualms about outwardly expressing his undying adoration for Grace.

As one of Hollywood's most sought-after actors, Cary Grant acted alongside beauties like Audrey Hepburn and Deborah Kerr. But no matter how many women he met, Grace Kelly was by far his favorite leading lady. He once said, "With all due respect to Ingrid Bergman, I much preferred Grace. She had serenity". He also called her, "The most extraordinary actress ever".

However, the rumors of her scandalous past couldn't invite old lovers back into her life. As she aged, Grace Kelly was still as unfulfilled as ever.

In 1981, Grace had the chance to meet Prince Charles' fiancé, Princess Diana. Even then, 19-year-old Diana sensed that there was trouble afoot. She later wrote, "I remember meeting Princess Grace and how wonderful and serene she was—but there was troubled water under her, I saw that". But that wasn't the most shocking part of their introduction.

During the royal event, Grace had a chance to catch up with Diana in the lady's restroom. Here, away from prying eyes, Diana opened up to the veteran princess, explaining how terribly alone she felt. In confidence, Grace confessed something so chilling—it's unforgettable. She told Diana, "Don't worry dear, it'll only get worse".

Well, considering both of their tragic fates, Grace was absolutely right.

On September 13, 1982, a terrifying car accident caused Grace Kelly's life to end far too soon. She and her daughter Stephanie were driving home along the hilly Monaco streets when Grace reportedly had a stroke. She lost control of the car, which plunged over 50 feet down the mountainside, landing on its roof. Paramedics rushed Grace and Stephanie to the hospital, but sadly the damage was done.

At the hospital, French doctors made a startling discovery. Their patient had suffered not one but two brain hemorrhages. The CAT scan showed that the first happened before the car crash and likely caused the accident. Incidentally, this stroke also explained the frequent headaches that the princess had been complaining of before the accident.

But this was only one piece of the puzzle.

Grace's second brain injury occurred after the crash when she fighting for her life in the hospital—most likely because of the trauma her body had endured. The princess slipped into a comatose state and all signs suggested that she would not wake up. Prince Rainier made the tragic decision to take his wife off of life support. She passed at just 52 years old.

Grace Kelly was buried in the royal family’s vault following the funeral, which featured a eulogy by fellow actor James Stewart. “I just love Grace Kelly. Not because she was a princess, not because she was an actress, not because she was my friend, but because she was just about the nicest lady I ever met.” Among those who attended her funeral were Cary Grant, Nancy Reagan, and Princess Diana.

But despite the end of her legendary life, the repercussions of that unspeakable day continued to cause problems.

Grace Kelly's daughter Stephanie thankfully escaped the crash with a hairline fracture and a slight concussion, but the impact on her was immense. Because of her injuries, she could not attend her own mother's funeral. In fact, the entire ordeal was so distressing that Stephanie refused to talk about it for decades. When she finally addressed her loss, her confession was downright heartbreaking.

In remembering her mother's brutal end, Stephanie said, "Not only did I go through the horrible trauma of losing my mother at a very young age, but I was beside her at the moment of the accident. Nobody can imagine how much I've suffered, and still suffer." Sadly, there was another reason why that fateful day continued to haunt Stephanie.

After Grace perished in the car crash, rumors began to swirl about exactly how the tragedy came to be. People thought it was strange for Grace to be driving at all, since she was well known to dislike it and always used a chauffeur. When they learned that Stephanie had been pulled out of the driver's seat, rather than the passenger's side, they immediately wondered: Was she the one driving on that fateful day?

Stephanie has always denied it, but the rumors persist.

Despite their less-than-perfect marriage and Grace's prevailing unhappiness, Prince Rainier seemed completely broken after his wife's passing. He never truly recovered from the loss. He never remarried or loved another, and when he passed away in 2005, he was buried alongside her.

The classic Alfred Hitchcock film To Catch A Thief features a famous scene where Grace Kelly's character Frances drives Cary Grant's John Robie around the French Riviera and escapes a dangerous pursuit. When the film premiered, viewers celebrated the scene for its tension and beauty. But after Grace's tragic death, the sequence took on an entirely different meaning.

Today, viewers can watch Grace Kelly zip around the same area where she would perish in a car crash. But that wasn't the most disturbing part. To make matters worse, it turned out that Grace had to perform her own stunt driving during filming...even though she was very uncomfortable with traversing the dangerous roads.

Before Grace Kelly wed Prince Rainier, another starlet had her eye on the handsome royal. heard that Rainier was looking for a bride from her friend . Though the blonde beauty wasn't seriously interested in pursuing him, she felt confident that she could wrap the prince around her little finger. Monroe reportedly quipped, "Give me two days alone with him."

Oh, but when it came to Monaco's royal family, Monroe still managed to have the last word.

Of course, in the end, Rainier ended up meeting and marrying Grace Kelly, not Marilyn Monroe. For her part, Monroe wasn't at all put out by not landing the royal. On the day of Grace and Rainier's wedding, Monroe sent Kelly a heartbreaking telegram. It simply read "I'm SO happy you found a way out of this business."

Despite her controversial passing and scandalous Hollywood career, many still wonder why Grace Kelly felt the need to have so many affairs throughout her lifetime. According to one of her friends, the answer won't make fans feel good. Grace's parents were incredibly strict and demanding. She grew up craving love and attention and felt that romance was an easy shortcut to intimacy and validation.

As her friend Don Richardson said, "She was starved for affection because of the family. She was afflicted with a great sense of emptiness, terrible loneliness, and this was her way of alleviating it."

Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, , 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11,

Terrence Stephen "Steve" McQueen wasn't some pretty-boy actor who never got his hands dirty. McQueen spent most of his life racing anything that had an engine, from grueling endurance classics to wild offroad motorcycle races. It's safe to say he got his need for speed from his father, William McQueen, who had one of the coolest jobs in history.

William McQueen earned his keep as a stunt pilot in a flying circus, performing terrifying stunts in a rickety old biplane. It's little wonder that his boy Steve grew up as an adrenaline junkie. But that's about all that William McQueen gave his boy, seeing as he abandoned Steve's mom Julia just six months after meeting her, leaving her pregnant and alone.

Steve McQueen's mother never had much luck with men—and her son would pay the price for it time and time again.

Unfortunately for little Steve, 20-year-old Julia Ann Crawford was not ready to be a mother. From her drinking problem to her penchant for violent men, she never made her son a priority. It was a blessing, then, when she sent her boy to live with his grandparents in Slater, Missouri. It would lead to some of the best days of Steve McQueen's life—but trouble was always around the corner.

McQueen remembered his days on the farm in Missouri as some of the happiest of his life, but they couldn't last forever. His mother dragged him out of his idyllic, pastoral childhood and straight into a nightmare. Since he was dyslexic and slightly deaf thanks to a childhood ear infection, he struggled terribly in school—but if school was bad, his life at home was even worse.

Julia's new husband had a violent temper, and he frequently beat young Steve McQueen. It got so bad that McQueen actually ran away from home to live on the streets...at just nine years old. In the blink of an eye, he went from having a loving family and a simple life on a farm to living on the streets of Indianapolis, afraid for his life. It's little wonder, then, that the boy started down a dark path.

Before long, McQueen joined up with a street gang in Indianapolis. At a time when most kids are playing with friends and stressing about homework, Steve McQueen was prowling the city committing petty act. His mother had never been there for him, but even she started to realize that her son was headed for a life behind bars. She decided to do something about it—but as always, that meant passing the buck.

It had worked once, so why wouldn't it work again? Julia sent McQueen back to live with his family in Missouri. I can only imagine the relief that the boy felt to return to the country, but his sojourn didn't last long this time. When McQueen was 12, his mother's marriage to her no-good second husband disintegrated and she moved to sunny Los Angeles to get a fresh start, bringing her boy with her.

It was going to be better this time, right? Well, Julia rarely stayed single for long. She'd married for the third time, and in case you couldn't tell, she wasn't exactly into "fatherly" types.

12-year-old Steve and his newest stepfather hated each other from the second they met. Like his mom's last husband, this guy drank and beat both of them. Before long, McQueen was back in the same cycle of rebellion and lawbreaking. Can you see where this is going? His mom threw in the towel once more and sent Steve back to Slater.

But McQueen's time on the streets had begun hardening him. The quiet, country life couldn't contain him anymore, and this trip to Missouri would be his last.

At 14 years old, Steve McQueen snuck away from his great-uncle's farm and never looked back. He didn't even say goodbye. Maybe he took inspiration from stories about his absent father, but McQueen wanted a life of adventure—and he found it almost immediately. He joined a circus for a time, but apparently, he wasn't the rodeo clown type.

He didn't last long at the circus, and soon enough, McQueen found himself back in LA with his mother and stepfather. But this time, things were different. He was growing up—and he'd gained a dark side.

Upon returning to LA, McQueen went straight back to his life on the streets. At one point, officers caught him stealing hubcaps and dragged him back to his mother's place. There, his stepfather was waiting, and as soon as the officers left, he beat McQueen as he had so many times before. The attack culminated in McQueen's stepfather throwing him down the stairs.

Who knows what it was, but this beating wasn't like the others. This time, something in McQueen finally just...snapped.

Lying at the foot of the staircase, Steve McQueen looked up at his stepfather and uttered a chilling threat: "You lay your stinking hands on me again and I swear, I'll kill you". There must have been something in his eyes, because this time, his mother and stepfather believed him. Their relationship had been terrible for years, but this was something new.

This marked the start of a new chapter in the life of Steve McQueen.

McQueen's mother usually had one play: Send him back to Slater. That had stopped working, so this time, she took drastic measures. Her husband had her sign court papers that legally declared McQueen incorrigible. It let them send him to the California Junior Boys Republic, a boarding school for troubled youths in Chino.

The experience would eventually see Steve McQueen turn his entire life around—but it began like any other nightmare.

Boys Republic was no summer camp. Regular life at the school was hard enough, but as a newcomer, the other boys tormented McQueen when he first arrived. Not only was he an outsider, but whenever he did something wrong, the teachers punished his entire class, not just him. This made him a pariah, and he received further beatings from his classmates.

But, as time passed, things changed. McQueen started to fit in for the first time in his life—and it left a lasting impression.

Though the place felt like a prison at first, it turns out the boarding school was exactly what McQueen needed. By the time he left at 16, he was a completely new person—and he never forgot the school that shaped him into the man he became. Even when he was rich and famous, McQueen returned to the Boys Republic to speak with students for the rest of his life.

McQueen had finally broken out of his life on the wild side, but that doesn't mean he settled down. In fact, this is when his life really went off the deep end.

Steve McQueen lived more in his late teens than most of us live in our lifetime. After leaving Chino, he met up with his mother in Greenwich Village, New York—but he didn't stay in the Big Apple for long. He met a pair of Merchant Marines and they persuaded him to take his life to the sea. Soon enough, he found himself aboard a ship bound for the Dominican Republic.

If you think that suddenly signing up with the Merchant Marines as a teenager is wild, just wait til you hear what he did next...

Apparently, the sailor life just wasn't it for Steve McQueen. As soon as he arrived in the Dominican Republic, he abandoned his post. Instead, he took a job...At a cathouse. The bohemian chapter of McQueen's life had officially begun. He didn't stay there for long, though, eventually finding his way back to Texas to work in a carnival. Then he ended up in Canada, working as a lumberjack.

Steve McQueen was never a man to be tied down easily, and he jumped from job to job, city to city, country to country, for around two years, all before he was even 18.

The Navy sounds like a strange place for a restless soul like McQueen, but that's where he ended up in 1947. He wasn't yet 18, but he got his mother to give him special permission. Turns out, she was willing to do just about anything to get rid of him, and the Marines probably seemed better than the streets. McQueen enlisted with the Marines and headed off to boot camp.

So, how do you think the consummate rebel did in the Navy? Yeah, it didn't go great...

McQueen got off a decent start in the Armed Forces, earning a promotion to private first class—but it didn't last long. He just couldn't help but rebel against authority, and he ended up getting busted down to private seven times. But demotions were the least of his troubles. After authorities caught him in dereliction of duty, staying with a girlfriend for weeks after his leave had finished, they detained him. As you can imagine, McQueen didn't "go quietly". He resisted and got himself 41 long days in the brig.

OK, so he got off to a rocky start as a Marine—but eventually, a new side of him started to emerge.

His time in the brig seems to have straightened him out a little, because McQueen shaped up and became a model Marine after. The highlight of his career came during a brutal Arctic exercise. While training in frozen waters, McQueen's ship suddenly hit a sandbar, throwing several men into the waves. McQueen dove in and pulled five other Marines ashore before they succumbed to the frigid waters, saving their lives. Maybe there was more to this rebel than met the eye?

But this isn't the story of Steve McQueen, famous marine. By now, McQueen was 22 years old, and it was about time he found his true calling.

It was 1952, and Steve McQueen had tried just about every job under the sun, except the one we know him for: Actor. Well, if we know one thing, it's that McQueen never shied away from new experiences. He took his money from the G.I. Bill and started taking acting classes in New York City under teachers like Sanford Meisner and Uta Hagen.

Acting was a whole new world for him, and he took to it quickly. Plus, it came with its fair share of "...perks".

Throughout his career, Steve McQueen's love life was always a topic of fascination for the tabloids. He jumped from one beautiful actress to another, and that started back in his early days taking acting classes in New York City. He began dating another hopeful young student—actress Gia Scala. Scala never quite achieved McQueen's level of success, but she appeared in dozens of Hollywood films throughout the 50s and 60s.

The pair had a wild fling, but it didn't last long. Maybe Scala didn't approve of how McQueen spent his weekends...

The G.I. Bill helped McQueen get a foothold in New York City, but it couldn't pay the bills forever. Fortunately, McQueen had other skills that could help with that: He started racing motorcycles every weekend to support his fledgling acting career. And, of course, he was good at it. Pretty soon, he was making around $100 every weekend, the equivalent of about $1,000 today.

If things had gone differently, McQueen might have become a professional racer—but stardom awaited him on screen.

The opportunities McQueen was looking for just didn't exist in New York City, so in 1955, he moved out west to try his luck in Hollywood. It was there that he met his first love. Around a year after arriving in LA, Steve McQueen married a gorgeous actress (shocker). Her name was Neile Adams, and the couple would go on to have two children together.

Their marriage would eventually go up in flames, but at least the early years were filled with happiness. Just as McQueen was starting a family, his career started taking off too.

McQueen fared a lot better in Hollywood than in New York. Soon enough, he even had a starring role in a feature film. Sure, the film was The Blob, a schlocky B-movie that opened alongside I Married a Monster From Outer Space, but it helped put McQueen on the map. It also helped him land a role in a TV pilot for a new western series.

The show was called Wanted: Dead or Alive, and its rugged, antihero bounty hunter Josh Randall cemented Steve McQueen as a star. But this was just the beginning.

With Wanted: Dead or Alive, Steve McQueen had finally hit the big time. Some of his most iconic roles came next, including The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape. It had taken about a decade, but Steve McQueen had officially arrived—and Hollywood's newest leading man quickly set himself apart from his peers.

Anyone who worked with him could tell you, Steve McQueen was willing to do things that no other actor would—or could, for that matter.

Unsurprisingly, Steve McQueen often ended up in movies where he had to ride motorcycles or drive fast cars. For most actors, a stunt double would do the majority of the actual driving—but McQueen wasn't most actors. Directors quickly realized that McQueen could drive/ride better than most of their stuntmen, and McQueen ended up filming many of his action scenes himself.

In fact, in The Great Escape, you can actually see McQueen, dressed as a German soldier, on a motorcycle, chasing...himself.

In 1968, McQueen landed the most iconic role of his career: Bullitt. A movie about a tough, San Francisco cop who drives a Mustang and gets into a thrilling car chase through the winding streets of the city? What could go wrong? Well, actually, it turns out, a lot could go wrong. In fact, despite the final result, Bullitt very nearly ruined McQueen's career.

Between the perfectionism of director Peter Yates and McQueen himself, Bullitt went massively over budget, much to the horror of Warner Brothers studio execs. Before filming, McQueen had a massive contract with the studio that would have seen him make seven more movies, but after the Bullitt debacle, they'd had enough.

They canceled the contract before the movie had even come out—which turned out to be one of the stupidest moves in history.

Yeah, Bullitt went over budget. It was also a smash hit with critics and audiences alike, raking in 10 times its inflated budget. So, Warner Brothers did what any self-respecting Hollywood studio would do: They came running back to McQueen with their tails between their legs, begging him to sign another contract. But they'd burned that bridge.

I bet telling Warner Bros. to screw off felt pretty darn good. Bullitt was the peak of McQueen's career—but the problem with peaks is, there's nowhere to go but down.

While McQueen's career was thriving, his marriage was on the rocks. Steve and his wife Neile had started growing apart, and her 1971 abortion pushed their relationship to its breaking point. They'd been together for over 15 years, but that didn't stop McQueen from falling into the arms of another woman. And, if that's not bad enough, McQueen's affair was with one of his costars.

Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw had instant chemistry on the set of The Getaway. The only problem was, both of them were married. But MacGraw's marriage was apparently just as frayed as McQueen's, and the pair began a secret affair. Unfortunately for them, few affairs in Hollywood stay a secret for long.

The tryst with MacGraw was the last straw for McQueen's wife. It also just so happened to be the last straw in MacGraw's marriage too. Neither of them wanted to waste any time, and within just a year, they'd divorced their spouses and married each other. Just like his last marriage, this one would burn out before long—the difference was, this one would burn a lot brighter, and a lot faster.

Many of Steve McQueen's friends called Ali MacGraw the love of his life—but their relationship was never simple. As MacGraw herself put it, "There were many times that were just wonderful and there were many times that were just ghastly". McQueen was a mercurial man, and living with him wasn't exactly easy. Then, as if their marriage wasn't stressed enough, a tragedy made things so much worse.

Ali MacGraw suffered a miscarriage during her brief, fiery marriage to Steve McQueen. Between the horrible loss and their tumultuous relationship, this marriage was doomed. Despite their love for each other, McQueen and MacGraw just couldn't make it work, divorcing in 1978. But McQueen hadn't been alone in years, so it was only a matter of time before he found someone new.

However, if you're Steve McQueen, you don't just go to a bar and try out some pickup lines. No, his dating strategy this time around was a whole lot crazier than that.

How does a megastar meet girls? He has his agent set up a date, apparently. Not long after his split from MacGraw, McQueen laid eyes on an utterly entrancing woman. Not on the street—he saw her in an advertisement. But this is Steve McQueen we're talking about, so that wasn't about to stop him. He had his agent track down the model from the ad and set up a date.

Her name was Barbary Minty, and she became McQueen's third and final wife.

For most of his life, McQueen was a serial monogamist, but he still had his fair share of flings. He had an affair with actress/model Lauren Hutton in the early 1960s, while still married to his wife. He also had an affair with Barbara Leigh, his co-star in Junior Bonner, shortly before he met Ali MacGraw. But those trysts paled in comparison to his wildest affair.

Mamie Van Doren was one of Hollywood's great, incorrigible starlets, and she claimed to have a sordid affair with McQueen in the 1960s. The pair would party long into the night, taking hallucinogens together—all while McQueen was still married with kids. Though many people close to McQueen would vouch for him as an all-around great guy, it seems as though women were always his greatest vice, and they brought out his dark side.

In the mid-70s, while arguably the biggest star on the planet, Steve McQueen stepped away from it all. He disappeared from the public eye, stopped appearing in movies, and spent his days driving around the country in a motor home, racing motorcycles wherever he stopped. While the appeal of acting eventually waned for him, racing always had his heart.

But maybe that wasn't his only reason for stepping away. Turns out, McQueen had some skeletons in his closet.

Between his up and down career and his tumultuous love life, it shouldn't come as a surprise that Steve McQueen suffered from addiction issues throughout his life. By the 1970s, he was nearly at rock bottom. He smoked like a chimney and drank heavily. He pretty much covered all his bases when it came to partying.

While at the height of his powers as a movie star, Steve McQueen could make pretty much any demand he wanted—but the demands he did make seemed completely bizarre. He would frequently agree to appear in a movie only if the studio provided him with a seemingly random list of items: Electric razors, jeans, and other basic supplies in bulk.

Obviously, these were not things that a movie star like Steve McQueen needed, so what gives? Well, it turns out, there was a heartwarming reason behind McQueen's rider.

Remember the boarding school where McQueen spent his early teenage years? Well, despite his rocky start there, he never forgot about the place. It became a home to him as so few places had, and for the rest of his life, it held a special place in his heart. He donated all those supplies from his riders to the school, and he'd often return to spend time with the students, playing pool and telling them about his experiences.

With his violent past, his many affairs, and his addiction issues, it's easy to paint Steve McQueen as a deeply troubled man, but there was always another layer to find.

Around the time his marriage to Ali MacGraw disintegrated, Steve McQueen developed a persistent cough. Not too surprising, given how much he smoked, but even when he quit, the cough remained. He tried antibiotic treatments, but still, he couldn't stop coughing. He finally went in for a biopsy—and the result was devastating. Doctors found pleural mesothelioma in his lungs. In other words, Steve McQueen had cancer.

The news was heartbreaking enough, but it gets worse. The cause of McQueen's illness was also tragic.

There are many types of cancer that can't be prevented, but there was a specific culprit behind McQueen's pleural mesothelioma: Asbestos. McQueen was exposed to the carcinogenic material throughout his life, from removing asbestos insulation from ships as a marine to acting around asbestos sound-proofing on sound stages. There was even asbestos in the protective helmets and suits McQueen wore while racing.

Though no one knew any better, Steve McQueen spent most of his adult life inhaling the dangerous material—and it finally caught up to him.

McQueen tried to keep his diagnosis hidden for as long as he could, but within months, the National Enquirer had gotten a hold of the story and revealed his illness to the world. A massive outpouring of support followed, but no one could do anything to help him now. Secret or no, his cancer was terminal. But that doesn't mean Steve McQueen was going down without a fight.

When American doctors told McQueen there was nothing they could do, he started to look elsewhere—and it led him to a truly twisted character.

There was nothing anyone could do to save Steve McQueen, but he wasn't about to admit that. He traveled to Mexico, seeking advice from a quack named William Donald Kelley. Kelley falsely claimed he had a method that could cure cancer, and McQueen was desperate, so he listened. He underwent "treatment" with Kelley—and it involved operations that ranged from bizarre to horrifying.

Under Kelley's instruction, McQueen received coffee enemas, daily injections of cow and sheep cells, constant massages, and doses of a horrible "miracle cure" called laetrile. And, as if these humiliating, uncomfortable, and ineffective treatments weren't bad enough, Kelley had the audacity to charge the desperate McQueen $40,000 a month.

Did we mention that "Doctor" William Donald Kelley had had his medical license revoked years before this? And did we mention that he had only been a freaking orthodontist? But McQueen had absolutely no options, so he listened to Kelly anyway. Sadly, it only made his final days more painful.

In October 1980, McQueen flew down to Mexico one last time. He had a massive, five-pound tumor on his liver, but his American doctors told him they couldn't operate on it. It was too large, and he was too weak—there was no way his heart could stand the operation. Still, McQueen had come this far, so he wasn't about to stop now.

Under the pseudonym "Samuel Sheppard," McQueen signed himself into a small, Juarez medical clinic. None of the doctors even knew his real identity—not that it would have made a difference.

Steve McQueen passed from heart failure at 3:45 am on November 7, 1980, at the clinic in Juarez, not long after his surgery. He was only 50 years old. It was just like his doctor had said: The cancer was terminal, and there was nothing anyone could do. But no one could say that Steve McQueen went down without a fight.

A lot of movies hire real professionals to teach actors about the characters they're playing, and Bullitt was no different. Producers brought in some grizzled old officers to show McQueen the ropes. They figured they'd give him a good scare by taking him to an actual morgue; after all, there's a morgue scene in the movie. I imagine they were looking forward to spooking this Hollywood pretty boy—but McQueen's ice-cold reaction left them stunned.

On the day of the morgue visit, McQueen casually walked into the morgue munching on an apple like it was just any other day. From that moment on, he'd gained the officers' respect.

If anyone doubted the dark side of fame, the Manson killings made it abundantly clear—but not many people realize how close they hit to home for Steve McQueen. Not only was he friends with both Sharon Tate and Jay Sebring, but around the time of the killings, the media published an alleged celebrity hit list that featured McQueen's name.

McQueen grew increasingly paranoid and took to carrying a pistol with him at all times.

Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Terrence Stephen "Steve" McQueen wasn't some pretty-boy actor who never got his hands dirty. McQueen spent most of his life racing anything that had an engine, from grueling endurance classics to wild offroad motorcycle races. It's safe to say he got his need for speed from his father, William McQueen, who had one of the coolest jobs in history.

William McQueen earned his keep as a stunt pilot in a flying circus, performing terrifying stunts in a rickety old biplane. It's little wonder that his boy Steve grew up as an adrenaline junkie. But that's about all that William McQueen gave his boy, seeing as he abandoned Steve's mom Julia just six months after meeting her, leaving her pregnant and alone.

Steve McQueen's mother never had much luck with men—and her son would pay the price for it time and time again.

Unfortunately for little Steve, 20-year-old Julia Ann Crawford was not ready to be a mother. From her drinking problem to her penchant for violent men, she never made her son a priority. It was a blessing, then, when she sent her boy to live with his grandparents in Slater, Missouri. It would lead to some of the best days of Steve McQueen's life—but trouble was always around the corner.

McQueen remembered his days on the farm in Missouri as some of the happiest of his life, but they couldn't last forever. His mother dragged him out of his idyllic, pastoral childhood and straight into a nightmare. Since he was dyslexic and slightly deaf thanks to a childhood ear infection, he struggled terribly in school—but if school was bad, his life at home was even worse.

Julia's new husband had a violent temper, and he frequently beat young Steve McQueen. It got so bad that McQueen actually ran away from home to live on the streets...at just nine years old. In the blink of an eye, he went from having a loving family and a simple life on a farm to living on the streets of Indianapolis, afraid for his life. It's little wonder, then, that the boy started down a dark path.

Before long, McQueen joined up with a street gang in Indianapolis. At a time when most kids are playing with friends and stressing about homework, Steve McQueen was prowling the city committing petty act. His mother had never been there for him, but even she started to realize that her son was headed for a life behind bars. She decided to do something about it—but as always, that meant passing the buck.

It had worked once, so why wouldn't it work again? Julia sent McQueen back to live with his family in Missouri. I can only imagine the relief that the boy felt to return to the country, but his sojourn didn't last long this time. When McQueen was 12, his mother's marriage to her no-good second husband disintegrated and she moved to sunny Los Angeles to get a fresh start, bringing her boy with her.

It was going to be better this time, right? Well, Julia rarely stayed single for long. She'd married for the third time, and in case you couldn't tell, she wasn't exactly into "fatherly" types.

12-year-old Steve and his newest stepfather hated each other from the second they met. Like his mom's last husband, this guy drank and beat both of them. Before long, McQueen was back in the same cycle of rebellion and lawbreaking. Can you see where this is going? His mom threw in the towel once more and sent Steve back to Slater.

But McQueen's time on the streets had begun hardening him. The quiet, country life couldn't contain him anymore, and this trip to Missouri would be his last.

At 14 years old, Steve McQueen snuck away from his great-uncle's farm and never looked back. He didn't even say goodbye. Maybe he took inspiration from stories about his absent father, but McQueen wanted a life of adventure—and he found it almost immediately. He joined a circus for a time, but apparently, he wasn't the rodeo clown type.

He didn't last long at the circus, and soon enough, McQueen found himself back in LA with his mother and stepfather. But this time, things were different. He was growing up—and he'd gained a dark side.

Upon returning to LA, McQueen went straight back to his life on the streets. At one point, officers caught him stealing hubcaps and dragged him back to his mother's place. There, his stepfather was waiting, and as soon as the officers left, he beat McQueen as he had so many times before. The attack culminated in McQueen's stepfather throwing him down the stairs.

Who knows what it was, but this beating wasn't like the others. This time, something in McQueen finally just...snapped.

Lying at the foot of the staircase, Steve McQueen looked up at his stepfather and uttered a chilling threat: "You lay your stinking hands on me again and I swear, I'll kill you". There must have been something in his eyes, because this time, his mother and stepfather believed him. Their relationship had been terrible for years, but this was something new.

This marked the start of a new chapter in the life of Steve McQueen.

McQueen's mother usually had one play: Send him back to Slater. That had stopped working, so this time, she took drastic measures. Her husband had her sign court papers that legally declared McQueen incorrigible. It let them send him to the California Junior Boys Republic, a boarding school for troubled youths in Chino.

The experience would eventually see Steve McQueen turn his entire life around—but it began like any other nightmare.

Boys Republic was no summer camp. Regular life at the school was hard enough, but as a newcomer, the other boys tormented McQueen when he first arrived. Not only was he an outsider, but whenever he did something wrong, the teachers punished his entire class, not just him. This made him a pariah, and he received further beatings from his classmates.

But, as time passed, things changed. McQueen started to fit in for the first time in his life—and it left a lasting impression.

Though the place felt like a prison at first, it turns out the boarding school was exactly what McQueen needed. By the time he left at 16, he was a completely new person—and he never forgot the school that shaped him into the man he became. Even when he was rich and famous, McQueen returned to the Boys Republic to speak with students for the rest of his life.

McQueen had finally broken out of his life on the wild side, but that doesn't mean he settled down. In fact, this is when his life really went off the deep end.

Steve McQueen lived more in his late teens than most of us live in our lifetime. After leaving Chino, he met up with his mother in Greenwich Village, New York—but he didn't stay in the Big Apple for long. He met a pair of Merchant Marines and they persuaded him to take his life to the sea. Soon enough, he found himself aboard a ship bound for the Dominican Republic.

If you think that suddenly signing up with the Merchant Marines as a teenager is wild, just wait til you hear what he did next...

Apparently, the sailor life just wasn't it for Steve McQueen. As soon as he arrived in the Dominican Republic, he abandoned his post. Instead, he took a job...At a cathouse. The bohemian chapter of McQueen's life had officially begun. He didn't stay there for long, though, eventually finding his way back to Texas to work in a carnival. Then he ended up in Canada, working as a lumberjack.

Steve McQueen was never a man to be tied down easily, and he jumped from job to job, city to city, country to country, for around two years, all before he was even 18.

The Navy sounds like a strange place for a restless soul like McQueen, but that's where he ended up in 1947. He wasn't yet 18, but he got his mother to give him special permission. Turns out, she was willing to do just about anything to get rid of him, and the Marines probably seemed better than the streets. McQueen enlisted with the Marines and headed off to boot camp.

So, how do you think the consummate rebel did in the Navy? Yeah, it didn't go great...

McQueen got off a decent start in the Armed Forces, earning a promotion to private first class—but it didn't last long. He just couldn't help but rebel against authority, and he ended up getting busted down to private seven times. But demotions were the least of his troubles. After authorities caught him in dereliction of duty, staying with a girlfriend for weeks after his leave had finished, they detained him. As you can imagine, McQueen didn't "go quietly". He resisted and got himself 41 long days in the brig.

OK, so he got off to a rocky start as a Marine—but eventually, a new side of him started to emerge.

His time in the brig seems to have straightened him out a little, because McQueen shaped up and became a model Marine after. The highlight of his career came during a brutal Arctic exercise. While training in frozen waters, McQueen's ship suddenly hit a sandbar, throwing several men into the waves. McQueen dove in and pulled five other Marines ashore before they succumbed to the frigid waters, saving their lives. Maybe there was more to this rebel than met the eye?

But this isn't the story of Steve McQueen, famous marine. By now, McQueen was 22 years old, and it was about time he found his true calling.

It was 1952, and Steve McQueen had tried just about every job under the sun, except the one we know him for: Actor. Well, if we know one thing, it's that McQueen never shied away from new experiences. He took his money from the G.I. Bill and started taking acting classes in New York City under teachers like Sanford Meisner and Uta Hagen.

Acting was a whole new world for him, and he took to it quickly. Plus, it came with its fair share of "...perks".

Throughout his career, Steve McQueen's love life was always a topic of fascination for the tabloids. He jumped from one beautiful actress to another, and that started back in his early days taking acting classes in New York City. He began dating another hopeful young student—actress Gia Scala. Scala never quite achieved McQueen's level of success, but she appeared in dozens of Hollywood films throughout the 50s and 60s.

The pair had a wild fling, but it didn't last long. Maybe Scala didn't approve of how McQueen spent his weekends...

The G.I. Bill helped McQueen get a foothold in New York City, but it couldn't pay the bills forever. Fortunately, McQueen had other skills that could help with that: He started racing motorcycles every weekend to support his fledgling acting career. And, of course, he was good at it. Pretty soon, he was making around $100 every weekend, the equivalent of about $1,000 today.

If things had gone differently, McQueen might have become a professional racer—but stardom awaited him on screen.

The opportunities McQueen was looking for just didn't exist in New York City, so in 1955, he moved out west to try his luck in Hollywood. It was there that he met his first love. Around a year after arriving in LA, Steve McQueen married a gorgeous actress (shocker). Her name was Neile Adams, and the couple would go on to have two children together.

Their marriage would eventually go up in flames, but at least the early years were filled with happiness. Just as McQueen was starting a family, his career started taking off too.

McQueen fared a lot better in Hollywood than in New York. Soon enough, he even had a starring role in a feature film. Sure, the film was The Blob, a schlocky B-movie that opened alongside I Married a Monster From Outer Space, but it helped put McQueen on the map. It also helped him land a role in a TV pilot for a new western series.

The show was called Wanted: Dead or Alive, and its rugged, antihero bounty hunter Josh Randall cemented Steve McQueen as a star. But this was just the beginning.

With Wanted: Dead or Alive, Steve McQueen had finally hit the big time. Some of his most iconic roles came next, including The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape. It had taken about a decade, but Steve McQueen had officially arrived—and Hollywood's newest leading man quickly set himself apart from his peers.

Anyone who worked with him could tell you, Steve McQueen was willing to do things that no other actor would—or could, for that matter.

Unsurprisingly, Steve McQueen often ended up in movies where he had to ride motorcycles or drive fast cars. For most actors, a stunt double would do the majority of the actual driving—but McQueen wasn't most actors. Directors quickly realized that McQueen could drive/ride better than most of their stuntmen, and McQueen ended up filming many of his action scenes himself.

In fact, in The Great Escape, you can actually see McQueen, dressed as a German soldier, on a motorcycle, chasing...himself.

In 1968, McQueen landed the most iconic role of his career: Bullitt. A movie about a tough, San Francisco cop who drives a Mustang and gets into a thrilling car chase through the winding streets of the city? What could go wrong? Well, actually, it turns out, a lot could go wrong. In fact, despite the final result, Bullitt very nearly ruined McQueen's career.

Between the perfectionism of director Peter Yates and McQueen himself, Bullitt went massively over budget, much to the horror of Warner Brothers studio execs. Before filming, McQueen had a massive contract with the studio that would have seen him make seven more movies, but after the Bullitt debacle, they'd had enough.

They canceled the contract before the movie had even come out—which turned out to be one of the stupidest moves in history.

Yeah, Bullitt went over budget. It was also a smash hit with critics and audiences alike, raking in 10 times its inflated budget. So, Warner Brothers did what any self-respecting Hollywood studio would do: They came running back to McQueen with their tails between their legs, begging him to sign another contract. But they'd burned that bridge.

I bet telling Warner Bros. to screw off felt pretty darn good. Bullitt was the peak of McQueen's career—but the problem with peaks is, there's nowhere to go but down.

While McQueen's career was thriving, his marriage was on the rocks. Steve and his wife Neile had started growing apart, and her 1971 abortion pushed their relationship to its breaking point. They'd been together for over 15 years, but that didn't stop McQueen from falling into the arms of another woman. And, if that's not bad enough, McQueen's affair was with one of his costars.

Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw had instant chemistry on the set of The Getaway. The only problem was, both of them were married. But MacGraw's marriage was apparently just as frayed as McQueen's, and the pair began a secret affair. Unfortunately for them, few affairs in Hollywood stay a secret for long.

The tryst with MacGraw was the last straw for McQueen's wife. It also just so happened to be the last straw in MacGraw's marriage too. Neither of them wanted to waste any time, and within just a year, they'd divorced their spouses and married each other. Just like his last marriage, this one would burn out before long—the difference was, this one would burn a lot brighter, and a lot faster.

Many of Steve McQueen's friends called Ali MacGraw the love of his life—but their relationship was never simple. As MacGraw herself put it, "There were many times that were just wonderful and there were many times that were just ghastly". McQueen was a mercurial man, and living with him wasn't exactly easy. Then, as if their marriage wasn't stressed enough, a tragedy made things so much worse.

Ali MacGraw suffered a miscarriage during her brief, fiery marriage to Steve McQueen. Between the horrible loss and their tumultuous relationship, this marriage was doomed. Despite their love for each other, McQueen and MacGraw just couldn't make it work, divorcing in 1978. But McQueen hadn't been alone in years, so it was only a matter of time before he found someone new.

However, if you're Steve McQueen, you don't just go to a bar and try out some pickup lines. No, his dating strategy this time around was a whole lot crazier than that.

How does a megastar meet girls? He has his agent set up a date, apparently. Not long after his split from MacGraw, McQueen laid eyes on an utterly entrancing woman. Not on the street—he saw her in an advertisement. But this is Steve McQueen we're talking about, so that wasn't about to stop him. He had his agent track down the model from the ad and set up a date.

Her name was Barbary Minty, and she became McQueen's third and final wife.

For most of his life, McQueen was a serial monogamist, but he still had his fair share of flings. He had an affair with actress/model Lauren Hutton in the early 1960s, while still married to his wife. He also had an affair with Barbara Leigh, his co-star in Junior Bonner, shortly before he met Ali MacGraw. But those trysts paled in comparison to his wildest affair.

Mamie Van Doren was one of Hollywood's great, incorrigible starlets, and she claimed to have a sordid affair with McQueen in the 1960s. The pair would party long into the night, taking hallucinogens together—all while McQueen was still married with kids. Though many people close to McQueen would vouch for him as an all-around great guy, it seems as though women were always his greatest vice, and they brought out his dark side.

In the mid-70s, while arguably the biggest star on the planet, Steve McQueen stepped away from it all. He disappeared from the public eye, stopped appearing in movies, and spent his days driving around the country in a motor home, racing motorcycles wherever he stopped. While the appeal of acting eventually waned for him, racing always had his heart.

But maybe that wasn't his only reason for stepping away. Turns out, McQueen had some skeletons in his closet.

Between his up and down career and his tumultuous love life, it shouldn't come as a surprise that Steve McQueen suffered from addiction issues throughout his life. By the 1970s, he was nearly at rock bottom. He smoked like a chimney and drank heavily. He pretty much covered all his bases when it came to partying.

While at the height of his powers as a movie star, Steve McQueen could make pretty much any demand he wanted—but the demands he did make seemed completely bizarre. He would frequently agree to appear in a movie only if the studio provided him with a seemingly random list of items: Electric razors, jeans, and other basic supplies in bulk.

Obviously, these were not things that a movie star like Steve McQueen needed, so what gives? Well, it turns out, there was a heartwarming reason behind McQueen's rider.

Remember the boarding school where McQueen spent his early teenage years? Well, despite his rocky start there, he never forgot about the place. It became a home to him as so few places had, and for the rest of his life, it held a special place in his heart. He donated all those supplies from his riders to the school, and he'd often return to spend time with the students, playing pool and telling them about his experiences.

With his violent past, his many affairs, and his addiction issues, it's easy to paint Steve McQueen as a deeply troubled man, but there was always another layer to find.

Around the time his marriage to Ali MacGraw disintegrated, Steve McQueen developed a persistent cough. Not too surprising, given how much he smoked, but even when he quit, the cough remained. He tried antibiotic treatments, but still, he couldn't stop coughing. He finally went in for a biopsy—and the result was devastating. Doctors found pleural mesothelioma in his lungs. In other words, Steve McQueen had cancer.

The news was heartbreaking enough, but it gets worse. The cause of McQueen's illness was also tragic.

There are many types of cancer that can't be prevented, but there was a specific culprit behind McQueen's pleural mesothelioma: Asbestos. McQueen was exposed to the carcinogenic material throughout his life, from removing asbestos insulation from ships as a marine to acting around asbestos sound-proofing on sound stages. There was even asbestos in the protective helmets and suits McQueen wore while racing.

Though no one knew any better, Steve McQueen spent most of his adult life inhaling the dangerous material—and it finally caught up to him.

McQueen tried to keep his diagnosis hidden for as long as he could, but within months, the National Enquirer had gotten a hold of the story and revealed his illness to the world. A massive outpouring of support followed, but no one could do anything to help him now. Secret or no, his cancer was terminal. But that doesn't mean Steve McQueen was going down without a fight.

When American doctors told McQueen there was nothing they could do, he started to look elsewhere—and it led him to a truly twisted character.

There was nothing anyone could do to save Steve McQueen, but he wasn't about to admit that. He traveled to Mexico, seeking advice from a quack named William Donald Kelley. Kelley falsely claimed he had a method that could cure cancer, and McQueen was desperate, so he listened. He underwent "treatment" with Kelley—and it involved operations that ranged from bizarre to horrifying.

Under Kelley's instruction, McQueen received coffee enemas, daily injections of cow and sheep cells, constant massages, and doses of a horrible "miracle cure" called laetrile. And, as if these humiliating, uncomfortable, and ineffective treatments weren't bad enough, Kelley had the audacity to charge the desperate McQueen $40,000 a month.

Did we mention that "Doctor" William Donald Kelley had had his medical license revoked years before this? And did we mention that he had only been a freaking orthodontist? But McQueen had absolutely no options, so he listened to Kelly anyway. Sadly, it only made his final days more painful.

In October 1980, McQueen flew down to Mexico one last time. He had a massive, five-pound tumor on his liver, but his American doctors told him they couldn't operate on it. It was too large, and he was too weak—there was no way his heart could stand the operation. Still, McQueen had come this far, so he wasn't about to stop now.

Under the pseudonym "Samuel Sheppard," McQueen signed himself into a small, Juarez medical clinic. None of the doctors even knew his real identity—not that it would have made a difference.

Steve McQueen passed from heart failure at 3:45 am on November 7, 1980, at the clinic in Juarez, not long after his surgery. He was only 50 years old. It was just like his doctor had said: The cancer was terminal, and there was nothing anyone could do. But no one could say that Steve McQueen went down without a fight.

A lot of movies hire real professionals to teach actors about the characters they're playing, and Bullitt was no different. Producers brought in some grizzled old officers to show McQueen the ropes. They figured they'd give him a good scare by taking him to an actual morgue; after all, there's a morgue scene in the movie. I imagine they were looking forward to spooking this Hollywood pretty boy—but McQueen's ice-cold reaction left them stunned.

On the day of the morgue visit, McQueen casually walked into the morgue munching on an apple like it was just any other day. From that moment on, he'd gained the officers' respect.

If anyone doubted the dark side of fame, the Manson killings made it abundantly clear—but not many people realize how close they hit to home for Steve McQueen. Not only was he friends with both Sharon Tate and Jay Sebring, but around the time of the killings, the media published an alleged celebrity hit list that featured McQueen's name.

McQueen grew increasingly paranoid and took to carrying a pistol with him at all times.

Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

I saw a neighbor boy practicing his jump shot into some tree branches in his front yard. I had a portable basketball hoop in the back from when I moved in that was just taking up space. So, I walked over and offered him the hoop for free. I saw him, his sister, parents, aunts, uncles, even a grandparent or two, all take a couple of shots at the hoop over time. It felt good to know his family got so much use out of it.

critical_fail1

I was nine years old, waiting for the school bus in Wisconsin during the winter. I had a thin coat, no hat or gloves. A woman driving past saw me and stopped, giving me a blanket from the back of her car. I remember thanking her, but being confused. I told her that I didn't know how I would give it back when I was done borrowing it. She hugged me and said not to worry. I still have that blanket.

saintdelft

I worked at Starbucks. One morning around 6:30, a customer came in and I asked how she was doing. "Oh its already crazy and I haven't even started," she replied. To make her day a little easier, I gave her her coffee order for free. A few days later, I was having a terrible morning. It was only 6:30, and everything was already chaos—but it quickly turned into the best day ever.

She came in as usual and saw that I was having a bad day. A couple hours later, she came back with a gift bag for me. Inside was a nice bottle of vintage. It’s amazing how someone's small gesture can make the day just a little bit nicer!

cuihmnestelan

I work for a non-profit organization downtown in a large city. There are a lot of homeless people who live on the sidewalk directly outside of our front door. There are less than 25 of us in that office, but several of my coworkers have saved people who were in medical distress due to substance addictions. I have literally seen them do CPR on people whose hearts had stopped.

None of them are medical people, but many have had CPR training. I’ve worked in that office for over a year and so far, none of the people who needed saving have succumbed on our watch. I once saw a co-worker, along with our receptionist, work on a guy for 10 minutes before he came back. I can’t express how amazing my coworkers are.

sykopoet

I was selling my bike online when I was a teenager for $30. A buyer contacted me, so we set up a location. The buyer ended up being two kids on a single bike; one was balancing on the pegs when they rode into the parking lot. The kid with the bike bought my bike for his friend so that they could ride together. It was the most wholesome thing I’ve ever seen, and I couldn’t keep the grin off of my face as I watched them ride away together.

SchrockyBalboa

I donated stem cells to a complete stranger. It’s a very impersonal experience because of the anonymity of it, so I didn’t know anything about the patient I was donating to, and she knew nothing about me. But then I received a heartbreaking message. I received a letter from her that really hammered home to me how much of an impact I had had on her life.

For me, it was a cheek swab I did in college four years ago, and then a random email saying that I had matched with someone. It was eye-opening to read her letter. Of course, it was a profound experience donating lifesaving stem cells to someone, but not knowing where those cells were going after the procedure had left me feeling a little empty, so I was grateful for her letter.

In 6th grade, I witnessed an incredible act of kindness. I was on the bus, 2 stops away from my stop on the way home from school. There was a man just lying on the sidewalk outside the bus, which had stopped. I noticed the bus driver wasn’t on the bus; I looked outside and saw our bus driver, being the nice lady she is, rush out of the bus, check his pulse and call an ambulance.

The bad part was that some people on my bus were saying cruel things, suggesting that the man was an addict, and that it was no use trying to help him. The next day, our bus driver heard the nasty rumors and decided to set us straight. "The man from yesterday actually went into diabetic shock". She basically saved him twice. You never know a person’s story until you ask.

BeebBeebLettuce27

I'm epileptic. Once, during a school assembly, I had a seizure, and it was pretty bad. When I woke up, the first people I saw were my English teacher smiling and telling me it would be okay, and my health teacher, who had apparently been the first person to run and get me help. I was in a super emotional state after the seizure, and I began to cry and say, “I'm sorry".

I was hushed by my teacher and helped down the bleachers. My health teacher, my English teacher, my choir director, and the school counsellor all stayed by me until I got into the ambulance. Later on, my English teacher also ended up sending me a very nice video of her and all of her family wishing me well. I was so grateful for all of the support!

alienartissst

My parents once bumped into a lady while they were traveling and got talking to her. She told them her horrific story. Her house had just burned down, her husband was gone, and she had no family or friends locally. She was outside my parents’ hotel bawling, standing around her car with her kids and not knowing what to do.

They had made it out of the burning house with nothing except the clothes they had on. The kids had no shoes, she was in a nightgown and wasn't sure what she was going to do for several days until she could contact distant people and get help. My parents had a car full of stuff from their travels, including clothing they had bought for my nieces and nephews.

They let her kids pick through it for shoes and shirts, gave them all the food in the cooler they traveled with, handed her all the travelers' checks they had on them, and then dad went inside to pay for a hotel room for a week for them.

ImmediateMountain9

I was 16 and driving over to my girlfriend's house on a rainy Saturday afternoon. There was a man biking in front of me and when he went to get onto the sidewalk, he completely wiped out. I pulled in to the closest driveway and saw that his bike was mangled and his arm was bleeding. I threw his bike in my trunk, gave him my old sweatshirt for his bloody arm, and drove him home.

When I dropped him off, he gave me his card. It turned out he was a dentist at a local research hospital. Well, fast-forward to when I was 19, and the same man took out my wisdom teeth for free as part of a "research experiment". Not sure if there was actually an experiment that they needed wisdom teeth for, but just goes to show that good things happen to good people.

salty_snacky

I worked at a museum that ran a summer camp, and I was in charge of the little kids. I had a kid in my group that came from a wealthy family. He brought a massive Megazord Power Rangers toy one day to play with. Then that kid did something so beautiful it made me cry. Another kid in my group tripped, scratched his knee, and started crying.

The first kid stepped in while I was taking care of the blood, and after noticing that the crying kid had a wolf on his T-shirt, asked, "Do you like wolves?" The crying kid answered while sobbing, "Yeah...a lot". Then the rich kid proceeded to snap the right leg of his Megazord off. As we watched, he transformed it into a purple wolf.

He gave it to the other kid and let him keep it just because he liked it. The kid stopped crying and cracked a smile. They became best friends from that point on.

Daviernex

I was talking to some random guy in the bar one night, and he mentioned that he was having surgery the next day and didn't have someone to pick him up afterward. He was just grabbing a bite to eat at the bar before his cut off time when I arrived. His girlfriend had just broken up with him and moved, and his backup driver fell through.

The poor guy just needed a hand. I ended up driving him there, sitting with him before he went in, calling his parents when he got out, sitting with him in recovery, picking up his post-op medication, driving him home, and making sure he was okay before I left. Seemed like no big deal at the time. Never saw him again, and that's okay.

nevermind-stet

My family and I were homeless when I was about to turn 13. My youngest brother is also severely autistic. We were standing in line for lunch at the local soup kitchen, which opened at 11 am. We had arrived at 6 in the morning, and were decently close to the door—there were only about 20 other people in front of us at the time.

My father had just returned from taking my youngest brother for yet another walk around the block, as he had begun fighting and biting himself in frustration. After another few minutes in line, it was clear that he had more than reached his tiny 9-year-old limit and had begun to lose it. People were staring at the fuss he was making.

There were a couple of guys who were dressed in ratty t-shirts, jean vests covered in patches, and plenty of veteran memorabilia, mostly from Vietnam. Each of them had either an old, dirty backpack or a trash bag, which held all of their personal belongings in the world. One of the men, in a wheelchair and missing a leg, saw my little brother’s frustration.

After hearing my mother apologetically explain yet again that he had severe autism, the man rolled up to the five of us—two parents and three young kids, all sunburnt from the Florida sun with no place to call home—and unhooked his one treasured possession. He had a little stuffed monkey that was hooked onto his steering portion of the wheelchair. It was the only clean thing about the man.

He gave it to my little brother, and my little brother immediately hugged it and cuddled with it, calming down. I'll never forget the man’s words: "He looks like he could use it more than me". It was his one and only real, treasured possession and he gave it to a little boy that was crying. Now, I'm in a position to give back, and I do whenever I can, but I don't think I could ever repay that single gesture.

aaerlevsedi

My dad ran into an old high school friend that he hadn't seen in years. He learned that the man had cancer, that he had no family except a son in college in another state, and that he was basically dealing with his condition all by himself. So my dad started taking him to his appointments and out to lunch, just to keep him company and help him through.

He even organized how to take his crazy number of prescriptions, since it was confusing to figure out when to take them when they all had different times and requirements; apparently there were about 18 of them in all. Then, when his friend succumbed, my dad helped his son do all of the end-of-life arrangements. My dad is my hero. He is such a giving person and I strive to be like him.

LaeliaCatt

My husband and I adopted a Great Dane and named him Paxton. He quickly became the equivalent of our first child. Pax went everywhere with us, including family holidays like Christmas and vacations. Pax was more human than a lot of humans I've met. He would actually hug me when I was down, loved everyone, even cats, and slept with his stuffed frog for years.

Paxton passed suddenly last year of a heart attack. We came home to find him on the floor of the living room. My husband and I were devastated. We can’t have kids, and Pax was our baby. In the 18 months before Pax passed, I had also lost my mom, my grandmother, and uncle. I think something in me broke. I couldn’t function. I took a week off work.

When I returned, I had an envelope waiting for me on my desk. Its contents made me burst into tears. It was a thank you card from the local animal shelter. My co-worker had donated $150 to them in Paxton’s name. I was floored. I knew he was a dog, and didn't expect anyone else to get that he had been like a child to me. That one gesture was so kind and needed. She will never know how much that meant to us.

WishingRadiance

I was biking to school on a pretty busy street, and while waiting at a stoplight, I had a seizure. I fell off of the bike onto the side of the street. Next thing I knew, I was safe on the sidewalk and there were a dozen homeless people crowded over me, comforting me and getting help. It was very embarrassing, but they were so sweet. Not sure what would have happened if they hadn’t been there!

ftnverified

I absolutely love doing adopt-a-family programs during Christmas. I don't have kids of my own, so I love the opportunity to buy gifts for kids in low-income families. My favorite family of them all was single mom who'd just turned 18. Her son was three and she'd moved into her very first apartment. She had nothing but two bare mattresses on the floor, one for her and one for her son.

She was working a job and was trying to save up for things for the house. Her wish list was heartbreaking. She wanted blankets for them both, a pan to cook with, and a Spider-Man toy for her son. That's it. I was single at the time, and supporting myself, so I only had a couple hundred to spend, but I was determined to make it go as far as possible.

I got her a complete comforter/sheet set, a pillow, and a full set of cooking pans. Then I found the coolest thing for her son: it was a fitted sheet that turned his bed into a Spider-Man tent! It was awesome! I found a big Spider-Man stuffed toy for him as well. I also found a huge book with over 100 full-length bedtime stories. I got the usual boring stuff of course, clothes for her son and a gift card for a holiday meal. But then I found the ultimate deal.

It was a clearance TV/dvd combo for less than $100! I knew money was tight for them, so I included a note in her Christmas card letting her know that she could rent her son videos from the library for free. I would have given anything to see their faces; I hope that it made her first Christmas on her own a little more happy.

coffcat

Sometimes when my sister is sleeping or napping, I plug her phone in to charge so that when she wakes up, it’ll be 100%.

Fancyliving228

I had some extra laminate flooring from a renovation I was doing. An elderly neighbor saw it and offered to buy what I had leftover. I hesitated, because it wasn't really leftover, I had other plans for it. It was about a thousand dollars worth of material. I told her if she could hire our neighbor to move it for her, she could have it for free, since I knew my neighbor needed the money. She agreed and redid her living room with it.

freud_sigmund

It was my first job in the field of conservation, and my boss was really tough, but secretly was a kind man. I had a six-month-old son and I was a 20-year-old single mom. I had just found out some bad news, and I was really sinking financially. My son's dad was dipping in and out. I wasn't emotionally mature enough for a relationship at the time. I had too much on my plate. One thing after another.

I was also the only woman on a crew of seven men, working to plant trees, fix United States Forestry Service roads and restore habitats for ten hours a day. I was too girlie to relate to the guys, but too manly for my girlfriends. Nobody understood. I felt hopeless. One day I cried on lunch break; it was all stacking up and I was cracking under the pressure.

After work the next day, as the other crew members filtered out of the work trucks, my boss said to me, "Just wait for a second". I was irritated, because I thought he was going to ream me out for my work performance, which he frequently did, for everyone. Instead, he waited until everyone was gone, pulled out his wallet, and took out a bunch of cash.

He said, "I don't know how much is here, because I just grabbed a handful. But I want you to take every dollar in my wallet and help get yourself out of that hole you're in". It's been almost a decade since then, and my life has been completely turned around. I'm deliriously happy now. That gruff, sour old forester made a big change in my life, one that reached far beyond that moment of desperation and generosity.

iron_annie

I broke my foot while bouldering a week into my semester abroad. I had never been out of the country before, so I was absolutely panicking. A total stranger came right over after I fell, recorded important information for the paramedics, and spent the next ten or so minutes while waiting for the ambulance asking me questions about my studies and my research after I mentioned that I was a student. His kindness was able to calm me down even though I was absolutely freaking out.

bakeseal

One of the smartest people I ever met married one of my good friends from high school. She had dabbled in coding games for fun, but had no IT experience. She was working minimum wage at a sandwich shop, which I thought was a shame, because she hated it and could do so much better. I was a manager at an IT consulting firm at the time.

I knew if given the chance to work in IT as a developer, she would do great. So I pushed my company to hire her as an intern. Without any code camp, relevant college classes, or experience, I was told that our company could never hire her. So, I helped her start small user group, put together a resume, and prep for an interview.

Then I went back to my company and forced the issue. I had to use a number of favors just to get her an interview. Then I basically cashed in all of my political capital, and said if she wasn’t successful, I would be accountable for it. They gave her a chance—and she did wonderfully, just as I knew she would. That was five years ago.

Today, she is a java developer making over $80k a year with full benefits. She loves her job, and my good friend doesn’t work much because his wife makes so much money. Unfortunately, pushing so hard was a contributing factor to the company letting me go a year later. I found a new job, so it worked out for me too. I don’t think she realizes what it cost me to get her in, and it’s probably better that way, but knowing I gave her a chance to change the trajectory of her life makes me smile.

dgreenleaf83

I was in a car accident when I was four years old that left me in a coma. But that wasn't the worst part. My sister, who was also in the car, succumbed to her injuries the next day. I was unconscious when my sister’s funeral was going to occur, which meant I would be left alone at the hospital. My preschool teacher offered to sit with me and hold my hand at the hospital, so that my parents could attend my sister’s funeral without having to worry about me being alone. It is the kindest gesture anyone has ever done for me.

natgoeshome

When I turned 18, I was struggling immensely with my mental health. One day it all got too overwhelming and I left the house, thinking I’d end up at the train tracks. My mind was in an absolutely terrible state. I got to the park and just couldn’t keep walking, so I sat on a bench and manically wept so hard that I couldn’t feel my body, and I was shaking uncontrollably.

My mum was calling me to try to find me, but my phone was about to die. Many strangers walked straight past me, or threw me a look of disgust. Then one lady, who lived on the street next to mine, stopped and sat beside me. She just sat and hugged me. She eventually called my mum and told her where I was before my phone finally ran out of battery.

Then she stayed with me until my mom arrived and took me for a long drive to calm me down. I still see the woman around when I’m back in my hometown. I don’t know if she remembers sitting with me, but I do, and her presence that day meant a lot to me. I’ve always wanted to let her know that I appreciated it a lot and will never forget it.

memevangelion

After school one day, I was supposed to have practice, but it got unexpectedly canceled and nobody told me until it was too late. My school days ended at 3:10, and busses left at 3:20. It was like 3:18, so I scrambled to grab my stuff and find my bus, which changed places frequently. I couldn’t find my bus, and all of the busses started leaving.

Now, I could have just walked home, but it was raining and I had a ton of stuff with me to bring home. My old bus driver, who drove another bus, saw me stranded and crying. So, she pulled over and lingered so that I could hop on. She waited with a bus full of kids waiting to go home, for a kid who doesn’t even belong on her bus anymore. That is one of the nicest things anyone has ever done for me.

everyone_hates_lolo

When I was enlisting into the army, my recruiter picked me up to go over some paperwork in his office, which was close to the downtown area of my city. On the way there, we passed a homeless woman sitting on the side of the road. Without even a second thought, my recruiter whipped the car around and pulled through a nearby drive-through.

He bought a huge meal with a large cup of water, and raced back to where the woman was sitting. The look on her face when he pulled up and handed her the meal through the window was something I will never forget. He didn't have to do something like that, but he did it out of the kindness of his heart. He's one of the best leaders I know, and I try to emulate him in everything I do.

Leoprrrd

I was at a convention standing in line to get David Tennant's autograph. I was so excited that I unfortunately caused a seizure. After I woke up, I was so embarrassed. I was wheeled back beyond a curtain that was behind the autograph booth. A moment later, David Tennant's agent came up to me and asked me what color pen I wanted.

I was confused, but I said black. After he said that, he explained that David wanted to come back to make sure I was okay. I was still pretty embarrassed, but of course I agreed. The first thing he said to me was a joking, “What are you doing falling down on me?” Then we had a full conversation. Eventually, he asked my name, and autographed the book I had brought. I was so excited that I forgot to be embarrassed!

alienartissst

I had a breakdown in the middle of one of my college classes. I had been depressed for several weeks, feeling like I wasn’t good enough to be in my major. Really I just felt worthless. I was doing a performance-based test in front of the whole class, and I was doing terribly. I was really angry with myself for not being better.

My professor interrupted me midway through and asked, “Do you want to try it again at the end of class?” I nodded, went back to my seat—and immediately started crying uncontrollably. I couldn’t help it or stop. I ended up excusing myself to the bathroom so that I wouldn’t cry in front of the class and embarrass myself further.

I performed again at the end of the class, and my professor was really patient with me and gave me feedback. The thing that really got me was before he dismissed the class, he wrote something down in the binder I had open in front of me. When I read it, I've never felt so touched. It said, “You are a strong, smart musician, and you have a bright future ahead of you. I believe in you, and I’m here for you".

I cried even harder after that, but in a good way. I had never had a teacher care about me that much, or show me so much compassion. That one message genuinely turned around my entire year and made my sense of self-worth improve exponentially. I still think about it all the time, and I’ll be forever grateful to that professor.

MusicalMal

I worked at Apple and had a homeless gentleman come in and ask for a job. Even though he tried on several occasions, he couldn’t get a job, unfortunately, because he had no phone and no home. He eventually got into a halfway home, and a bunch of us at the store got together and got him a cheap phone and a SIM card, paid for six months. He eventually got a job and isn’t homeless now!

applejackrr

It was the first day of isolation here in Michigan, and there was a line in the grocery store that wrapped around the building. I spent 90 minutes waiting to check out. Eventually, I was next in line, but the lady in front of me had a problem with her card: it was denied. After a few failed attempts, the cashier asked her to step aside and call her bank.

They set her groceries aside. She only had necessities, nothing fancy; jugs of water, rice, macaroni & cheese, everything generic brand. As I was checking out, she was sitting on a bench trying to get through to her bank without having any luck at all. So I asked the cashier to check out her groceries with mine, which she did.

As I checked out the cashier told the woman, who was still waiting on the phone, that she was good to go. She was confused, and the cashier told her that I had paid for her groceries. If I had lifted a car off of this woman, she couldn’t have looked any more grateful. I once rescued a claustrophobic woman who was trapped in an elevator, and her look of gratitude didn’t even compare to the look of appreciation I got from this woman at the grocery store.

She said thank you and asked my name. I told her, said something cliche about needing to stick together, and we went our separate ways. It was only $80, it wasn’t a big deal to me. But, in that moment, on that day, when things were falling apart and people felt scared and powerless, after waiting so long, and not knowing what to do, my small act of kindness had been a big deal to her. I was so glad I was able to help out, even that little bit.

DerekPaxton

When I was in seventh grade, I was getting yelled at by some mean people at lunch one day. I had been tormented for years and was getting tired of it. After the mean kids went away, I just sat down on the floor where I was and ate my lunch, stifling tears and sniffles. A group of sixth-graders came up to me and asked what was wrong. I told them what had happened and they offered to have lunch with me. I accepted. Then we just started having lunch every day.

feeddahippo

I had recently moved to a foreign country, and one day I was riding my bike and epically crashed. I ripped a hole in my leg and couldn’t make it to the hospital. I also didn’t know how to call the country’s emergency services. I flagged down a car and when they saw the leg gash, they told me to get in. They not only drove me to the hospital, but they also held on to my bike all day, and then once I was done and back at home, brought it over to me. Complete strangers and the kindest people I had met in a while.

caiatrid

It was Christmas Eve and I found out that a friend of mine had literally no one to spend Christmas Day with. I lived far away and had a family of my own, but I wanted to help him somehow. I was browsing Facebook and suddenly saw a friend of ours post that he had room for a spare person on a trip. I told my first friend to go grab his passport and pack to go away for a few days, and then sent him to Amsterdam on Christmas Eve with some spending money. Dude was in tears.

fract00l

When I was 17, my mom signed us up to deliver presents for one of those giving tree places. The lady who she was taking presents to lived in a tiny town in a rural part of our state that was about an hour and a half from where we lived at the time, but also just happened to be close to where we had lived when I was little.

I tagged along with her because she asked, and I didn’t want her to have to drive all the way out there alone on Christmas Eve. I didn’t want to go though; I hated the tiny town we were going to. I was a moody teenager in a perpetual bad mood, and I thought I had better stuff to do. Anyway, we got out there and found the place.

It was a tiny, one room shack in among tiny one room shacks behind what used to be a little hotel on the side of a rural highway. We knocked on the door and this little woman, probably in her mid-late 20s but so careworn that she looked closer to 40, opened the door. She invited us in and we offloaded the goods, like three bags of presents. Her three kids were peeking at us from behind a curtain, and she had them come out to say thank you.

She was beaming, couldn’t stop thanking us. The kids were ecstatic. They weren’t getting presents at all until we knocked on that door. It was like 10pm Christmas Eve, and we had basically saved Christmas for them. As we left I was quiet until we got in the car. Then I turned to my mom and told her that I was glad she had brought me.

She started crying her eyes out and just grabbed me and hugged me tight. I offered to drive home and she agreed. On the way she told me that when I was little, we had been in that family’s position. We had gotten gifts from that same giving tree organization for years. I knew we had been poor, but never realized how poor. I still consider that my best Christmas. I have no idea what I got that year; but I remember giving those kids and their mom a good Christmas, and that’s so much better.

AdumLarp

I work at a veterinary clinic, and was helping a client when he noticed that our euthanasia candle was lit. They asked if someone was saying goodbye, and I sadly nodded. His next act brought tears to my eyes. He handed me his credit card and said he’d like to pay for them. Trying not to lose it and burst into tears completely, I ran his card through and thanked him.

He waved his hand saying that he’s been in that position plenty of times, knew how difficult it was, and wanted to help. He wished to remain anonymous and left with his pet.

allisynWinchester

There was a man on the train I was on giving grief to the ticket attendant because he had incorrectly purchased a ticket and she had asked him nicely to buy a new one. Long story short, he asked for her full name and said he wanted to write a complaint. I felt bad for her, because she was just doing her job and had done nothing wrong.

I left my spot and went on a mission to find her. When I did find her, she looked absolutely miserable. I asked her nicely if she had any spare paper and a pen, and she brought it to me. I then wrote a recommendation from myself to her boss saying that she had been a great host and was doing a great job. The smile on her face was beautiful.

su-reddit

I went to pump gas today. The card reader was broken, so I went inside to pay. As I opened the door, I saw a mother holding her daughter’s hand saying, “come here honey,” as she inched towards the cashier. She then pulled out a crumpled dollar bill and some change and told the cashier, “$1.47 on 3 please". When it was my turn, I added another $10 to her pump.

I tried to do the deed unnoticed, but her $1.47 worth of gas ran out before I could enter my $10 worth. This resulted in me going outside and telling her to try the pump again. She knew it was me, and was very thankful. I can’t help but wonder if the exchange was meant to be. How often is a card reader broken at a gas station forcing you to go inside?

Had that not been the case, I wouldn’t have been presented with the opportunity to help. Before the mother left, she told me that she hopes someone does something nice for me in return. Though that would be appreciated, the only thing I truly hope for in return is to be presented with more opportunities where I can be of help. I have yet a single regret: Only adding $10.

Ksteeeze

My brother and I were driving home to my parents’ house, and it was about a five-hour drive from our college. We came up a hill in a fairly rural area and I saw something weird on the side of the road; a motorcycle abandoned on its side. My brother said it was nothing, but I stopped anyway because I had an eerie feeling. I soon found out I was right.

It turns out that a 65-year-old man had crashed his motorcycle and was unconscious in the ditch. Since there was a hill right there and he was on the other side of it, he was pretty hidden and no one saw it happen. He was ten minutes away from his house too. I stayed with him until the ambulance came, and then checked in on him a few weeks later.

He had some broken ribs and was a little beat up, but he made it just fine. I think about him a lot and hope he’s enjoying his retirement and is staying away from motorcycles.

tinytinyspaghetti

At one point in my life, I was struggling so much financially that it was difficult to even gather up a couple of dollars to put gas in my gas-guzzler car. Consequently, I rarely had more than 1/4 tank, even in the winter. One day, I miscalculated, and I ran out of gas in the middle of town. I remember carefully walking on snow and ice to a nearby phone booth carrying my nine-month-old baby in his snowsuit.

I only had a handful of phone numbers memorized, and nobody I called answered the phone. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t even have enough money for a bus. Out of desperation and feeling completely humiliated, I approached a stranger and asked for a couple of dollars so I could walk to a nearby gas station and buy some gas.

He told me a couple of dollars wouldn’t be enough, because they’d want deposit money for the gas can. I’m sure my face fell as I fought back tears and muttered, “Thanks anyway". He looked at me a moment, and then said, “I’ll be right back. You stay here". He left for a few minutes and came back with a full gas can. As he poured the gas into my tank for me, he told me the location of the gas station where he got it.

He then said, “I’m counting on you to return this gas can". He drove away once I assured him that I would. When I got to the station about a half-mile away, the attendant told me that my “friend” had given him $40 and told him that it was so I could fill my gas tank and that he was to give me the change. It was like a miracle to me, and I started crying all over again.

Tehannalives

I was walking down the beach in Morocco on holiday in December when I saw this couple walking the opposite way to me. It was a chilly day, so the women had her hands in her pockets and she was all snuggled up in a big scarf. She started scrunching up her face and titling her head, and was clearly about to let out a big sneeze. Her partner noticed that she was about to sneeze and before I knew it, he had whipped out a tissue and covered her nose before she even had to take her hands out of her pockets. It was the most wholesome, purest and kindest thing I’ve ever seen.

cleopatra9876

An acquaintance of mine with two kids had his car repossessed. I only found out after a mutual friend of ours was gossiping about it. I decided to give the guy my second car, since it was just sitting in the garage gathering dust. He used it for two years until he got his dad's old car. I let him sell the car and keep the $600 bucks he got for it. For years before, I had people ask me why I was keeping that second car and I just kept saying, "just in case".

freud_sigmund

I was at a store and there was a woman with two very small kids checking out. She had a bunch of groceries and a couple of toys for the kids. She went to pay and discovered that she didn't have her wallet, so she told the cashier that she would put everything back. Her little girl, who was only about 2, started to cry uncontrollably.

The rough-looking man in front of me, who looked like he could have been homeless, went up to the cashier and told her that he was going to pay for everything. When the lady protested he said, "I don't want your little girl to cry. This is my good deed for the day". I almost cried too, as did the lady who was trying to buy her groceries.

KathAlMyPal

Years ago, I was going to a family get together and I was told I needed to bring dessert. So, I went to the store and was looking at the cake mixes for an awkwardly long time, not knowing what to get. A lady walked up beside me and began scanning the options as well. After several minutes, I said jokingly, “Are you having a tough time deciding too?”

She replied yes, and explained that for the past fifteen months, she had been watching her diet and exercise and that she lost 100 pounds. I replied, “Wow that’s incredible—you should really be proud of yourself!” She replied with a shrug. I stopped her and said it again, because I really meant it. She started to cry. I asked why she was crying, and she said that her family and friends weren't very supportive of her efforts.

I said, “Well I'm very proud of you!” and asked if I could give her a hug. She said yes, so we hugged right there in the middle of the aisle. Then, she said thank you and we parted.

Hoosier61

About 8 years ago, I had lost my job and was on social assistance. One day I went into my pharmacist to have my prescription filled. I miscalculated the total and I was about ten dollars short, but it was all the money I had to my name at that moment. Embarrassed, I was fiddling in my purse looking for coins when the pharmacist stopped me and said it was okay.

They just gave me the medication, no charge. A few weeks later I got a job, and upon receiving my first paycheck, I paid them a visit with a big box of chocolates and a thank you card. I tried to give them what I owed for my medication, and they refused it. What they did for me meant so much at such a dark time and I’ll never forget it.

Hapennydub

My dad was working in construction in New York City in the early 90s. It was December and it was raining, so there was nasty slush everywhere. He saw a homeless guy outside the train station on his way home. The poor man was wearing no jacket, and had shoes with holes in the bottom so large that you could see his wet socks through them.

Dad gave him the boots off his feet, the jacket off his back, two extra pairs of socks he had packed with him, and a $20 gift card to a local chain restaurant that he had received for his birthday but hadn’t used yet. We picked my dad up at the train station, shoeless, socks soaking, with no jacket, shivering uncontrollably.

Despite all that, he was smiling and waving at us as we pulled up. We were poor growing up, so he had a lot of compassion for people who were struggling. He knew, as you will if you’ve ever had to buy them, that good work boots and a good winter jacket aren’t cheap buys. He saw someone who needed what he had more than him and gave it, just because he could.

An older gentlemen tried to ship an envelope to his “grandson” from a shipping company I worked at. The way he acted and the things he said threw up too many red flags in my head, so against company policy, I opened the envelope after he left and found 5 figures in cash inside. I called the authorities and told them to get in touch with the man to try to figure out what was going on.

As it turns out, someone had called the older man and said his grandson was in the hospital and if they didn’t send the money, he wouldn’t get a surgery that was badly needed. The older man couldn’t get in touch with the grandson by phone, so he panicked and sent the money to the address the fraudsters provided. We were able to stop it from happening and get the money back to him. He was so grateful; he said that the money was basically his life savings.

The news ran a story on the situation, and apparently it’s a scam that happens to a lot of older people. We started a club to reach out to nursing homes to try to educate people about the scam. A lot of people were not aware of anything like that happening, so hopefully we prevented some people getting scammed. A lot of good came from me just being nosey!

Yoinkie2013

My neighbors asked to borrow my truck one day. I told them no because I could not trust my truck due to the tires being bald. The next day, my neighbor called and said that he was getting new tires for his vehicle, and that I could have his old ones, since he knew I needed them. He told me to just show up at a certain tire shop and they would put them on for me.

When I got to the tire shop, I was shocked when they put on brand new Goodyear tires. I asked what had happened to the used tires I had been expecting to receive, wondering if there had been a mistake. The shop owner smiled and confessed that the “old tires” were just a story to get me in the shop. My neighbor had bought me a full set of new tires instead.

jorcam

I had been working as a server for a while, and one day I was working with a co-worker who was pretty new. They'd sent most staff home because it was late. Then disaster struck. As it always seems to happen at those times, we got super busy. My co-worker was struggling and got a terribly rude table. They didn't seem to understand that they weren't the only customers in the restaurant or that we were understaffed, and it took a turn for the worse.

They made her cry and have a meltdown. We've all been there, so I took over the table and, after they left, put $15 on the table so that she would see she had received a "tip" from the table. I never told her that I was the one who put money on the table for her. Seeing her confidence grow from that was what I was hoping for. I got my wish.

When she picked up the tip, a grin broke across her face and she said, "Wow! I must not be as terrible of a server as I thought I was! Maybe I'm getting the hang of it after all".

MaxtheCatismyFav

My dad is a retired junior/senior high school art teacher. Every single morning for well over a decade, he packed an extra lunch and put it in a place in his classroom where a student whose family was struggling could take it without making a big deal of it. Eventually, when the older student graduated, one of his younger siblings started taking his class.

The kid would already know he could take the extra lunch bag without having to face talking to my dad about it, or being embarrassed in front of the class. I used to ask why Dad packed two lunches while I was growing up, and he would just say, “I sometimes get extra hungry". My mom later told me the truth. He is such a quiet, humble, and extremely generous man.

saudadedabahia

When my wife gave birth to our firstborn, the woman she had shared a ward with while in the early stages of labor had a stillbirth. After giving birth, rather than spending time bonding with her newborn, my exhausted wife handed me our son and spent the next three hours comforting and consoling the poor woman. Something about the bond of mothers seemed to connect them.

The woman and her husband have since become close family friends and had two beautiful children after that—they still credit the support my wife gave them in the period of time after the stillbirth, especially in those three hours, with helping them get through their grief. It was the kindest act I've ever seen, done by the kindest person I've ever met.

ElCapitan2020

My fiancé lost the ring that I made her and was super distraught about it when we couldn’t find it. I had handcrafted our rings myself. She was very sad since she loved hers. I worked from home during the pandemic so, every time she went to work, I worked on making a new ring. And in about 4-5 days I said I found it and handed her the one I made brand new. She still doesn’t know. I’d like to keep it that way as well. I don’t need her feeling terrible.

Sources: 1, 2

It's hard to imagine the mind-blowing power that Prince Aly was born into in 1911. His father, the Aga Khan III, was the spiritual leader to millions of people—no biggie at all, right? This mantle is part of a thousand year tradition, and came with a lot of influence, wealth, and lands. As it turns out, such a life comes with perks...and pitfalls.

As the Aga Khan’s son, Prince Aly lived in utter luxury. One of the biggest family holdings was a world class stable of thoroughbred horses, and the Prince spent his youth in luxurious residences all over England, India, and France. In other words, he wanted for nothing. However, for the young prince, it wasn’t all fun and games.

With such an important position, Khan’s father travelled constantly. Meanwhile, his Italian mother spent her days working as an artist and her nights entertaining as a socialite, throwing wild parties. As a result, the poor (metaphorically speaking, of course) young Aly grew up rather lonely. Maybe that explains his unhealthy need for another kind of affection.

Right out of the gate of his adolescence, Prince Aly was a hit with the ladies. Before he was in his mid-twenties, he had a number of high profile conquests, including the debutante Margaret Whigham. His most salacious bedmate, thought, was Thelma, Viscountess Furness, a lover he just so happened to share with the Prince of Wales himself, Edward VIII. And bigger scandals were in his future.

In 1933, the young man found himself head over heels for Joan Yarde-Buller, an English socialite...and the wife of Loel Guinness, heir to the Guinness empire. When Aly first met the beautiful Joan at a dinner party, he was reportedly so taken with her, he leaned over and said, "Darling, will you marry me?" When Joan informed him that she was already married, the prince's response was disturbing.

Instead of saying, "Oops, my bad," Prince Aly took Joan's martial status as a mere challenge. He threw himself into courting her, sending her bouquets of flowers and secret messages until she finally caved and agreed to meet him in a clandestine rendezvous. Well, once Joan was in, she was really in. Before long, they were in a full-on, steamy affair. It did not go well.

Shortly after it began, Thomas Guinness found out what was going on between the Prince and his wife, and he found out in the worst way possible. He had evidence that the two lovers spent three days in a hotel room together. Plus, there was the fact that Joan confessed it all to him and begged him to split up. Ouch. After that, Guinness was out for blood.

Guinness took his bedroom issues to the public courts, filing for divorce from Joan and suing Prince Aly to pay all the costs associated with the high-profile split. The messy socialite drama was front-page news at the time, and it ended in a slam dunk for Guinness. The judge ordered Khan to empty his pockets, and Joan was a free woman at last. Happily ever after, right? Wrong.

Oh, sure, Prince Aly and Joan's new freedom started out well enough. Just a few days after her divorce went through, Yarde-Buller converted to Islam and married Khan in a private ceremony in Paris. But there was a dark side to the nuptials. As Joan Yarde-Buller stood at the altar next to her prince, she was hiding a scandalous secret.

See, seven months after their wedded bliss, Joan and Prince Aly welcomed a son into the world. Yep, do the math on that "seven months" thing: Throughout her divorce and on her wedding day, Yarde-Buller was pregnant with Khan's child. Well, that probably explains the explosive split and the hasty wedding. But that's not all...

As it turns out, illicit affairs, tabloid divorces, and love children don't make for the best marriages. In actuality, Prince Aly wasn't entirely devoted to his new wife. He later said lukewarmly of his bride, "Joan was a sane and solid girl, and I thought if I married her, I would stay out of trouble". Not exactly a glowing recommendation.

At 26, Khan qualified for a pilot’s license and began to fly his own planes regularly. He also raced horses, cars, and skied. These were not passive hobbies for the Prince, either. Instead, he pushed himself to the limit—so much so that he broke his leg three times on the slopes and almost perished in car races. Maybe it's this daredevil spirit that recommended him for his next job...

During WWII, Khan joined the British Intelligence and served as a spy in the Middle East. His mixed background and position of prestige provided him with the perfect cover. But he had one huge flaw. As his Commanding Officer put it, “The only risk I ran in having him on my team was that he was irresistible to women, could not leave them alone". And, well, he certainly didn't.

The still-married Khan went on another whirlwind bedroom campaign, often romancing three or four different women at a time. His boudoir reputation quickly became international news, and "Prince Aly Khan" turned into a household name in the West. In fact, the film director Orson Welles once referred to him as "the most promiscuous man in Europe". Yet underneath, he was covering up a secret.

In truth, deep insecurity drove Prince Aly's indiscretions—and vengeance. When his Commanding Officer asked him one day why he chased women, Khan's reply was intimately revealing. He confessed it was because Western men discriminated against him because of his race, so, as he put it, "I pay them out by winning all their desirable women". And the insecurity didn't end there.

Despite their passionate beginnings, Prince Aly's bitterness seeped into his marriage with Joan Yarde-Buller. The Prince became more and more convinced that Joan's hoity-toity English aristocrat friends looked down on him—which, hey, they very well might have. This, as well as his philandering, drove a deeper wedge between them.

So why exactly were women so into Prince Aly? One reason is downright scandalous. As a young man, the zealous lover traveled to Cairo and spent six weeks with a doctor who trained him in imsák, an ancient Arabic art...of love. Naughtily enough, the doctor taught Khan how to control his muscles so that he could resist climax as long as possible.

As much as Khan loved the ladies, the ladies loved Khan. His looks, charm, and bedroom talent made him a bit of a conquest for women, and not just any women. Prince Aly had a noted type: "respectable" society ladies, who he liked to chase down ruthlessly, no matter the cost or how many enemies it made him. And his next target was a big one...

Starting in the late 1940s, Prince Aly became obsessed with the Hollywood "Love Goddess" Rita Hayworth. When her blockbuster film Gilda came out in 1948, Khan watched it and fell in love at first frame, especially during Hayworth's famous "Put the Blame on Mame" performance. He replayed it again and again, and swore he would have none but her. And well, whatever the Prince wants, the Prince gets.

Prince Aly got a lucky break: He found out that Hayworth was traveling to Europe at that very moment. His friend, gossip columnist Elsa Maxwell, swore she would throw an enormous party, seat him next to the starlet, and stage an introduction. The Prince was ecstatic to display all his skills of seduction to the screen siren—but he may not have realized how much baggage Rita had.

When Prince Aly met Hayworth, she had quite literally just ended her marriage with director Orson Welles, with whom she had a young daughter, and she was utterly heartbroken and depressed. She had even been thinking of leaving Europe early. Until, that is, Elsa Maxwell invited her out to a big bash. Aly had set his trap...and Hayworth walked right in.

Although some sources claim Hayworth wasn't instantly into Prince Aly Khan, the man seemed to have a supernatural power to win over even the most reluctant conquests. By the end of the night, they went home together to his place at the Chateau de L'Horizon, with Hayworth only returning to her hotel in the wee hours of the morning. Their flame was on.

Though Khan was confident in his powers with women, Hayworth was no easy catch. As the Prince pursued the noir starlet, so did other worthy husbands such as the Shah of Iran and Aristotle Onassis, one of the richest men in the world and the man who later married Jackie Kennedy. For some reason, Hayworth ignored them both and fell into Khan's arms.

In the beginning, Hayworth and Khan lived in a bubble of new love. In fact, it got straight-up mystical. According to lore, one day a fortune teller arrived at Hayworth’s hotel and insisted on seeing her. She told the starlet that she was “about to embark on the greatest romance of her life” and that if she gave in totally, she would “find happiness at long last". Note to self: Don't trust fortune tellers.

As all-consuming and passionate as Prince Aly's affair with Hayworth was, there were just two huge problems. First, he was still very much married to Joan Yarde-Buller. Second, Hayworth's high-profile status made their fling front-page news across the world, throwing Prince Aly's sordid personal life into print yet again. And then his family butted their heads in.

The Aga Khan deeply disapproved of his son's new obsession. The spiritual leader had more than a few affairs in his own youth, but he was mortified at the negative press the story was generating, and the way it exposed the immorality at the center of his clan. He pushed Prince Aly to break it off with Hayworth...but then the worst happened.

Just as things were really getting out of hand with the press, Rita Hayworth got pregnant. Even more scandalously, Hayworth decided to keep the child. To his (sort of) credit, the Prince stuck to her side and committed himself to the relationship, silencing all his father's doubts. Except, well, that meant another divorce trial.

Prince Aly was passionately in love with Hayworth at this time, and poor Joan Yarde-Buller saved the last of her dignity by trying to make a quiet exit from the whole mess. But she did get one revenge. Although she left without much of a peep to the press, Joan took the Prince for a whole lot of money, securing herself a comfortable life post-Khan. Chin up, Joan.

The promiscuous Khan seemed completely "meh" about the disintegration of his first marriage. In fact, he planned his second marriage to Hayworth for just a couple of weeks after his divorce to Joan—sound familiar?  He also lavished Hayworth with gifts, including a $150,000 diamond necklace, leading up to the wedding. As for Hayworth? Well...

Before her nuptials, Hayworth started to feel uneasy. After all, Khan's reputation wasn't stellar. To add insult to injury, many of the Prince's snobby friends looked down on her for being a mere Hollywood star, while her own friends didn't think she had a chance in heaven to turn Khan into a loyal husband. So Hayworth struck out in a desperate way.

Hayworth was so uncertain about her impending royal marriage that she actually telegrammed her ex-husband Orson Welles, begging him to come see her because of an "emergency". She was so beside herself, Welles even rode on the back of a cargo plane to get to her as quickly as possible. But when he opened the door to her hotel, he saw a desperate sight.

In a scene that would have made Prince Aly's blood boil, Hayworth met Welles at her door dressed head to toe in lingerie, with candles and champagne completing the atmosphere behind her. "Here I am," Hayworth breathily told her ex, "Marry me". It was in defiance of all her loyalty to Prince Aly, and Welles' response changed the course of Hayworth's life forever.

Although Welles could see Hayworth was utterly unhappy, he saw no choice but to decline her offer. More than that, he also encouraged her to go through with marrying Prince Aly, believing that the situation was too far gone to stop. Even so, Welles later recalled that it was “just the worst marriage that ever could have happened. And she knew it!" Sadly, Hayworth didn't listen to her gut.

There was a rot at the center of Prince Aly's relationship, but you'd never know it by his exquisite confection of a wedding. The two-day affair took place on May 27th and 28th, 1949, where guests drank hundreds of bottles of champagne and ate pounds of caviar beside a swimming pool filled with gallons of cologne. To complete the picture, Hayworth cut her wedding cake with a glass sword and then scores of the Aga Khan’s followers kissed her feet.

On December 28, 1949, Hayworth gave birth to her child with the Prince, a daughter they named Yasmin; the little babe's full official title was "Princess Yasmin Aga Khan". Both Hayworth and Prince Aly doted on their girl, and for a brief time, it seemed like these crazy kids were going to make it. Just kidding, it didn't seem like that at all.

As the years passed, the Aga Khan's hesitant approval of his son's marriage—and his son—soon soured. Child or not, Prince Aly continued to womanize and gamble, while the Aga Khan felt that Hayworth was only in the union for peace and entertainment, not duty or love. Eventually, the supreme ruler confronted his son...and gave him a disastrous ultimatum.

In 1950, the Aga Khan demanded, on pain of his good name, that Prince Aly and his wife Rita Hayworth tour Africa to meet and listen to their followers. It didn't turn out great. For months, the Prince joyously rode around meeting adoring crowds, while Hayworth spent her days twiddling her thumbs. Except in the end, it was the nights that were the real problem.

While Khan fulfilled his diplomatic duties, he also found time to mix business with pleasure. He spent much of his off-time on the trip in the "company" of other women and away from his wife. So it should have been no surprise when, after one carousing evening, he returned back to their hotel to find Rita's bags packed. She left him and returned to the States immediately—but it wasn't the end of their drama.

After their disastrous trip, you might expect Khan to make an effort to save his marriage. Instead, in 1951, the Prince danced with another major Hollywood starlet, Joan Fontaine, in the very same club he and Hayworth had met. It was the final straw. When she found out, Hayworth officially filed for divorce under the grounds of “extreme cruelty". And that cruelty kept on coming.

Before his marriage with Hayworth even came to an end, Prince Aly had his sights set on yet another woman. Another Hollywood star, in fact—the beautiful Gene Tierney. Khan and Tierney met in Argentina while she was filming a movie and he was scouting racehorses, and their romance began shortly after. Somehow, it was his messiest dalliance yet.

Tierney was desperately in love, so when she and Prince Aly got engaged in 1952, she went right out and told the press. It was a fatal mistake. As a future spiritual leader, Aly absolutely needed to get permission from his father to marry. Well, the Khan didn't want another attention-seeking starlet in his life, and he turned his son down flat. Aly's reaction was...not good.

Prince Aly wasn't a man to give up on a beautiful woman, so instead of offering Gene Tierney marriage, he had a much more indecent proposal: She could simply become his mistress. Tierney, already on the verge of a mental illness, understandably exploded on the sleazy Prince, engaging in several screaming matches with him around Paris. This didn't go well for her, either.

In the end, Prince Aly didn't like it much when his side-pieces made his life difficult. Fed up with Tierney's (legitimate) waterworks, the rake simply upped and left her in a Paris Hotel. Shortly after, Tierney had a bona bide breakdown and returned to America, where her family admitted her into a mental institution for over a year.

Aly still had one loose end from his second marriage: His daughter Yasmin. Although Hayworth had custody and was currently raising Yasmin in the Catholic faith, the Prince was set on making her a Muslim. In a bid to convince Hayworth to bend to his demands, he offered his ex-wife a literal million dollars. Hayworth turned him down. Except she might have had good reason...

During the fallout of her marriage to the Prince, Hayworth started to develop chilling beliefs. As the Khan himself put it, "Miss Hayworth somehow got it into her head that either Aly or I myself might try to take her daughter away from her, indeed kidnap the child". Of course, the powerful family denied Hayworth's fears as delusions...but then again, they would.

Prince Aly's dramatic divorce from Hayworth once more became a press firestorm, and everyone was struggling to get snaps of their daughter Yasmin in particular. One day, a prying reporter crept into the house where Yasmin was staying with a caretaker, hoping to catch the heat-score in a candid moment. What he discovered shocked him.

Inside, the photographer found Yasmin and her half-sister, Rebecca, living in horrible conditions. The caretaker's house was dirty, and garbage covered the property. But that wasn't even the worst part. Later on, people discovered where Hayworth had been all this time—on a romantic getaway with her newest lover. Needless to say, the Prince was not happy.

With this kind of bad press following Prince Aly around, the Aga Khan wasn't just disappointed anymore, he was darn near ruined. Soon enough, people within the Khan's community began demanding that he abdicate, and the ruler had to call a special council to threaten excommunication to the malcontents and squash the crisis.

After his fling with Tierney, Khan found himself another high class partner: Bettina Graziani, a gorgeous model who hung out with the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Lauren Bacall, and Humphrey Bogart. In a now familiar story, Graziani left her screenwriter boyfriend to run off with Khan, who convinced her to leave her career and settle down.

Khan had a taste for blood. Even when it came to hunting, the prince decided to do things to excess. As a young man, Khan went on hunting expeditions and bagged about 20 leopards and panthers, seven tigers, and three lions. Of course, that simply wasn't enough for the Prince, either. Unlike many others, he did this all on foot.

Like his father, Khan was a huge fan of horse racing. He rode from a very young age and, when he could, began to raise thoroughbred horses himself. Though his second wife Rita Hayworth wasn’t really into equine pursuits, she joined his club and bought a filly anyway. The horse went on to place second in the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe, one of France’s most prestigious races.

According to world class trainers, Khan was one of the best horse breeders in the world. In fact, it’s likely that he could have made a career in horses alone. Champion trainer Noel Murless once said that, “It is probably fair to say that, with his experience of international racing, he was the best judge of collateral form in the world".

Before his time as a spy, the young prince decided that he needed a little adventure in his life, and joined the French Foreign Legion. The Foreign Legion is France’s most infamous military unit, which accepts entrants with foreign nationalities. For most of WWII, Khan served as a legionnaire in Egypt and the Middle East.

At a certain point, Khan joined the British Cavalry—a fitting place given his experience on horseback. During his military career, Khan participated in the Allied invasion of German-occupied France. It seems that, here, he found a healthy outlet for his love of danger and daring, and he received a colorful array of medals, including the Croix de Guerre.

Of course, all this sturm and drang had to reach a breaking point, and what a breaking point it was. Much to Prince Aly’s dismay, his father dealt him a cruel betrayal. Before the end of his life, the Aga Khan rewrote his will. In it, he decided to pass his title down to his grandson, rather than his troublesome son, for the first time in history. Oh, but it got more embarrassing than that.

The denial of Prince Aly's inheritance was a very public event. After the Aga Khan passed in 1957, aides called a press conference—complete with a lawn full of people and journalists—to read out the ruler's last will and testament. So yeah, Prince Aly Khan found out about Daddy's colossal snub at the same time as the rest of the world. Thanks, Dad.

Prodigal son that he may have been, the Aga Khan's decision still hurt Prince Ali tremendously. According to his fiancée, Bettina Graziani, the Prince “was never quite the same” after his father’s announcement, and he felt the whole press circus was a "public humiliation" for his sins. Yeah, that kind of Freudian nightmare would do anyone in.

The Prince's future wasn't all bad...for a bit. In 1958, soon after his father's passing, Pakistan appointed Aly as an ambassador to the United Nations. More than that, his girlfriend Bettina became his fiancee, and she was also newly pregnant. For a brief moment, it seemed that everything was looking up. However, a tragic twist of fate awaited.

In May 1960, Prince Aly was in France on United Nations business with his fiancee Bettina. As was his way, he found a little time for pleasure, and the pair were en route to a party. The Prince was behind the wheel on the narrow European roads, with his chauffeur riding in the back. Then, suddenly and without warning, he crashed headfirst into another vehicle.

The Prince sustained devastating injuries at the scene of the crash, and workers rushed him to the hospital to try to save him. It only ended in tragedy. Prince Aly Khan, the lothario of the 20th century, lost all the vim and vigor of his life that evening, passing almost immediately upon arrival at the age of 48. Yet even then, there was one more heartache to come.

By some miracle, Prince Aly's fiancee Bettina managed to survive the accident with only minor injuries. Still, this could not have helped her sorrow. Although her body was physically fine, the shock of the crash caused her to miscarry her and the Prince's unborn child. It was a final, tragic closing to Aly's drama-filled life.

Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

When we think of schemes and scams we think of ‘con artists.’ ‘Con,’ in this case, is an abbreviation of ‘confidence,’ as in ‘confidence man’ or ‘confidence trick.’ These terms gained popularity through the satirical writing of Dr. James Houston, who sarcastically described an unsophisticated swindler, Samuel Thompson, in this manner. However, Houston’s readers misunderstood his writing, and Thompson gained a reputation as a master crook!

While Samuel Thompson may have been the first con man described as such, Carlo Pietro Giovanni Guglielmo Tebaldo Ponzi, born 33 years after the term was coined, in 1882, is perhaps the most famous.

Ponzi grew up in Italy but arrived in Boston on November 15, 1903. He quickly learned English, gained employment in a restaurant, and worked his way up to waiter, where he got fired for short-changing customers. Once a scammer, always a scammer.

After failing to make much money in the US, Ponzi moved to Montreal in 1907. Having learned French, and already speaking Italian and English, he was able to get a job at the newly opened Banco Zarossi—a bank primarily serving Italian immigrants in Montreal. However, the owner was using the money from newly opened accounts to pay off debts and was eventually run out of town.

After his ex-boss fled to Mexico, Ponzi moved in with Zarossi’s abandoned family. He tried to help them out, but a lack of funds and his own desire to return to the US led to him forging a check he found in the empty office of a previous Zarossi client. He subsequently served three years at Saint-Vincent-de-Paul Penitentiary.

On his way back to the US, Ponzi got caught in an immigrant-smuggling scheme and ended up serving two years in an Atlanta prison. And to think, he could've stopped there and Ponzi scheme would've meant an entirely different thing.

After being released from lockup for the second time, Ponzi got a job as a nurse in a mining camp. When a fellow nursed suffered severe burns Ponzi volunteered to donate 220 square inches of his own skin. The subsequent operations resulted in pleurisy for Ponzi. That's a pretty big sacrifice for a man who mostly took from others.

Ponzi met his wife Rose Maria Gnecco upon his return to Boston, and the two were married in 1918. After taking over, but being unable to revive his wife’s fruit business, Ponzi decided to work for himself. He came up with various ideas and wrote to European acquaintances to try to sell them on his plans. One interested correspondent from Spain sent an IRC (International Reply Coupon) with their inquiry. Ponzi figured that the IRC (which was bought for the cost of postage in its home country, but exchangeable for the cost of postage in the new country) could potentially be used to profit from differences in postal costs. The cost of postage had greatly decreased in Italy after WWI, and Ponzi figured that exchanging an Italian IRC for American postage could net him an estimated 400% profit.

Unfortunately, Ponzi did not have the start-up capital necessary to buy the initial order of European IRCs. So he started a stock company that promised investors huge amounts of interest on their money. By January 1920, Ponzi started his Securities Exchange Company. (It’s not a coincidence that the US Securities and Exchange Commission, established in 1934 to regulate the industry and protect investors, has a very similar ring to it.)

In January 1920, the first month of Ponzi’s SEC, 18 people invested $1,800. In February he paid back his original investors with money from new investors. As word spread of this great financial opportunity, things escalated quickly. Like, really quickly. By May 1920, Ponzi had made $420,000, or about $5 million, adjusted for inflation. By June people had invested $2.5 million ($30 million with inflation). By the end of July Ponzi was taking in about $1 million ($12 million with inflation) a day.

Throughout all of this “investment,” Ponzi was largely able to pay previous investors with the money coming in from new investors. However, recall that the original plan for Ponzi’s business was exchanging lesser value postage for higher value postage. While he was able to do this, Ponzi had not yet figured out how to exchange the postage for cash. He also, to his credit (?), realized the logistical impossibility of purchasing, transporting, and exchanging the ludicrous amounts of IRCs that would be necessary to pay out the millions in investments he had accepted.

As Ponzi’s insane financial ascent continued, the Boston Post decided to investigate. They interviewed a financial journalist named Clarence Barron, who observed that Ponzi had not invested with himself. Barron also calculated that to cover the investments in Ponzi’s SEC there would have to be about 160 million postal reply coupons in circulation. The actual number of coupons in circulation was about 27,000. They were formidable foils for each other—while Ponzi went on to be known for his investment scam, Clarence Barron went on to be president of the Dow Jones and worked at The Wall Street Journal. He's considered the founder of modern financial journalism and has a finance magazine named after him.

The Post piece caused panic amongst investors, and Ponzi paid out $2 million over three days to crowds outside his office. However, he was far from admitting defeat—he’d mingle with the crowds, offering coffee and donuts, and some in the crowd decided to leave their money invested with him.

Ponzi decided to hire a publicity agent, William McMasters. However, McMasters became suspicious of Ponzi and investigated his finances. In August, the disloyal agent wrote an article for the Post declaring Ponzi to be $4.5 million in debt. This sparked a second run on the SEC from worried investors, who Ponzi paid off in one day.

After the second run, an investigation by the state’s Bank Commissioner, Joseph Allen, discovered that Ponzi had borrowed about $250,000 from Hanover Trust—a bank that Ponzi effectively controlled. While not cause for judicial charges, this led Allen to assign state examiners to supervise Ponzi’s accounts. The state examiners would eventually determine that Ponzi was $7 million in debt.

On August 11, 1920, the Post ran a story detailing Ponzi’s Montreal misadventures in corrupt banking and check fraud. Later on in the day, Allen seized Hanover Trust, foiling Ponzi’s contingency plan to ‘borrow’ money from the bank’s vault.

On August 12th, Ponzi surrendered himself to authorities and was charged with mail fraud. After being released on bail he was re-arrested on charges of larceny.

After the collapse of Ponzi’s SEC, Hanover Trust, and five other banks, investors retrieved less than 30 cents per dollar invested. The total investment losses were estimated at $20 million, or $240 million calculated for inflation.

Charged with 86 counts of mail fraud by the Feds, Ponzi pled guilty and was given a relatively lenient sentence of five years.

Ponzi was able to get out of lockup after just three and a half years but was almost immediately indicted on 22 state charges of larceny.

After arguing that the state’s charges were in bad faith as they exemplified double jeopardy, and having his arguments dismissed, Ponzi represented himself in a trial for the first ten counts of larceny. Apparently, his powers of financial persuasion were transferable to the judicial system, as he was acquitted on all counts by the jury. A second trial, for the next five charges, found a deadlocked jury, and so it took a third trial to convict Ponzi on the remaining seven counts, and he was sentenced to seven to nine years in lockup.

Ponzi would scam again, in Florida, after his larceny conviction, then attempt to flee the country. After this failed, he served another seven years in prison in Massachusetts, but ultimately made it back to Italy, where he met his end.

You might think that he would have shown some remorse, but while giving a final interview to an American reporter, Ponzi said "Even if they never got anything for it, it was cheap at that price. Without malice aforethought, I had given them the best show that was ever staged in their territory since the landing of the Pilgrims! It was easily worth fifteen million bucks to watch me put the thing over." I'm not sure his victims would agree.

Almost 60 years after the passing of Ponzi, one of the biggest stories of the last decade told a similar tale of financial hubris. This investment scandal with a similar structure would be discovered to be the work of Bernie Madoff. The former NASDAQ chairman admitted that the investment arm of his firm was an elaborate Ponzi scheme, and investors lost an estimated $18 billion.

Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

I had a letter mailed to my office that was basically threatening me, saying I better stop handing out C’s and D’s or "word on the street" was going to come out that I was a bad teacher. It might not seem like the worst rumor, but if spread correctly, no one would take my class and I'd be out of a job. I had a pretty good idea of who it was.

For obvious reasons, I immediately ruled out all the students doing well in my classes but didn't think direct accusations would be effective anyway. I decided to get to the bottom of it, and my plan was rather genius—I took the letter to each of my three classes and turned it into a lesson on faulty rhetoric.

My expectations were exceeded when I began to read the letter out loud and without fail, each class erupted in laughter and exclaimed things like "What a butthead!" before I could even weigh in. The kid I suspected the most was sat slumped in his chair without much to say that day.

okkoto

A group of lousy, talkative students started doing well on the weekly tests during the seminar periods. They went from marginally passing to consistently getting 100s. I figured out that they had a friend who was in an earlier seminar feeding them the questions before they took the test themselves. So, I took it upon myself to teach them a lesson—I emailed them asking them to teach the whole class on their newfound study habits.

They all had to stand in front of the class and "teach" everyone how they study. The whole lesson was a load of garbage, and it was visible to everyone. For the next test, I rotated the questions for their seminar time to make sure it was different from the earlier class. The whole group got 0/10 across the board. I emailed them again and said, "Guess those study habits need some tweaking, huh?"

rand486

Once there was a guy sleeping in my calculus class. I walked over to my desk phone and said to everyone, "Did you guys hear that ring?" I picked up the phone, nodded my head, and hung up. Then, I set my brilliant plan into motion—I woke up the guy and told him he was needed in the main office, so he left. The entire class was confused. Ten minutes later, he returned and was like, “They didn't need me at the office". I said, “I know, but I hope that walk woke you up".

GDE1990

There was a kid in my class who was always cheating on my tests and quizzes. I caught him several times and contacted the parents, but nothing was ever really done about it. I don't think his mom ever really believed that he was cheating as much as he was, and there were plenty of times when I probably didn't catch him. He once missed the midterm test.

He came back to school on the day I gave the kids their scores back. The papers also had the answers, but not the questions. I saw him sneakily talking to his friends, and they gave him the papers that had the answers on them. I didn't say anything, because the next time I gave out a test, I knew I'd nail that sucker big time.

I gave him a makeup exam that had the same questions with all of the answer choices moved over by one letter. Little bugger got a 3% on a multiple-choice midterm.

teacherthrowawayyyy

I had two students request a meeting with the dean of students to discuss my unfair grading. I picked up a habit early on that ended up saving me in that situation—I had started to take copious notes and have a file on every student. I showed up with a stack of evidence. Every substantive in-person interaction was documented on the front of the file, and I included copies of every email and note on the inside. There's nothing more embarrassing than coming face to face with your laziness and being unable to wriggle free.

They started paying attention after that.

VestigialTail

I had two blatant plagiarists stand up and read both of their papers at the same time. Halfway through, without even looking at them, I turned to the wall and recited the last concluding statements out loud. That's when it became satisfyingly clear—they had used my own body of work and changed it just enough to make it past the checker.

I then told them that they would have to read each paper they write out loud after each submission and that I would personally grade their papers. They also had to sit at the front and I would call on them with every open-ended question first.

sect-10

I taught at a private school for five years while going to school at night to switch professions. This school prided itself on its fancy college placements and average student GPA and SAT scores. However, because almost every student paid the school's high tuition, the school never expelled anyone. Instead, it mandated summer school or holding a failing student back a grade.

There were some kids whose parents funded scholarships at the school, so the little monsters thought they were untouchable. One such student was named Max. He was a standard brat. He was a smug, insubordinate, and conniving 10th grader who was the bane of my existence for the entire year. Sending him to the principal never worked because the principal was in Max’s parents' pocket.

Appealing directly to the boy’s parents didn't work either because of the quintessential, "What?! Our son is an angel and has top grades in all his other classes" reaction. Of course, a student is magically going to get top grades when the other teachers are scared of their parents. About two to three months before the end of the school year, I overheard Max smugly describing his summer plans.

He was telling this kid that was going to be spending the entire summer at an exclusive summer camp in the Swiss Alps. Thus, my plan began to unfold. I taught Max's class in two different subjects, so my grades counted for about 25-30% of each student's overall GPA. Max never studied for my exams or participated in class, so he received failing grades.

I stopped telling him what his weekly grades were. Then, about two weeks before the end of the year, I handed each student a one-page summary that contained their "projected end-of-year grade". Max's projected grades were 36 and 31, which meant he would be failing two core classes, and they effectively brought his GPA below the average allowed by the school.

This in turn meant the Swiss Alps would be Max-less because he would be spending his summer vacation in the school's mandatory remedial program. To ensure no one tried to pressure me into changing his grades, I sent copies of all my projected grade summaries to all the teachers in my department, as well as to the school's assistant principal, principal, dean, and Board of Governors.

Max was terrified and decided to try and pressure me into saving his summer. At the following morning's assembly, he approached me in front of about 100 students and teachers and, in his smug way smiling out at everyone, announced loudly, "Mr. Realist, you're going to give me an extra credit project to raise my grades so I can pass, just like all the other teachers, right?"

The room went silent. He wanted to give everyone a scene to remember, so I was going to do just that. Watchmen is one of my favorite comics of all time, and this was in early 2009 when the movie adaptation was released. I stood up, got right up in Max's face, and responded with a modified version of Rorschach's famous quote".

Max, you are afraid of me.  I have seen your true face. Your life is but an extended gutter and the gutter is full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. Your accumulated filth has foamed up about your waist and your politicians look up and shout ‘SAVE US!’ I look down at him and whisper 'No.'" Then I walked out of the assembly hall, and Max spent the summer in remedial school while I went to Vegas.

Sarcastic_or_realist

I had my senior level Abnormal Psych class visit a local homeless shelter. A few people in the class felt it was dumb or a waste of time, so they bailed just as the tour was starting. That ticked me off, so I made sure my next move would teach them a lesson—I made the final exam for that class four questions that were VERY easy to answer; that is if you had stayed for the whole tour.

It was absolutely impossible if you did not.

TollBoothW1lly

I have taught more than a thousand kids. I had a kid in my class who complained about everything—he did no work whatsoever, talked smack about everyone, made fun of kids with disabilities, etc. He was always the first to start shrieking that he was the victim in every situation, that everyone was against him, and that he always got picked on and so forth.

He had a constant tendency to immediately trash talk anything that anyone else had put effort into, including my lessons. One day, one of my students, an incredibly sweet and sensitive girl, was sharing something in class for the first time. She was visibly nervous and had a shaky voice.

Of course, this kid began making fun of her hair, her glasses, and her face. He was loud enough that we could all hear what he was saying. I started walking toward his desk but was interrupted when the girl very, very calmly cursed at him. The entire class was dead silent. This girl never spoke, let alone swore, and she said it with such self-control. Everyone's eyes were on me, waiting for me to react.

The troublemaker started screaming, saying, “Did you hear that? You always get me in trouble when I say that. This isn’t fair,” and so forth. I said, "Huh? I didn't hear anything," and turned back around, continuing the lesson. A few kids cheered. It felt really good.

Permalink

I had these two girls in my economics class who were cheating all the time. They turned in this paper on the Federal Reserve that didn't get picked up with the plagiarism checker, but they each turned in the exact same paper as the other. They weren't going to get away with it. In front of the whole class, I told them they did a great job on the paper and that they each got a 50%.

Permalink

I was a professor at a state university where I taught pre-health and pre-med students. I have many stories, both good and bad, but I've never felt the need to retaliate against a student until one student entered my world. This student wanted to go to medical school, though they were of very middling intellect and came off as socially inept; not to mention personally odious.

She figured the best way to get ahead was to complain about everything. In academia, if you complain enough about a class, we give you a higher grade and send you up to the next poor instructor for you to torment. So, this student went all out to find everything and anything to complain about: the exam had too many questions, lecture notes were not in the format she liked, I didn’t return her emails on the same day, and the list went on.

By the end, she had escalated these issues to the top, and I got called into the Dean's office. My administrators above me have worked with me for years. They knew this student’s history of filing complaints about everything and everyone. They told me to go easy on her just so I could be done with her. I gave her a higher grade than she deserved (which seemed to be the point of all of this), then washed my hands of her...or so I thought.

A year later, I was assigned to be the committee head of the faculty that creates group letters of recommendation for medical school applications. This student submitted the form for our committee to create her recommendation packet. Students can, and SHOULD, waive the right to read these evaluations. If you are afraid of what a professor will say about you, don't ask them for a letter.

The student made sure to point out to the committee in a formal letter that because of the problems she had with ALL of the professors that would be writing letters, she wanted to make sure their letters were appropriate and of the correct tone before we sent them off. Therefore, she would be reviewing them before approving them for inclusion in her packet.

Nobody wanted to write a true letter for fear of getting sued. She would be seeing all of the letters, as would her counsel before we sent them. So our hands were tied. But one brave soul decided to rebel—he went around and solicited her letter-writers into creating sublime choruses of praise. These would be letters you would expect to read to the Nobel Committee about Hawking, Einstein, Newton, and Feynman.

Nobody would believe that a student with this background or MCAT score could get even one of these eulogy masterpieces, let alone such letters from a whole panel. I included a note from the committee stating that the student had previously filed academic complaints against every professor that wrote her a letter, therefore these letters may not reflect her true academic potential.

The student didn't have the right to see THAT part unless they requested it later after the letters had been sent out. She sent out applications to every medical school that existed. Within her application packet came those beautiful letters, and those three explosive paragraphs explaining that this student filled academic complaints against every letter writer, and did not waive the right to keep their letters secret.

It doesn't take a genius on the admissions committee of each of these schools to read between the lines and drop that application in the trash before granting an interview. She did not get one interview. With more than 30 applications, not one school invited her to continue her application process. That gets a professorial cheer!

Nevermind_Itll_Heal

A girl who had been obnoxious all semester gave a presentation that was suspiciously articulate despite her usual behavior. I stopped her in the middle of it and I dropped the hammer: "Now you're going to continue reading that essay, but I know you didn't write it, because it was written by my friend. I expect you to make a new presentation for next week, but read us the rest of the essay please". She was stunned.

bbbberlin

There was this one little jerk who was always bothering another kid about his weight. I would always tell him to stop and he would for a bit, but the next day he would carry on. One day, I finally had enough and told him that he needed to go to the principal's office. He responded with something along the lines of: "I don't need to listen to you, I’m strong".

I knew that I needed to do something. So I told him that since he is so "strong," he would have to stand in the middle of the room with his arms stretched out. Let me just say that it is more difficult than it sounds. He took it as a challenge—he walked his smug face to the middle of the library and started holding his arms out.

It took him less than a minute for him to start lowering them, and I would turn to him and say, "Yeah, you must be really strong" sarcastically and he would lift them back up. About five minutes passed and my mom, who also worked at the school, walked into the library to see what was up. We chatted for a second, and then she noticed the kid standing in the middle of the room. She asked what he was doing.

The kid's face went red immediately. I told my mom that he was bothering other students and was disrespectful. Turns out, that my mom was this kid's favorite teacher and he had no idea that I was her daughter. He ran and started crying into my mom's skirt and apologized, but my mom still took him to the principal. The rest of the year he was a little angel.

yourbff

I used to teach high school English and theatre. My students weren't terrible, they were just teenagers. I ended up getting a reputation of being able to work well with "problem students," so I ended up getting a lot of problem students shoveled into my class. I rolled with it as best I could, not realizing this was the result of my being a newer teacher and at the bottom of the totem pole.

I was teaching Lord of the Flies and allowed the students to vote for one of their classmates to be in charge of the class. One of my classes voted for one of my "problem students". I let the class crash and burn for a week. It was part of the lesson, and I was surprised at the results—I still remember the individual student who was voted leader saying he couldn't take it anymore. He never realized how much of a pain he and other students were being. He ended up being one of my top students for the rest of the semester.

asher1611

I taught English at a ritzy private school. We weren't allowed to discipline the kids for any reason, no matter what, because the school was making money from the tuition. For the most part, the kids were pretty good, but there was this one kid who was always disruptive, bullied the other kids, threw pencils, wrote swear words on the whiteboard before class, never listened, etc.

Eventually, I had enough of him—I started eating a lot of kimchi on the days I taught that specific class, which gave me wicked indigestion. When I walked by the kid I would let out horrible, silent, creeping, hot gas. No one ever blames the teacher and after a couple of weeks, he became known as the stinky kid. It made me feel better knowing that he was knocked down a few pegs.

funsizedsamurai

I had a terrible student who was obnoxious and disruptive. He had no respect for anyone, including his classmates. What I did next was exactly what he deserved—I gave him a class participation grade that was just low enough to have him fail the class. He tried to appeal it twice but to no avail. He changed majors and the professors in his new major hated him too.

Permalink

I had a twelfth grader take a bottle of water that wasn’t his, then deny it, demonstrably lying. He got super snotty and insulting when I called him out on it. I just sent him off to the office for the period, and he probably thought that was the end of the matter. Little did he know that it was far from over. A couple of months later, the school was going on a senior trip camping in the desert.

He was devastated to learn he wasn't allowed to go. He would have to sit in an empty classroom and watch PBS videos while we were hiking, sitting around campfires, sleeping in tents, and making bacon and pancakes for breakfast. I wasn’t about to chaperone him and deal with whatever nonsense he was going to put forth.

todlee

I had a student in my college composition class who was constantly making obnoxious, offensive comments. He thought he was the edgy class clown but mostly he was just annoying. He kept getting away with his appalling behavior until one day, he slipped up big time—he wrote an essay that was just an incoherent rant about how much he hates a certain ethnic group.

I reported him to the dean of students for hate speech. Other than the occasional comment about how he was being silenced for "standing up for America," he finally stopped making obnoxious comments in class after that.

schnit123

I had a very strict policy about passing notes in class. I had suspected a bunch of students had been passing notes to each other, but I could never catch them. That is until one day after all the students had gone home, I found a large stack of old notebook paper on the floor. It was a note more than10 pages long that had been stapled and taped together.

The girls in question had been passing this same note around and adding to it, presumably since the beginning of the school year. I would hand out a lot of extra credit from bonus questions on homework to extra credit assignments, and I kept track of how much each student had accumulated. At the end of each semester, I would have an auction.

The students could spend the extra credit they had accumulated on prizes, usually toys, and candy. I saw the perfect opportunity to serve them their karma—I saved the giant note that the girls had written until the end of the semester and then auctioned it off to a group of boys in the class. None of the girls in question passed notes after that.

128bitz

I taught an AP Chemistry class. Our school’s rules allowed for unlimited skips in classes of honors-level or above. I had three students that would only show up for the exams and all three would pass with identical grades, despite never sitting within eyesight of each other. I spent the entire year trying to figure out how they could have possibly cheated. In the AP class, your grade was based solely on the final exam at the end of the year.

All other classwork, homework, and exams were to help you learn, and were the deciding factor for being allowed to take the AP Exam. I decided to throw them a curve ball—instead of a written exam we'd have a lab exam for a final, and it would include a chemical that stained your skin blue if you touched it. Since these three students never showed up for class, they never knew anything about lab procedures, and they ended up failing the class and having blue skin for the rest of the school year.

Permalink

I was teaching film and I had this one student who slacked and was not that great in class. She always complained when I showed a black and white, classic, or subtitled film. She was also great at making others feel bad. For graded coursework, my students had to do a paper on their favorite director. She picked Tim Burton.

They were given strict instructions to use books from the recommended reading list and Wikipedia was not allowed. Within the four weeks of the assignment due date, I would see my students in the library, devouring the required books. All except for her. The due date came, but they had a few days to make corrections before it went to the external examiner.

Hers was the last to be handed in. Immediately I could tell it was from Wikipedia. As I glanced through it, it was all just a collection of titbit trivia from Tim Burton’s page, albeit just re-written slightly differently. She told me she read Burton on Burton and a few other film books, but forgot to put in the quotes.

I told her Wikipedia was forbidden as a source and marks would be deducted. She told me she hadn't used Wikipedia, and called me a liar for having said I did. Clearly, she had no idea who she was talking to. I told her she had two days to hand in the proper paper. So that night I re-edited Tim Burton's Wikipedia page, and I waited. Two days later she re-submitted her paper.

I read it and told her she had once again used Wikipedia. She denied it. I asked her if she could show me her research or evidence to back her writing that Tim Burton said his inspiration for making Mars Attacks was because he was abducted by aliens, or that Edward Scissorhands was based on a true story about a boy called Thomas Cleaverfingers.

She said it was in Burton on Burton. I asked which page, as she didn't follow the bibliography rules. She told me it was on page 45. I took the book off the shelf behind me and began to flick through it, slowly. “You've got the wrong edition,” she said, “It's in the new edition". I just put the book back on the shelf and then told her how I re-edited the Wikipedia page with stupid quotes and made-up trivia. I had to submit her paper to the external examiner who would support my giving her an F.

vertigo01

I had a kid in my high school science class who used to say out loud that he believed that you could pass any multiple-choice test by always answering 'C.’ So, on one test day, I walked up to him, handed him a multiple-choice test, and said, "I made this version of the test JUST FOR YOU!" The kid turned pale—he furiously filled the test out with everything EXCEPT a ‘C.’ On his version of the test, ‘C’ was the correct answer every single time.

lartrak

I had a kid one year who was just evil, so much so that within one day of meeting him, I was shocked by his sinister nature. I've had kids who were psychopathic before, but this kid was straight-up worse. He manipulated people to do his bidding, bullied, harassed, and teased other children and teachers, didn't do his work, and took classroom materials.

At first, I was kind to the kid and did all the right things. I authentically praised his work and actions whenever I could and I never let him feel like I was out to get him. I always clearly stated the reasons why he was in trouble, involved his parents, and so forth. I was fair and kind...It didn’t work. One day, after he punched a kid repeatedly, then tried to get out of it and run away, I lost it on him.

I just shouted at him right to his face in the hallway. I don't even remember what I said. It was so bad, I went back to my desk and took some deep breaths. I had never shouted like that at a kid before and was mortified that I let him see that weakness in me. When I looked over at him, he was writing an apology note to the child he had punched. After that, he still displayed some mean-spirited tendencies, mostly on the playground, but he could at least control himself in my classroom.

swisspea

One time, I had a student who was really concerned about his grades. He suckered me into helping him right before progress reports were to be released, so he could play in the big game coming up. It's something all teachers will fall for because we want all students to achieve, so I helped him. I kept him updated on his grades.

Up until the day of his big game, he was barely passing at a D-. On the day of the game, he came into class and did absolutely nothing. He just shut down and was obnoxious because it was so close to progress reports. He figured the material from that day wouldn't be submitted for the progress report because it was so close...but he was wrong.

He thought he was good to play the next football game. So, I decided to put in the extra effort and grade the work for that day and see what would happen to the overall class average if I recorded the grades and submitted them. He ended up with a 59.4%, a failing grade. So I hit ‘Submit Grades.’ There went his game.

kulstor_ebrough

During midterm exams, I explained the rules to the class. Three times I was asked and turned down requests for calculators. Everyone was done except for my ADHD student. He was allowed double time to complete the exam. Then he pulled out a calculator. I watched and watched in disbelief as he solved problem after problem.

I pulled up his medical necessities form and waited. Once he was done, I took his test and he stood there waiting. I asked what he was waiting for, and he asked that I look it over. I then told him the brutal truth—he failed. He started crying and asked why. I explained that cheating was the worst offense he could do and that because he used a calculator, despite me saying none were allowed, he had cheated.

I threatened to report him. His first words were, "But, my accommodation!" I then pulled out and showed him where it said, "calculators must be allowed except where calculations and formulas are the tested content". He bawled like a baby and never mentioned his accommodation again. I have ADHD myself. It never got me free A's. I had to work twice as hard to get them in the regular time allotted.

godfet

I taught visual arts at a middle school for several years. To survive teaching this age group, an experienced teacher understands that most boys are sneaky as heck. They really can't help it, as its age-appropriate behavior, slow frontal lobe development, etc. One special little ray of sunshine kept reaching under the table unscrewing the bolts attaching the table legs.

Any bump from an unsuspecting kid would send the table crashing. So, one morning before class, I gave him a taste of his own medicine. I globbed an entire jar of petroleum jelly all over the leg bolts under the table. Watching this kid's face slack into horror after reaching under the table to grab the bolts was so satisfying. He couldn't wipe it away, hide it, or deny it.

Permalink

One of my first teaching jobs was at a particularly rough high school in the city. There was one student who was known to all of the teaching staff as a real piece of work. He was rude to everyone, inattentive, and always tried to pick fights with students, both verbal and physical. Those were all bad, but at one point, he went too far—he tried to light a fire in my home economics class by stuffing a bunch of dishrags into an oven.

I ended up keeping him after class, sat him down, and gave it an honest try talking to him. I tried to figure out why he was acting the way that he was. The kid just sat there and either wouldn’t pay attention to anything I was saying or would just lip off in response. Eventually, he said something along the lines of, "I don't have to sit here and listen to this garbage," and stood up to walk away.

That would've been the end of it, but fate wouldn't have it that way. He dropped his pencil and as he bent to pick it up, I stood up and gave him a boot in the behind that would put the Spartan kick from the movie 300 to shame, sending this little piece of work sprawling out onto the floor. He gathered himself up and began ranting and raving.

He said that he was going to tell the principal and that I would get fired. I decided to call his bluff, and in a voice that would turn blood into ice, looked him square in the eye and said, "Go ahead. Who's going to believe you?" It freaked him out real bad, and he took off running. Needless to say, nobody ever did believe him.

Tell_Em_Hawk

When I was a very new professor, I made sure to spell out the course requirements both verbally during class time, and on paper in the syllabus. For students who were taking the class pass/no pass, they had to take a midterm and final exam, as well as write a paper. It was made very clear that their passing grade in all of them had to be a C or better.

I had a smart-alec in class that came to me during my office hours and told me that he was not going to do the paper. His voice took a breezy, commanding, almost condescending tone, but he who he was messing with. I said, “Okay,” just as breezily. He got a C on the midterm, a C on the final, and an F on the non-existent paper. He didn’t pass the course that he thought would be a free ride.

Permalink

I had a teacher who got me back in an epic way. It was back in the seventh grade—she made us write diary entries of the book we were reading. The book we were to read was our choice. I was a terrible writer, and had had enough of the diary entry stuff, and hated reading to boot. So, I wrote a long entry bashing her and her English class, in general.

When I came into class the next day, she had the projector out.  We were going to edit the grammar and punctuation of a paragraph. When she turned it on, my face went white. It was my journal entry!  I was mortified. The kids in the class were laughing at who could write something so stupid. Luckily, she had blacked out my name. Touché to her.

gnrp45

I was a foreign teacher working at a high school that split up homerooms by academic level. The lowest level homeroom was the one that always gave me trouble. They talked the whole way through class, didn't respect me, and said offensive stuff to me in front of my face. That's not the worst part though—as a result of their behavior, they basically didn't learn a thing.

One day, I heard someone on Japanese TV say, "Hanasanakute ii yo," which means "It's okay if you don't speak". So one day, I said this in a loud voice to the worst kid in the class, addressing him by name. The dude actually shut up and listened. I had about 500 students between two schools at this point and I made sure to memorize not just his, but all of their names and called them out personally on their baloney.

Amandrai

I had a student tank an assignment. My policy was that students can redo any assignment but the highest possible grade I will give a redo is a B. He refused to believe that he actually failed the assignment, and went to my department chair. The chair supported me, so he went to the dean. The dean supported me, so he just kept moving higher up the chain of command only to be told that I was right.

He made all sorts of irrational demands, which ticked off the various administrators he pestered. Finally, he became so annoying that everyone put their foot down once and for all—he was told to accept the grade, work out the redo with me, or face some sort of sanction for wasting everybody's time. After a month of this nonsense, I met with him and my chair.

I told him once again that he could redo the assignment for at most a B. He still tried fighting it, but the chair stepped in and said he had one minute to accept the deal or face the consequences. With no other option, he agreed to rewrite the paper. I gave him one week to get it done. On the day it was due, he showed up at my office and handed it to me.

Without even looking at it, I dropped it in my recycling container and said, “Thanks, I'll change your grade on the assignment to a B". It seems petty, and the rewrite could have been just as bad as the original. I’ll never know. But the satisfaction I got from watching him jump through all those hoops and rewrite the paper, only to have me discard it, was worth it.

csudebate

When I was in my last year in engineering college, I took a job as a tech high-school teacher in a public school in my city to help me pay my tuition. One day an electronics teacher called in sick, so they asked me to cover for him a few hours. The content wasn’t a problem for me, but the kids were older than the ones I usually taught.

When I entered the room, there was an unusual silence. Since these kids were older, their attitude was different. I introduced myself, explained the situation, and started the class after they told me what their status in the subject was. A minute after I turned around to write on the board, one kid yelled a nickname they had been using for me (without me knowing) and every kid started laughing.

I didn’t know who it was, so I turned around and asked, "Who was it?" Of course, there was dead silence. So I said, "Guys, I understand your group commitment and how you'll support each other. You know as well as I do that I can't let this slip through. So you'll all be asked to finish a very difficult assignment immediately after class unless the guy who called me names stands up like the man he thinks he is and takes the punishment for himself instead of having you all take it for him".

A few seconds later, the guy stood up and said "It was me, sir". I told him it was a noble choice to confess and I proceeded with the instructions of his epic punishment. I told him to go right outside the classroom and count all the tiles on the floor in the hallway, out loud, one by one. The hallway was about 30 ft x 8 ft, and the tiles were 2 in x 2 in.

His classmates were giggling. The guy went out and started counting out loud. "ONE!... TWO!... THREE!..."  I continued with the lesson. When the kid outside was at around 20, he started to lower his voice, so I yelled out through the open door, "I CAN'T HEAR YA!!" Then he raised his voice and went "TWENTY-ONE!! TWENTY-TWO!!"

At that point, his classmates burst out laughing and I asked them for silence to continue the class. When the guy was at around 50 or 60 tiles, I asked him back in. I told him it was OK to pick on people, but he must know about the person first, so he knows what he is dealing with and is prepared for a comeback. Those kids never called me names afterward—at least not to my face.

beatokko

When I was teaching at a trade school,  I had this one student who loudly announced, “Shoot, I’m hungry,”  in the middle of my introduction and when I was going over the syllabus. I asked him his name and told him to go get a sandwich and bring me one too.  He didn't leave; he just sat lower in his chair and was quiet for the rest of that class.

The following week, sure enough, he had another loud outburst. I knew exactly how to deal with it by then—I just looked at him and asked, "Where is my sandwich?" He was quiet most of the time after that, and when he wasn't, I would just ask about the sandwich and he'd shut right up.

Diablos_lawyer

I had a student who copied off of his partner for every assignment for the whole semester. However, he was smart enough to always change the wording so that it wasn't identical, thus, I would have no proof to take to academic integrity. He slipped up on the last take-home assignment when he couldn't copy off his partner.

Instead, he used blatantly plagiarized information from Google. Finally, I had proof! He now is not getting credit for the course and has to retake it. He now also has a tainted academic record due to his offense and is potentially going to be on suspension until next fall. Gotcha!

goombagirl2

I had a kid in preschool who had mastered the whole "going limp" thing. He was a hefty boy and none of the teachers could pick him up when he did this, which meant it was a massive power move on his part. I happened to be on a fitness kick at the time and was going to the gym four mornings a week and working out with a trainer.

One day, I was complaining about this kid and my trainer had me start doing deadlifts. He said it was good exercise, but would also help me with this kid. It took about two months, but the day I was able to pick him up when he went dead was SO satisfying! The look on his face was of utter shock. No one, not even his parents had been able to pick him up for ages. He never did it again, at least, not at school. He'd lost his move.

lonelady75

I was on the field on playground duty. To my left were a bunch of trees and behind them was all the play equipment, such as forts, bridges, and monkey bars. The monkey bars were closed at the time due to an incident that had happened earlier in the week. They were taped off with a big sign telling the kids not to use them. This one kid just wouldn’t listen.

I must have been over there 10 times, clearly explaining that they are out of bounds, but this kid couldn't care less. He was showing off to his friends, and every time I would walk back over to keep an eye on the more than 50 other kids on the field, he was back on the monkey bars. There was a soccer game that was going on behind me.

I stood there looking at this kid still on the monkey bars when the ball rolled past me into the trees. One of the boys from the field took off after it, and for some reason kicked it back to me. I realized that I'd just been presented with an amazing opportunity, although one heck of a long shot. I instantly line up what looks like a pass back to the kid, but instead, I kicked it too high and deep.

The ball dipped and curled, dodged two trees, and cleared the fort by inches. It came out of nowhere and smacked this kid right-center on the side of the head, knocking him off the monkey bars and into the dirt where he promptly started crying. It looked like a total accident. In no way did it look even remotely deliberate, but it was. Nobody went near the monkey bars for the rest of the day.

teacherthrowwwawwaay

I was a sub for a few months in a history class where the teacher gave very little care about teaching. One of the students in the class was always loud and distracting to the other students. It always made the class very difficult, and he'd occasionally pick fights with other students. He wasn't mean; he just didn't know how to get along with the other kids.

One day, one of the students he was messing with asked out loud, "Why is he like that?" I answered with, "He probably has a pretty dysfunctional home life, where his parents don't provide him with healthy types of attention. One of them is probably incarcerated. He was probably abused at various points in his life, and never received the foundation to connect with people on a healthy level.

“So, this type of behavior is the only thing that he knows". A hush fell over the class. The loud kid looked at me astonished and said, "Mister, are you psychic or something?" He then started crying silently in the corner while I awkwardly tried to continue my instruction. He was pretty quiet for the rest of the semester.

unidactyl

I was teaching a technology course at a college. Through the reflection on the glass behind one student, I could see him browsing Facebook for the first hour of the class. I had root access to all the machines, so I did the pettiest thing—I remoted into his machine and updated his host file for Facebook to 127.0.0.1. Seeing the next page go white and him being completely puzzled as to why every webpage worked besides Facebook was extremely satisfying.

trspanache

I had students who would give me multi-page papers. They weren’t paperclipped or stapled, and they wouldn’t have names on them. That ticked me off, so I sought my revenge. When I would ultimately locate them all and figure out who they belonged to, I would write their grade in the middle of the last page, then staple them all together directly through the grade.

indifferentinitials

I taught a large Intro to Environmental Science lecture class, and there was a group of four-to-five girls who would sit clumped together and constantly talk throughout the entire class every time it met. One day, I started the class by saying, "Have you guys seen Community? I just saw the episode where they parodied Dead Poets Society.

“The students get a new outlook on education by standing up in their chairs. Well, today four lucky girls are going to get a new outlook on environmental science!" I then proceeded with my grand display—I walked each girl to a new seat on all corners of the lecture hall. This was probably in front of around 300 other students. Justice felt amazing.

I had a difficult freshman when I taught high school French. He was really smart, but he had a really bad attitude and hung out with the loser kids.  He obviously wanted to maintain his loser rep. The test had a section where the students had to write a paragraph in said language about their favorite class. He wrote, “I don't have a favorite class, but I will tell you about my least favorite class: French.

“I hate this class because the teacher doesn't know what he is doing and a dog could teach me better than he does". Here's the thing, though—his paper was written in excellent form, I marked that entire section wrong because he didn't follow directions. Deep down I wanted to let him pass, but the petty side of me won out and I marked it wrong anyway.

When I passed the papers back he announced very loudly, "HEY! I did this part! Why did you mark it wrong!?" I very matter of factly said, "Because you didn't follow directions". He sat very quietly at his desk for a couple of seconds and said, "I am so full of rage right now".  A single tear rolled down his cheek. I couldn't help it. I broke into a fit of laughter right there in front of everyone. The class knew that he hated me and that I hated him, so there was no reason to hide it.

Permalink

We had one rather enterprising high school senior boot from USB on his Windows tablet, then unlock the local admin account, and use that to make himself a local admin account. but here's the kicker—he was dumb enough to use his gamer tag as the account name. We had Computrace on those devices, and it phoned my home and alerted me about the user logging in as a non-domain account.

I remote-disabled it. It was confiscated and a very interesting parent-teacher-principal conference occurred. We threatened to expel him for breaking the user agreement that both he and his parents had signed TWICE, thus revoking his offer of a full scholarship to college.  He would be forced to repeat his entire senior year. In the end, he was forced to be our unpaid intern for the rest of the year, even when he had dates and school events.

tuxedo_jack

I thought I was a pretty cool professor. I would allow for extra credit for writing a poem, or doing a drawing on the back of tests, writing my tests using basic pop culture references to get complex concepts across, all that good stuff. My students enjoyed it because I made sure there was always a little silly thing to help them remember names and facts they would need to know.

At the end of the semester, students have a group paper and PowerPoint presentation to do on a project they worked on the whole term. I hated doing group projects, but hey, get used to it, right? I made sure that they knew that participation was a major part of their grade, and if a single student in their group came to me to say someone wasn't pulling their fair share, I'd do something about it.

I never had a problem with this because even though I was the "fun" professor I was serious when it came to business. I graded them hard and had high expectations, but I made it worth their while. Well, one semester, this guy is in a group with extraordinarily quiet and shy students. He did NOTHING all quarter long, but nobody said anything to me from his group.

I was so fed up with him by the end of the quarter, I decided to mess with him. Because group projects stink and in order to stick it to that guy for being a freeloader, I graded individual students based on their ability to answer my questions on their presentation topic. Well, guess who got EVERY SINGLE QUESTION from me that day? Yup, the lazy kid.

He got zero points for participation since he did not speak during the group’s PowerPoint, zero points for the questions I asked him (he had no idea what I was asking him about when it was the topic of their group project), and zero points for the corresponding group paper because he couldn't name a single source he had contributed to the references.

His group of quiet, nice students was stunned that I went that hard on him, but they all thanked me for it later. He had made their group project impossible to do correctly by not doing jack and they were just too shy to do anything. He got a D in my course. He changed his major because he realized getting a science degree meant you had to understand science, write papers, and do work, not sit text your frat brothers during class.

biotech_b

I was a flight instructor and had an underperforming student. He wasn't dumb or unskilled, just lazy. When he realized that he wasn't going to finish his course before summer kicked in, he asked me to start flying with him on weekends so he would finish in time. I was kind of mad at the idea of losing my weekend to work, but I needed the money, and wanted this guy out of my hair, so I agreed.

On the third Saturday night, he left me enraged. He was a no-show without a call. I had to dig into the computer system to find out that he marked himself as sick five minutes before the lesson. Now, I was angry because my friends had gone camping that weekend, and I had skipped out to help this student who couldn't be bothered to call me about being sick.

As I was driving home, I stopped to get some food at a place next to our local movie theatre. While I was waiting for my food I saw my supposedly sick student walk into the theatre with his buddies. So, I decided to schedule the oral portion of his final exam at 5:30 am on Saturday, and the flying portion for 5:30 am on Sunday.

KodiakRS

I had the same kid always falling asleep during my geometry class. I would regularly stand over the sleeping student's desk and drop a textbook on the floor to wake him up. It didn't stop him from sleeping, so I took it to the next level. One day, I told him to stand against the wall for the remainder of the class. He never slept in class again.

wappydutchman

I taught a class right after lunch so I had a couple of kids who would come in late and obviously high. The class was pretty quiet before they got in, so every now and then, I would mess with them and ask them for the assignment I gave out; the one that everyone else had already handed in at the beginning of class. The look of panic was amazing—they would just start fumbling with words.

I told them it wasn't a big deal and they could hand it in next time. They could never figure out that there wasn't an assignment.

kohlscustoms

I was a primary school teacher in a rural central school. I had this one kid in my class of nine students who were constantly disruptive. He would jump up and down on the desks, throw objects at staff and students, and would swear constantly. Not much could be done, one of his parents worked at the school and the principal almost refused to suspend or expel him no matter how bad his behavior was.

One afternoon, I was out on playground duty and he was kicking a soccer ball around with some other kids. The ball came past me and I stopped it. He yelled out, "Kick it here," while calling me a name and walking toward me. I took a few steps back, lined him up, and belted the life out of the ball. What happened next made everyone's jaws drop. It hit him square in the nuts and stomach.

He fell down like a bag of bricks. All the kids in the playground were laughing and I ran over to "see if he was OK". He got up and looked at me with tears welling in his eyes.  I had a slight smirk on my face and said, "You wanted it, you got it". Then his face turned back toward the ground again and he began throwing up.

He didn't come back to school for four days after that, and when he eventually did come back, he was almost a model student for the remainder of the year. The next year I was put in a different class and his issues started arising again. He didn't last till the end of the first term before his parents decided to home-school him.

reactorfox

I was a physics teacher at a private all-boys high school. One of my students was always very rowdy, and normal threats or punishments weren't working. I found out this kid loved Game of Thrones, and that worked brilliantly in my favor. One day, when I asked the kid to quiet down and he refused, I gave him a Game of Thrones spoiler. I then informed him that every time he misbehaved, I would spoil the show for him.

He didn't believe me, so he tested it out a couple of times and was met with a new spoiler each time. He didn’t misbehave in class after that.

gabmonty

I taught high school art. I had a student become furious with me and eventually threaten to hit me. I tried to give the kid an easy out because I knew he wouldn't do it, and nothing good could come of embarrassing him. However, he wouldn't have it and continued to threaten me. Finally, I gave him an ultimatum—I told him to just go ahead and either take a swing at me or get out of my room.

He was now even more furious that I called his bluff. So in retaliation, he threw a jar of paint at the wall as he stormed out of the room. It made a huge splatter, which he assumed I would have to clean up. Instead, I created a silhouette of Ryu and the paint became the Hadouken. When he came back from suspension he had this look of defeat. Other students thought it was badass.

Tsukomo

I taught a high school stats class. There was a group of very talkative and disruptive kids who were doing well. I sensed something was fishy. When I looked at their tests, I saw that they all had the same answers. So I looked at the seating chart and noticed that they could all look over each other's shoulders of the smart, quiet girl. I knew what I had to do for the next time.

I decided to give her a different test; only her. When I handed back the tests, I told everyone who got under 50% to come and see me. These kids got around 10%. When I was alone with them, I said, "Well, this is your punishment for cheating. Don't do it again".

YisThatUsernameTaken

I was in Montreal for a hockey game and wanted to buy a Canadiens jersey. They're a little pricey at the arena, so I was walking around downtown looking at sports memorabilia shops. I found one, walked in, and bought a Canadiens jersey. It was one of the nice lace-up ones, for almost half retail price. So I put it on to wear out of the shop.

Before we hit the door, I ripped the tags off and my dad noticed that the 'NHL' insignia was backward, and said 'LNH.' I got in the clerk's face and said, rather loudly, "You sell fakes! This is a bootleg! This is supposed to say NHL!" The clerk's English wasn't great but he ensured me, "These are the new ones. LNH is the new logo". I replied "Yeah, ok, the NHL changed their name. I believe that".

He wouldn't do a refund, and finally, I left the store feeling defeated. On the walk back to the hotel, I saw another Montreal jersey with the LNH insignia. And another. I pulled my phone out and googled it. It stands for la Ligue Nationale de Hockey.The new Canadiens jerseys had LNH on them to celebrate their French Canadian heritage.

lawlessSyntax

It was in Munich, Germany. I was on a train and a conductor came around to check for tickets. I give him my ticket, and immediately he starts explaining something about how I hadn't paid and he was gonna write me a fine. I was like: "You have the ticket that I bought in your hand! Are you crazy? How can you give me a fine?"

He keeps explaining I didn't pay and so he needs to give me a fine. I keep getting more irate at this obvious idiot. How could he possibly say that? I point to him that the value I paid for the ticket is on the thing! I start mentioning/insinuating is he doing this to all tourists, to scam them.

By this time we've reached the next station and he gestures to me, while getting off the train with my ticket, and sticks it in a machine on the platform that goes "ka-ching". When he gave it back to me, he looked me straight in the eye and said "Now, you've paid". I felt like a complete idiot.

Wonderdolkje

I was buying a used car from a dealer. We agreed on a price over the phone. He offered to have someone come pick me up to test drive it (I was new in the city and had no car). So he and another guy came to pick me up. And of course, he's trying to sell me a new car instead of the one I'm interested in, but I'm not hearing it.

I test drove the car, and it's just what I'm looking for, and the price we agreed on is under book value, so I'm good with everything. Then he draws up the paperwork and my jaw drops. The final cost is nearly two grand more than we agreed on!  I'm pretty upset now. We had a clear agreement, and he tried to slip in $2,000 like I wouldn't care.

I say no deal, drop me back off at home. He keeps knocking off a hundred here, a hundred there. Screw that, we had a deal, take me back home. Finally, he says, well if you're not gonna buy the car then you can find your way home. Now I start raising my voice so the other customers hear our conversation".

YOU MEAN TO TELL ME YOU DRAGGED ME 40 MINUTES AWAY FROM HOME, TRY TO CHARGE ME AN EXTRA TWO GRAND THEN TELL ME I'M STRANDED OUT HERE IF I DON'T PAY?" He's begging me to be quiet, tries cutting more off the price, but I'm not letting this go.

I don't respond well to high-pressure sales tactics and they're starting to realize it. Anyway, after making a big scene and giving the salesman a legitimate panic attack, the manager finally agreed to sell me the car at the agreed-upon price. I then negotiated another $500 off of. He wanted me out of that shop. The car is still running great.

Utaneus

I had gone two days without my medication because my doctor did not renew my prescription due to him suddenly leaving the practice. I have epilepsy, and I was starting to feel sick, hazy, and not aware of my surroundings. I managed to walk over to a pharmacy closeby to get a refill after I got a new doctor to fill out a script.

I told the lady that my script was sent to a different pharmacy but I had to come to this one because I couldn't drive over to the one I was going to. She said okay. I confirmed with her four or five times that she would call and transfer over my script. An hour later I came to pick up my medicine. She puts it in the bag and staples it. I pay and leave. I get home and it is the wrong medication!

I already waited over an hour plus. I told her and she didn't believe me so I got angry and raised my voice and said that I asked for it over an hour ago and I was given the wrong medication and this was not acceptable. She threatened to not fill my medication and ban me from the pharmacy. Maybe I was making a bigger scene than I thought I was.

I said "Alright, I am sorry. I have gone three days without my medication. I cannot drive to my other pharmacy. I need to take this medication in the proper dose, not twelve of these little pills for one dosage. I am extremely hazy and I feel sick, please just fill my script". She had me just sit down and wait and called then and there.

At least it got done in about 45 minutes instead of a few hours. I felt like a jerk, especially since I never yell at anyone.

I spent my last $40 on a car part I needed, but there was something wrong with it and I had to return it. The sales clerk said he can't take it back without a receipt. I paid with a credit card and there's a warranty so I should be in the system. He wouldn't even check and refused to exchange it. That's when I lost it.

I was irate, screaming at him. customers were laughing at how upset I was. He threatened to call the authorities. I told him to go ahead. Then, something amazing happened. Behind this guy’s back, another employee overheard my details, looked up my information, and printed out a copy of my receipt.

Just as this guy is about to tell me for the millionth time that I can't return the part without a receipt, the employee behind him hands it to me, and I handed it back to the manager I was arguing with. I got my new part and was able to make it to work that night. Hope that guy didn't get fired for doing the right thing.

IDontWantToArgueOK

I was waiting in Gatwick airport, UK, for our flight, which was at 0650, and gates closed 30 mins before departure. I was watching the boards like a hawk but the "Go to gate" only appeared at 0610, cutting it a little fine for them, but whatever. We start casually making our way towards the gate, it's a bit of a walk, but as we pass another board on the way we see it's 0615, and "Gate closing" appears.

So we start running to the gate, and get there a few minutes later, just as we see another passenger walking through the gate. We hand over our boarding passes and passports and the saggy faced old witch says, "Sorry, the gate is closed". It was 0617, not a chance they should've closed the gate, but clearly, they'd thought the last passenger had boarded and decided to shut up early to make their stats look good.

I kicked off! I had seen that they just let a passenger through, I could see them still boarding the plane. But no, they'd "shut their systems down' and couldn't do anything". This was utter bollocks, I called them out on it, but eventually got marched back through the airport to get another flight. Oh, but it got worse.

As we're checking in for a flight that leaves at 0900, we're told we have to pay another £100 each, this was twice as much as we'd paid for the original flight.

Adinho85

Right after I got my first salary I went to a big electronics store and bought a steering wheel controller. They had only one left of the one I wanted, the exhibit one. The salesman promised it would be okay if I just cleaned it properly. He even gave me 10% off, yet the price still was 198€. At home, I noticed it was broken.

When I drove back to the store the salesman told me he would arrange the repair and it would be fixed in about four weeks. That was when I went from slightly annoyed to purified anger. I told him that I wanted to back off from the purchase. Then he told me that the company terms, blah, blah. I didn't remember exactly what he said because I yelled, "May I please talk to someone who is not about to gouge me from behind on the counter?"

This must have been the magic words since the manager and a bunch of customers came over to see what was going on. And I did get my money back.

Realultralord

I had ordered some food at around 2 AM. My roommate had to work the next day and was sleeping, so I made a note on the delivery saying, "Please call, do not ring the bell. Thanks!" Our doorbell was a loud buzzer, so I didn't want to wake him. About an hour later, I hear a loud buzz. I was so annoyed because I had asked that they not do that.

I go to the door and it's this guy probably around 20 years old and immediately after he hands me my food, he sticks his hand out and goes, "Tip?" I had money in my pocket that I was going to tip him with but I didn't even get a chance to get it out before he did that. I responded with, "Seriously?"

Then I went to tell him that he was not going to get a tip not only because he rang the bell when I asked him not to (it was printed on the receipt under my address so he should have seen it) but also because of how rudely he demanded a tip. He said, "Whatever" and left, so I called the restaurant and told them they had a bad driver.

-eDgAR-

This happened at my bank. I went in to change my rent money from 20s to 100s, so making a money order would be easier to count. I tell the lady behind the desk what I'm doing, and she happily agrees to help me. In 20s, I counted out $1,000 for her, putting the money down and counting out loud. She then takes the cash, gets the hundreds, and counts back $900 to me.

I tell her there's $100 missing, and she claims I only counted $900 to her. She already put the 20s I gave her in her drawer, so there was no way to see what I counted to her. I argued with her for about 10 minutes until she told me they were about to close and to come back tomorrow.

I was so shocked this lady was so stupid that I just told her to quit her job while she's ahead and walked out. Thankfully I had an extra $100 in birthday money. Never went back to that location.

AlwaysKim28

The lady at the drive-through couldn't hear me, so I talked louder. She still couldn't hear me so I spoke even louder. She still couldn't hear me so I moved round to the window and she had the headset around her neck, so I said, quite loudly, "Can you hear me now?" She jumped about three feet and looked surprised to see me.

Jhimiolik

A girl at the checkout at a grocery store scanned my membership card and it didn’t apply the discount. I paid and then we learned the discount wasn’t applied. She said she couldn’t do anything about it. The discount can’t be applied. I pointed to the people behind me. Will their discount be applied? Yes. So what you’re saying is it’s not worth your time to fix your mistake? She acted like I was the jerk holding up progress. I wasn’t nice. A manager came by and fixed it.

Johnnyringowhat

So my husband is a drummer and he had just played a gig. Had a full load of drums in his station wagon and couldn't see well out the back. He pulls into McDonald’s for a late-night snack and orders McNuggets. He is told there's a wait and to park in the waiting bay. He had to reverse. He reversed once and hit a bollard. Drove forward and reversed and again hit the bollard.

He was super embarrassed, so he just drove straight out into the car park and for some reason, reversed into a park, completely taking out a rubbish bin. By this time the whole restaurant is looking at him because it looks like he's tearing the place up just because he has to wait for his chicken nuggets.

Next thing the poor drive-thru kid came running outside with a bag of food, apologizing and terrified, threw the bag in the window, and ran back inside. I still giggle when I think about this.

TotesritZ

Anyone's who's got a bus will know that when you ring the bell, not only does it make an audible "ding", but a light at the front of the bus next to the driver that says "BUS STOPPING" will illuminate. I rang the bell, got up, and stood right next to the driver by the door so he can also see I'm waiting to get off. The driver just continues past the bus stop. I'm like, "you not stopping for me there?".

He rolls his eyes, scowls, and slams on the brakes in the middle of the road, to the point where everyone standing up nearly fell over and I think I heard someone fall down the stairs. He looks at me and goes "Maybe try ringing the bell next time if you want me to stop," and opens the door in the middle of the road.

I just walked up to the sign that's lit up right in front of him and started sarcastically tapping it like it's on the fritz. "Well, I think your light must be broken or you’re going blind if you can see that mate".

D4ni3lg

Years ago, I went to Quebec City with my girlfriend and I got us tickets to see a play. The play was in French, but whatever, I thought, theater is theater. I was so wrong. I go to the ticket outlet to get the tickets, and as I'm on my way home, I realize that the tickets say "Impair" on them. I call the ticket company and explain to them that they must have given me wheelchair/disabled seating.

I didn't mind or care; I just didn't want to take that seat if there was someone who needed it. The guy puts me on hold three times throughout this conversation. During the third time I'm on hold, I go on the internet to see how "Impair" translates into English. It means "odd". I had purchased seats 5 and 7, on the "odd" side of the theatre. I felt so stupid.

Permalink

At a chain restaurant one night our waitress was bussing a huge tower of dishes. As she was walking towards me I thought to myself, there is no way she is gonna make it to the kitchen. Sure enough, once I am in splashing range the tower goes down. Half-full glasses of soda hit the floor and send splashes over my sandaled feet, and a full cup of marinara sauce hits the edge of our table and showers me with about a quarter of a cup of marinara sauce in a billion droplets from my hair to my chest. Then the waitress walked away!

The manager comes over. By now the waitress has heard that I am complaining. She comes over and stands behind the manager as the manager and I talk. I explain what happened and that accidents happen and I'm not even mad over the spill, but I'm mad over being treated badly after. The manager is gushing apologies, and our dinner will be free.

Still, I said, this is an area for retraining or something. There needs to be something said to the server, that is not how you treat people. The manager turns around and sees the waitress, and says I'm sure she was coming to apologize right now. Little did she know, things were about to take a nasty turn. The waitress rolls her eyes and says nastily, it was just an accident. No apology.

The manager has a stunned look on her face. The waitress says nothing, gives a smirk, and crosses her arms. I looked between her and the manager, who is now silent and doesn't know what to do with this. It ends in a standoff, of the waitress refusing to simply apologize and me seething. So I thought for a moment and came up with a genius plan.

I said to the manager, so you said our meal tonight will be free? We want to change our order. And we want to keep our same server. No hard feelings, after all, right? So we changed our order for the most expensive entrees we could find, with three appetizers and salads and soup first. Dessert after. Tab was well over a hundred bucks. We lingered for as long as we could stand.

Needless to say, we stiffed that waitress, and I wrote no hard feelings on a napkin covered in marinara sauce at the table. The only time I ever stiffed a server, and it was grand.

Permalink

I was getting my phone number transferred from my father’s name to mine. It took about a year of me begging my father to do it until he caved and finally did it. As a small backstory, he is a very nasty, narcissistic man and I was trying to get away from him at the time. After we finished the paperwork, we received a confirmation email stating it would take between 2-5 business days. A week passed. Nothing.

Another week passed. Still nothing. I contacted their customer support and they assured me that they were working on it. A third week passed by and I called them. After explaining my situation, the girl put me on hold without warning and left for about 10 minutes. I had enough time to cook lunch. When she came back, she told me I never ordered the transfer.

She told me, "The documents aren't here". I asked her why come they aren't there? She made a sound and simply said "I don't know" I was getting kind of upset at this point so I asked her to please find out, prompting her to put me on hold without warning again. When she came back, she explained they could have been lost but it was most likely our fault they had lost them.

This upset me something fierce because we had done everything they asked and from then on, it was their responsibility to complete the transfer. I mentioned this and she agreed. So I asked her if she could, based on the confirmation emails, transfer the number. She told me no and implied that “stealing” another person’s number was against the law and that I had to talk to my father to resubmit the request.

I was so mad at this point I might have been crying. I felt pretty lost at that point. Pretty much thanked her for nothing and hung up. I feel bad about it in hindsight, but things like these aren't supposed to happen and her accusing me like that was way over the line.

Stutterpug

I went into a little vegan place in Soho, London, for a coffee. My girlfriend and I were on our way to a movie and had around 45 minutes to spare. I ordered two cappuccinos. There was no-one else waiting, and there were two hipster-looking types behind the counter. They took my order and then spent, and I’m not kidding, 27 minutes walking back and forth, talking, moving things around, washing stuff, but not making coffee.

In the interim, a small line had formed, and they served a couple of those people first, including with food orders. I asked after 15 minutes, just to check they hadn't forgotten me. They said of course not, and continued to lounge about. In the end, I stood up and started yelling at them, asking what they were doing, and why it was so hard to make two simple coffees.

I demanded my money back, as we didn't have time for the coffee anyway, and had to then have a big argument about this while one of them kept saying "but we're making it!" When I turned around after berating them, my jaw dropped. The actor Forest Whittaker was behind me in the line. I felt bad for losing it in front of Ghost Dog.

Interceptor

I ordered a sandwich and a drink from a fast food place in a station - the kind of place you grab your food and eat it immediately. I got my drink and was waiting for my sandwich. I'm not in a hurry, so I don't mind the long wait, I assume they're having to make it from scratch or something. Then I notice someone else got the same type of sandwich as I ordered, so they've forgotten me. It happens, I'm not in a hurry, no problem.

No problem that is, until I ask about it. The woman behind the counter says she's given me my order, then turns away before I can speak. When she comes back, I point out that I don't have a sandwich. She tells me I've put it in my bag, and again turns away as I'm trying to explain that I haven't. At this point, I've become a little annoyed, and I'm hungry... so I empty my bag across the counter and ensure she checks everything I have to ensure I haven't stolen my £2 burger.

I was tempted to make her check through the individual pages of my book to try and find this mystery burger, but chickened out of being that much of a jerk. Finally got my sandwich.

WombList

I was at my phone company’s store asking about an issue with my phone, and the guy’s attitude was so nonchalant. I understand not being able to do anything about it, but at least pretend to care. He was extremely rude, so I snatched my phone out of his hand and demanded to see the manager. I felt ashamed afterward, but I hate poor customer service.

LamarEdwards

I went to dinner with a friend. It's one of those places where you order and then they call your number and you go pick up your food at the counter. Also, keep in mind the place is usually out the door busy. When we got there it was empty but they had a full staff. My friend ordered pasta and I ordered a salad. We sat down and the line started to form out the door but it was moving and things were going smoothly in the kitchen.

My friend got his pasta and about five minutes go by and I still don't have a salad. I'm watching the kitchen, and the cook in charge of salads doesn't look busy at all so I go up to check. I finally get to go up there and see that the cook in charge of salads is laughing with his coworkers and is on his phone. So I go up to the cashier, "Can you tell your guys to make my salad? I ordered 15 minutes ago, my friend is almost done eating".

They scrambled to find my ticket for the order, offered me a soda, and apologized. I said, "No it's fine please just make my salad". I felt bad for going off on them because they probably just lost my ticket, but it made me so angry to see them just screwing around when I'm here wondering why it's taking so long.

ORGASMIK

My wife and I are in our early 20s, and so going out and buying our first car from a dealership was a rather big deal. We saved a ton of money and went in knowing our budget. At the third dealership we went to, we immediately saw a car that we both loved. Upon stepping out of our car and being surrounded by the salesmen, we asked to check that car out.

The inside and outside of the car looked great, and they assured us it ran smoothly. I asked for a test drive. They were hesitant about letting us test it out, assuring us that it ran fine. Their hesitance just made me worry more. And it turned out that I was right to be suspicious. It broke down before we left the lot. Twice.

The first time he told us it was some BS issue that they'd fix before we took it. But it sputtered and kept dying. We didn't even take it on the road. You had to slam on the brakes to start slowing down. I lost it. This was going to be my wife's primary car that she has to take on the highway every day, and they want to sell me a car that can barely brake, without letting me test drive it.

I try to be understanding. I work retail, and can usually understand if there's a legitimate issue, or even if an employee is being a bit lazy and just doesn't want to do something. I've been there, and I get it. But these people went too far. They flat out lied and tried to sell us an unsafe car that could put both of our lives at risk.

Redundantposts

I was at Wal-Mart. The cashier was taking some time, and we assumed their machine was broken. We were wrong. It suddenly hits us what's going on when we need 21 cents in change. She sees the number and a look of terror goes across her face. I'm about to say "keep the change," but no. I need to see this. She just stands there, fiddles with some coins for a bit then calls her manager over. "Which one's the quarter?"

The manager asks, "Why do you need a quarter for 21 cents?" The clerk replied, "One quarter and one penny". The manager is puzzled and explains, "Quarters aren't 20 cents". The clerk disagreed, saying "Yes, they are". The manager responds, "No, they're 25".  The clerk: "How do I make 21 with a quarter?"

Sleeplessposter

I waited 40 minutes at a KFC. I got there when the place was practically empty. They told me the chicken wasn't ready (in a place that exclusively serves chicken), and that I would have to wait. I decided to wait. Ten minutes is okay, 15 is tolerable. But more than half an hour? At first, I was fine because they were serving a family that had been there before me. I figured that where most of the chicken had gone before my arrival.

But then they served several customers that came in after me, which made me angry. I had two small meal orders. I approach the counter and ask what's going on, and that they hadn't called my number. The cashier apologizes and takes my receipt to the food worker (I watched and heard this), and tells her to make my order right away.

I stay there waiting, thinking she's putting my order together, but then she walks past me and serves two more customers! I became livid and shouted, "Are you kidding me?!" The cashier's jaw dropped, he started yapping at her, she sluggishly started heading back to the food station, but I was done at that point and said, "Just give me my refund so I can get out of here!"

Then it takes the cashier more than five minutes attempting to process the refund, then he asks her to do it, all the while everyone is watching, and more are still getting served. It took every bit a restraint I had not to make a total scene or flip things over.

XJ-O

I was about 8 years old, and we were just about to go on holiday. We go to the same place every year and it's about a six-hour drive away. As usual, we take our car into the garage for a pre-journey checkup to make sure everything is fine and dandy, and it is, so we load up the car. The morning of the holiday comes and my family pack up final things, run final checks, and start to drive. Not five minutes later, the car is having a tantrum, gears are grinding, breaks are barely working, and there is acrid smoke coming out of the bonnet.

So we get a family friend from down the road and he gives the engine a look and finds out immediately what's wrong. Some dumb mechanic drained the oil out of the car and didn't put it back, and now the engine is destroyed. My dad and brother sit with the car, while my mom and I get a ride to the garage. My role is simple: If they can't fix the car right then or give us a courtesy car, I am to throw the biggest tantrum this world has ever seen, and I am not to stop until my mum gives me the sign.

So we get into the garage, the waiting room is jam-packed, and my mum demands to speak to the manager. The manager "isn't in". So I start whimpering and tears start coming. I say, "But mummy, will this mean we won't be able to go on holiday? It's our only holiday this year, I've been looking forward to it" and on and on, looking super adorable.

Of course, this is my mother’s cue to say “We only get one holiday a year, we can't afford another one, and you've ruined it by BREAKING OUR CAR. If you don't get someone in charge RIGHT NOW, neither I nor my daughter will be leaving until you FIX THIS". This goes on for about half an hour. I've fake cried myself into real tears because I'm genuinely worried at this point. 

15 minutes later, my mother convinces the mechanic to at least come and see the car. He gets to the car, gives it a gander, goes ashen, then walks off and makes a frantic phone call. About 20 minutes later, all of our stuff was packed into a courtesy car and we were on our way (with me sleeping the whole 6 hours because my tantrum had exhausted me).

Smidgit

I had ordered a mattress and box spring set from Sears for our new King-sized bed, and when it arrived, it had only half the box springs (King-sized beds use two twin-sized box springs). I called to complain, and they insisted that's all I ordered, and that I should have known I needed to order the other half separately.

I raised a big fuss about it over the next several days, including reporting them to the Better Business Bureau, but they wouldn't budge. I went ahead and bought the other half elsewhere. Then one night, I got a call from the Sears delivery department. The lady says: "I'm calling to confirm that your order is arriving tomorrow afternoon".

Me: "I didn't order anything". Lady: "Well I have an order here for you". Me: "What is it?" Lady: "I don't know. I can't look it up. Me: "OK, listen. I didn't order anything. If a package shows up at my door that I didn't order, and you can't even tell me what it is, I'm gonna call law enforcement". I mean, rationally, I know that Sears wasn't going to send me anthrax or something, but it felt really good to threaten to call the boys in blue on them. I did get my refund later.

RainyDayNinja

In a drive-thru with my buddies, before pulling out we realize we got the wrong order. I'm inebriated at this point, but not driving, it's worth mentioning. The car behind us is at the window so I just bring the food back to the window on foot. Talking to the customer and teller for a few seconds it became apparent that our orders were swapped for whatever accidental reason.

Well, the old dude in the car behind us just starts insulting me, like "You shaggy teenager you probably spit in it. I want a fresh order". I just wanted to swap our bags and bounce. So me and this old guy got into a pretty intense shouting match, and the guy working the window had to be like, "Dude, it's a health code thing, we do have to re-prepare all of your food. We can't be responsible for what happens when food leaves McDonald’s property".

Anyway, I took it personally, and started shouting at the old man and the guy in the window was like, "Why does this have to be complicated? I have this guy's order right here, he has my order in his lap, I didn't touch his food. Why can't we just swap bags and move on?" At this point, the old guy laid back into me and the shouting match just escalated.

After a couple of moments the employee in the window put his hand on my shoulder and just said, "Dude, leave it, please, we'll sort it out here". He had a sort of exhausted look in his eyes where I just felt like I don't wanna make this guy's job harder than it already is.

WhiskeyOnASunday93

I didn't freak out, but I was very rude and to this day, I feel guilty and embarrassed about it. I was in line to get food and was attempting to read the menu. I had forgotten my glasses, so it took all my focus to read. Not to mention that it was so loud I could barely hear myself think, and I was hungry. I vaguely heard my friend, who was in front of me order something, but didn't catch what or what the lady behind the counter told her.

So it's my turn, and I say to the lady "Hi, could I have a spring roll?" She rolls her eyes at me so hard I was afraid they were gonna fall out. "Did I not JUST say to her (referring to my friend) that we were out of spring rolls?" I reply, "Oh, I'm sorry, I must have missed that, I'll have the combo then". But she wasn't done. She snorted, "Yeah, sure. All of you just think you can ignore people like me-"

I tried to say I was sorry, but she talked over me, saying "Entitled brats thinking we don't matter at all, but try saying that out loud...No one shows any respect these days" and just going on and on until I lost it. I saw red and screamed, "Oh my God, just give me my food!" She nearly dropped my plate but didn't, and I went to eat but I felt so bad about my reaction.

Permalink

I took my old car to get some new tires and wound up waiting almost an hour while the clerk was talking to some girl. Not a customer, just his friend. Finally, the dude decides to talk to me and is condescending to me. Begrudgingly I left my car there because I still needed tires. I'm quoted 45 minutes to an hour. I finally got a call to pick up my car nearly three hours later.

I show up and you could smell my clutch melting from 20 paces, and they somehow managed to completely snap my shifter in half right above the pivot point. These guys took my car out and hot-rodded it. It was undrivable, I had to tow it home. They didn't pay one red cent towards the repairs. Normally I don't complain, but those yokels got the wrath on that day.

roachezmo

Oh man, not my proudest moment. My bathrobe was in shambles so the wife said it was time to get a new one. So we end up at Wal-Mart at midnight. First mistake. I found one on the clearance shelf with a clearance sticker that reads the cheaper price on it. Take it upfront and of course, only self-checkout is open. I scan and the kiosk says to wait for assistance. Great.

An employee comes and scans her card and removes the discount. I said, "Ma'am you removed the discount". She said she didn't remove anything. I said, "Yes you did, it was just on the screen and this is supposed to be 10 dollars". To prove it, I scan it and she does the same thing! But she just says, “See, it's the same price”. I replied, “No ma'am, you just removed it again”. So I asked her to call the manager.

I waited for 30 minutes and then asked her again and all she says is "Well, I called him, if you want to just buy it, then you can". For some reason, this was the last straw. I don’t know why after all of this that is what set me off. So I said no don't worry about it I'm leaving. The employee said to me, “Well are you going to put the robe back where you got it?” So I threw it on top of a battery kiosk and let it fall to the bottom of it while making eye contact and told her she could do it since she can't do her actual job correctly.

Felt like a jerk and my wife was less than impressed, but it was infuriating at the time. My wife reminds me of that often when she wants to embarrass me

TX_Poon_Tappa

I took my car to a dealer to have some new tires. I come back two hours later and my car is sitting in the front lot and a salesman is standing there with another guy sitting in the driver seat. As I'm walking up to it I can hear the guy revving it. I quicken my pace and walk up asking him what he thinks he's doing, and what that has to do with tires.

The salesman jumps in and says "Please don't disrespect my customer". At that point, I lost it. What followed was legitimately the angriest I have ever been in my life. I'm screaming what does he mean, a customer, and why is there melted rubber in my wheel well and why is there someone not affiliated with the dealer sitting in my car let alone revving it?

The salesman walks to the manager’s office with me still shouting at him through the showroom as the manager comes out. The manager heard my side after I calmed down and apologized profusely. He said there was a mistake and that my black Mustang was parked next to the same style and trim as one they had for sale. I asked him why the salesman even had the keys in the first place and he couldn't answer.

After about a half-hour of me blowing up and cooling off as new details emerged, the GM says he's covering the cost of my tires and throwing in six oil changes and tire rotations. I got back to my car and they didn't even put the right tires on. I turned right back around and the service manager saw me coming and said he already heard what happened and that he had made the mistake with the tires, so he took it in right away and fixed it, gave me my refund and old tires as well as the new ones.

Thescartographer

I was eating at a nice restaurant, the food was quite expensive but apparently, it was worth it. It was only lunch so we decided to get something light, I ordered a ham and cheese panini and some chips. When it arrived I noticed a clump of blonde hair on the panini. I'm not fussy. If there's a hair, I'll usually just remove it, but this was too much. It was disgusting. It was a full clump of hair that had been cooked into the panini.

When the waiter walked by I pointed it out to him, he insisted it was just cheese. I politely asked him to make a new one. A few minutes later he came back with a new sandwich and apologized for the inconvenience. But here's the thing: It wasn't new at all. They had just flipped the panini over so the hair was hidden. I then became what I hate the most, the guy that asks to speak to the manager.

The manager came over and I explained the situation, she said she would make me a fresh one, but I requested a new meal so I know they wouldn't just try to hide it again. The waiter then came over with my new meal which was a chicken sandwich, I cut it open to see pure pink meat. This whole time my friend was struggling to eat her meal because of how burnt it was. At this point, we've both just left the food on the table and walked out. The waiter tried to stop us, but the manager just let us go.

Yaxax

I was on my way back to school from a class held in a different building across town. One of my favorite burrito places is nearby. I never eat there because it’s across town and crazy expensive. This place is drive-through only and the line is always long. I order a simple bean and cheese burrito. I get to the first stop lite on my way down the street, take a bite, and realize it’s a chicken burrito.

I paid almost 10$ for this and I only eat there like once a year. I want my burrito, so I turn around, wait through the line again, and explain the issue. I am not angry. I have worked in a restaurant for years so I know things can go wrong. I get another burrito and take a bite at the same stop lite. It's Carne guisada. I drive back and wait through the line.

I have messed up an order twice before, and I know it can make you feel bad, so I politely explain what happened again. I have them repeat back to me what I ordered a few times. A few minutes later the manager hands it out "One bean and cheese burrito". he says. I open it right there at the window. Egg, potato, and cheese. I tossed the open burrito at him, and told him to give me my money back.

Vypernorad

I was hungry and already a little stressed, but there's no excuse for how I behaved in this instance. We ordered some food, my wife ordered a salad side, and then twenty minutes later, our food comes out and I notice that my wife got fries instead of what she wanted. I pointed out the mistake to the cashier, who just said, "Yeah, we're out of [whatever]. We’ve been out since lunchtime".

So, here's what ran through my mind. If they already knew they didn't have the item my wife ordered, they should have said as much when she ordered it. If the girl running the register didn't know, then someone should've said to me while I was waiting, "We don't have that item. What would you like instead?"

They didn't do either of those things and, in my hangry, stressed mind, this was inexcusable. I yelled at the girl working the register and stormed back to the table. She tried to calm me down and pointed out that, even if I was right, yelling at the teenager running the register didn't help. I complained that just taking this kind of thing was part of what was wrong with the world, got up, and stormed out to the car, throwing my meal away in the process. However, there was a strange, life-changing bright side to all this. 

After we got home, we had a long talk, and that was honestly the final straw that allowed her to convince me to talk to my doctor about my anxiety. I used to let my anxiety build up as stress and then, every six to eight months, I'd blow up about something stupid. I haven't had one of those tantrums since and am much happier than I ever was before.

EKomodori

I thought I had paid with a $100 bill. When I got the "wrong change" back, I flipped out, got the manager involved, made the poor cashier empty her drawer in front of me, and count through every bill. I had paid with a $50 bill. Oh, the shame. There are not enough apologies for what I did to that girl. If you're reading this, I’m so so sorry!

Ugh, this is so embarrassing. I was once at an airport McDonald's and was not as early as I usually like to be for my flight. The McDonald's worker was very slow, not listening to people's orders, and not friendly. I ordered my McMuffin and went to wait in the line. I paid using a card and casually looked at my receipt. I noticed that there was a discrepancy between what my item cost on the board vs. what was charged on my receipt.

I politely let her know that she charged me too much. Could she please give me back the change? Her rude reaction was what set me off. She told me it didn't matter and asked if I really cared about 75 cents? She blamed a few different things. The machine was broken, it's too hard to go back in and fix, her manager is a jerk, etc. I was irritated that she flipped between one excuse to another.

I'm embarrassed to say I snapped at her. I think it's really rude to secretly charge extra (especially a huge company that can afford to give me back my 75 cents), then make me feel like I'm the bad guy for caring about 75 cents. Even though I was in the right, my reaction was wrong.

Permalink

I went out to dinner at a diner with two friends and one of their girlfriends one time. The place was pretty busy but there was plenty of wait staff running around. The first warning sign that things wouldn't go well was when they gave our table to a waiter who wasn't even working our section. It took him forever to come to us and take our drink orders, forever to take our meal orders, forever to get our food.

We had to ask the waitress in our section to send him over at least once or twice. At one point I asked for a drink refill and he got nasty and said, "Well, you're just going to have to wait". Now listen, I get that you were busy, but you don't need to be rude. And that wasn't the only time he was nasty to us either. As if it was our fault that he'd been assigned to us, we didn't ask for the guy.

I didn't even say anything, we just waited and waited until my friend's girlfriend finally grabbed our glasses and went to the counter area to get the refills herself. We didn't even blame the guy for being overworked, but he was a jerk. We thought about stiffing him altogether but instead, we came up with an even more devastating idea.

We left him a quarter from each of us. Four shiny quarters on the table. When we were leaving, he managed to rush over to clear the table and collect his tip even though he couldn't rush over any other time while we were there. He yelled very sarcastically across the diner, "Thanks for the generous tip, ladies". I turned around and yelled back, "You’re welcome. Maybe you’d have gotten a real tip if you weren’t such a jerk".

paladindansemacabre

My brother and I were doing quite a big grocery shop which included a lot of bulk buying of things like paper towels, tissues, toilet paper, etc. We get to the counter and are placing our items on the scanner when the cashier rudely cuts off my brother as he's about to greet her. She said, "Tell me how many items you have! No need to put them up like that, just give me one, okay? How many? Huh? How many do you have in the cart?"

I told her we have eight boxes of tissues, but we would like some bags as we needed to carry them. She cut me off here and said, as she snatched the box from my brother's hands, "That wasn't so hard, was it?" She then mutters something horrible under her breath. She went, "Stupid Asians, learn some proper English and stop wasting my time".

It's worth noting that my brother and I are fluent in English (it's actually our first language, despite being born in Korea). I'm not very good with confrontations and I avoid them if possible, but I took a leaf from my mum's book and told her off. Usually, I brush off people making those kinds of comments, but this was just unbelievable and she was so rude to my brother that I had to do something.

Permalink

I was at Lowe’s one day buying some tools I needed. The total was like $47 and change. Well, I paid with a $50 bill so I should have gotten back $2 and change. Well she gave me just the $2 and no change (the change was close to a dollar). I said she still owed me some change, and that I would like to have it. She said she didn't have it in the drawer.

I said, "Well, are you gonna get it?" I said this because after she originally gave me the wrong change, she shut the drawer and proceeded to play on her phone. She got an attitude and said, "It ain't even one dollar, why are you getting so mad?" Yeah, it's less than a dollar, but it's mine and I want it. I went nuts. I told the manager what happened and he fired her on the spot. It was great. No regrets.

TheMechanic1989

One night in college we had left the bars and decided to hit up McDonald's for a late-night snack. I was the designated driver and had a couple of friends in the car. We ordered and I pay, and they gave us the food. I hand it over to my friend and tell him to make sure everything is there before pulling away and he tells me my burger isn't there.

So, I knock on the window and tell them they forgot an item. The girl at the window tells me that they checked it before they handed it to me and everything was there. I tell her they must have made a mistake. At this point, my friends start to tell me it isn't a big deal but it's easy for them to say. Their food is in the bag. I babysat my friends and wanted my sandwich.

So, I continue to argue with the girl and the manager comes over, tells me they'll make me a new sandwich, but does it in a way that lets me know he knows I got my sandwich and I'm just looking for free food. That was too far. I went off on this guy. I ranted for a solid two minutes on how maybe he's the kind of guy who would pull that sort of stuff but I have a lot more class than that.

I would have kept going except at that point my friend who I handed the food to said: "Oh, wait. There are two bags here. Yeah your burgers in it". At that point, I just stared straight ahead, said "I apologize", put the car in drive, and left.

SuddenlyBoris

A few weeks ago my family went to a local burger joint for dinner. We order our food and when it arrives (we all got burger sliders) the waitress drops mine off and there's massive hair sticking out of it. I'm not talking just one long hair, I'm talking hair plural. "Woah!" I tell the waitress. I notice that every other table on this patio is staring at me now. "What's that?" The waitress looks at it confused. "Uhh...I dunno". "Ok, I'm not eating this, please put in another". She takes it back.

The manager comes out and says "I have good news! I looked at your food and it wasn't hair, it was some kind of fuzz ball from clothes or something!" I look at her blankly and start laughing "That's not making me feel better!" She chuckles and asks if there's anything else she can do. "No," I said, "just the replacement sliders I asked the waitress for already". She was trying to avoid comping my meal".

Uh, well before we put that in you want anything else?" She didn't put the order in! At this point, I've had enough, so I say, “If my replacement isn't back by the time my parents finish eating, take it off the bill and don't bother bringing it at all!" The other tables are staring at us now. My dad notices a giant charred piece of something sticking out of his burger and asks the waitress what it was. Again she didn't know and took that for a replacement too.

The table next to us started laughing at us and commenting we were just trying to get a free meal. I looked over and told them "YOU'RE free to eat the hair and charred food they gave us". They shook their heads and stayed quiet. They comped our meal and we never went back.

Permalink

I was working at Blockbuster during college, taking a full course load at a prestigious university, and working full time. I was exhausted and constantly had my head in two worlds. I would regularly go to a juice bar and get my usual Orange Berry Blitz during a short 15-minute break. They kept me going.

One day, I am in there having a particularly difficult day and the manager hands me my beverage and says, "What's with the frowns all the time? See, you need to be happy like us! When I see you all unhappy in your Blockbuster uniform it makes me not want to go rent a movie there. You make me not want to go in there".

Well...I lost it and did the most rational thing I could think of, and I threw the Orange Berry Blitz square at his smiling face and walked away while his face dripped. The other "smiling" workers were staring wide-eyed, not knowing what to do. Later that evening two of them came to my store, told me how I was a hero, and they brought me an Orange Berry Blitz.

Therabidllama88

One time my family and I went to eat at Steak and Shake. Our waiter was clearly high and he spilled an entire glass of ice water ON MY BABY and then laughed about it. I lost it. I understand that it was an accident but the fact that he laughed while my nine-month-old son cried hysterically made me very close to punching him in the face. I still get mad thinking about it.

Deathbycheddar

I ordered a double cheeseburger with no onions. I got onions and returned it but I didn't get any kind of an apology, just a sigh of disgust. Several times in the following weeks I ordered the same thing and kept getting the wrong food. I was now disappointed with the service but I liked the burgers so I kept trying. Finally one day I opened my burger and again there were onions inside, and I took it back and got a snotty response from the girl behind the window.

She then said, “The manager said we aren't gonna serve you anymore because you complain too much”. I said, “If you'd give me what I ordered I wouldn't complain". So the manager calls from back, “Are there onions on the burger?” She looks at it and, like she couldn't admit the truth, it had a normal serving of onions, she pettily said, “It has ONE onion on it".

I was pretty steamed by that point and her attitude was the last straw. I said, “How many onions did I order?” Well, she had no response for that. She gives me the new burger and I take it out of the bag, open it up, and smear both buns, meat, mustard, etc all over the windows, and then walk off. Oh, but to be fair, no onions. I don't feel that bad about it.

u/philipem

My mom and stepdad went RV shopping.. They found the one they wanted for the price they wanted. The dealer asked if they wanted to get a satellite dish installed to get local TV wherever he went. The satellite would have been an extra $2,000 and would leave permanent holes in the roof of it were ever taken out. They said they probably would but wanted to think about it some more and left to come back the next day.

Well, when they came back, there was a big, shiny, brand-spanking’ new satellite dish sticking out of the top. Nowhere in the paperwork they signed said anything about agreeing to the satellite. Then they tried to charge them $200 to have it removed. The guy's excuse? He just knew they would like it and be happy with it.

They decided to just keep it but made them at least drop the price of it for the inconvenience. The thing didn't even work because campgrounds are full of trees and he'd be lucky to get a static-filled news station.

Owlettehoo

We sat down at a restaurant at the world's most inconvenient table. Square with four chairs, one was pushed up about a foot from the bar and the bar patrons. They were practically sitting on the table. I sit across from my partner. Shortly a waitress comes and asks me to move adjacent to my partner, as my chair is impeding the ability of others to go to the bar.

So I move. Then we wait a long time to be served, get our food and I take my first mouthful when an employee comes over and says that I need to move seats because my chair is blocking the path they use to deliver food. This happened once more before I finished my food. That’s when I lost my temper and berated the server. I just wanted to eat.

Cantthink0fanything

I went to the drive-thru at McDonald’s and ordered a Happy Meal for my 3-year-old, a large drink, and a soft serve for me. I got to the window and paid and got put in the waiting bay. 20 minutes went by with still no food. I stayed calm and after 30 minutes I went in. I waited patiently for someone to help me. A young girl came and asked if I wanted something.

I told her nicely what was happening she said "Oh, I don't do drive-thru," and walked away. Five minutes went by and no one would help me and I was seeing red. I got started screaming at all the workers telling them how pathetic it is that I have been waiting for 30 minutes. None of them cared which made me angrier.

After around five minutes of me going crazy they gave me my order but I was too angry and I just launched the soft serve and drink at the window. When I got back in the car and told my husband what had happened I felt like such a jerk and I thank god it wasn’t my local McDonald’s.

Elegantae-fabulosa

I once lost my mind at a worker who asked me to leave my backpack at the front of the store. I still think I'm right. I would never betray my neighbors to enforce that policy especially in a city where thousands and thousands of working people commute with backpacks. On top of that, I had my work computer and tablet in my bag. I'm not going to trust you with my livelihood.

I've worked retail. I've run a theater. There are all sorts of stupid rules that come down from the parent company that you can just ignore. But when I said no and refused to budge, I'm sure that worker thought I was one of "those" customers.

ButaneLilly

As a teenager, I went into the local bank branch to cash my paycheck. After receiving the money I moved out of the next customer’s way and stopped at the little table where they have to fill out paperwork to count it. Found that I had an extra $100 bill. Went back to the teller, and waited until she finished with her current customer.

When she was done I very sweetly said: "Excuse me but I think there was a mistake with my money". She looked at me very haughtily and said "I'm sorry?" I repeat that I thought there was a mistake with the money given to me. She looked at me and in the snarkiest tone I have heard to date, told me "I don't make mistakes".

I looked at her for a couple of seconds before saying, "Alrighty then, have a great day!" and turned around and left.

Aeboco

I'm not proud of this one but I was on nine days of going in at 7 AM to work and stopped at Starbucks for a coffee and a bagel since that would be my food intake till like 1. So I go in, order, and wait. Get coffee. Wait. Wait some more. Gonna be late if I keep waiting. So I mentioned it to the person I made the order with and they got snotty with me saying I didn't order a bagel.

I showed her the receipt she gave me and she just made a harrumph sound and started making it. Three more people got their orders before I got my bagel. I mention it again and the lady practically throws it at me. I've never been so furious in my life, so as I turn to leave, I said, "Oh and by the way, someone spilled something!" and toss my venti cold press on the ground. The whole place goes silent and the lady, who was the manager, just looks at me with pure hate in her eyes. I didn’t break my stride leaving.

McBombDotCom

I got mad at a fast food place because they called me a rather lewd name over the PA to pick up my order. One minute later, right after I told off the girl for using the name, I realized what was happening...and I was mortified. The reason they used that name is because I had signed up for an account under a rather lewd name from a Simpsons episode, and they automatically read my loyalty card name, not the name I gave them. I had no idea this would happen. That was the day Busty St. Claire blushed hard and tipped well.

Oopstheeconomy

Sources: 1, 2, 3

I was attending a funeral of a family friend whose wife had passed. This gentleman had a large family, and all of his siblings got up and made it all about themselves, dredged up old family drama, and made it clear that they resented his wife the entire time they had been together. It was so painfully awkward, and he looked aggrieved and mortified.

Abbreviations-Odd

A few years back, my mom’s uncle passed. At the funeral, my young eight-year-old cousin cried a lot at the service. It took some time, but eventually, he calmed down and his parents went for a little walk with him for some distraction. While on the walk, he noticed that his first name was written on one of the tombstones in the graveyard.

He mentions it loudly, and the response was utterly cruel. One of the bystanders just said, “Yeah, it’s already reserved for you". He immediately started crying again.

firedexo

He handed out his business cards at his stepdaughter’s funeral. There was very nearly a fistfight over it.

Jenny010137

I was at the funeral of my good friend, who had passed quite young. For whatever reason, her ex-boyfriend showed up to the funeral. But that wasn’t even the worst part. He got up and made a speech where he proceeded to tell us about all the great things she did in bed and what a loss for mankind that is. Oh, did I mention her current boyfriend was there?

Schmackerich

My mother-in-law took a photo of a wine glass during the lunch we had after the funeral, and then she posted it on Facebook. Guess what her caption was? “Life is Grand". It was my mother’s funeral.

kellywithayy

A colleague of my mom’s lost her husband to a heart problem, which is tragic enough. Then fate got even crueler. On the way to her husband’s funeral, the same colleague had a heart attack in the car and passed soon after. It was in the news because of how heartbreaking it was. I couldn’t imagine being their family.

HeartsOnRewind

My grandma is a piece of work. For example, she called my dad last night, claiming that she and my grandpa had a baby in 1999 and the baby passed when it was five. We’re almost sure she’s lying just to weasel herself back into our lives. And what caused her to get exiled? Well, it all has to do with my grandpa’s funeral.

She told my dad at his own father's funeral that her pain was much greater because she had lost a husband, while he had only lost his dad. As if grief is a competition. I’m so glad she’s out of our lives.

lanidvah

My husband went to his great aunt's funeral. While they did the little ceremony in the cemetery, a group of the young relatives were all hiding behind a tombstone, giggling and doing illicit substances. Real classy.

YaDrinkBee

My mom passed just two days before my first child was born. I didn’t get pregnant again until 11 years later, so I was five months pregnant with my second child when my father passed. I was obviously a complete wreck. But then it turned horrific. Someone came up to me at the funeral and said, “You should stop having kids, it’s bad luck for your family".

Karma_Cookie

My dad passed from an overdose when I was 12. Honestly, it was horrible. I was a daddy’s girl, and I adored him. It was nearly Christmas, and I was the one who found him. Even though years have passed, my aunt still talks about him like “When MY brother passed” when she’s speaking about it to me. You know, his DAUGHTER.

When I tried to be like “Hey, he was my dad and I found him, can I have a hug or something?” She pretty much explained it like, “I had more time on earth with him, so I miss him more than you could".

invalidusername02

After the eulogist had droned on for an endless 45 minutes, the pastor went over to the lectern and politely asked him to conclude his eulogy. The guy boldly told the pastor, "I'll stop when I'm darn good and ready!" He then proceeded to talk for about 20 more minutes. The total funeral church service lasted for almost three hours—it seemed interminable.

Back2Bach

I knew a little boy who climbed up into the casket with his grandfather. This one's sweet and wholesome. He was around four years old. He wasn't sure what was going on, and people weren't giving him much attention. He asked someone what his grandfather was doing in a box at the front of the room and why no one was talking to him.

A relative, thinking they were explaining the situation in an age-appropriate way, told him that grandpa went to sleep, and wouldn't wake up again. So he went up to the casket and climbed up. The room froze in shock. Then he said, "Good night, grandpa," and he kissed him. Adults told him later you could hear a pin drop and there wasn't a dry eye in the room.

Beorbin

This one gets…very dark. One day, my father told the family he was marrying his long-time girlfriend—my mom had passed 10 years previously—on the coming Sunday. By the next Friday he had passed on, and my sister became the executor of his estate shortly after. This is where it all started to unravel in the worst way.

Thing is—and no, we didn’t believe it at the time—my sister was the one who offed him. She had been daddy's little girl her whole life, and she realized that now that he was re-marrying, his will would be changed and the clock was ticking. It took her five days to conceive of the plan and to carry it out, and she did it purely for financial gain. And just before we realized what’d she’d done, there was the funeral…

During the viewing, she was obviously so paranoid about anyone finding out that she dragged her little boy to the casket to put on a display of emotion. When he didn't cry enough to suit her, she pinched him on the upper arm until he was sobbing, then took him around to everyone, saying he was really crying because he loved his Gramps so much. Just…chilling.

smilingonion

When my granddad passed, we went to view his body at the crematorium. While we were there, my aunt started stealing from the facility the second the employee’s back was turned. Just shoving anything that wasn't nailed down into her purse and pockets. Unbelievable. And yes, we called her out and made her put it all back.

Korsola

My brother-in-law is a mortician. One time, a guy disguised himself as a nun, showed up at the funeral, pulled a piece from under his habit, and tried to shoot the deceased’s son. Luckily, the piece malfunctioned and didn’t fire. The son then decks the nun and knocks him out, kicks him in the head a few times, and is pulled off by other family members.

Authorities are called…turns out the deceased owed the “nun” quite a lot of money and the son had refused to honor the debt.

O2K30C1

My uncle was cremated. He lived across from a lake and we wanted his ashes spread on this little island on this lake. I was tasked with swimming with the urn from the boat to the island, holding it out of the water. I then stood at the edge of a small cliff with my nephews beside me and all the family watching in the boat. This is when disaster struck.

I opened the urn to dump his ashes over the cliff. We all say a few things, and as I go to dump the ashes, the wind picks up and blows the ashes all over my wet body. One of the worst things that has ever happened to me.

PsychologicalTaste14

My uncle passed, and at his funeral, my cousin (his son) was crying. Some old-timer family member came up to him and said, “Stop crying, you’re a man and you’re embarrassing us". I never wanted to slap someone at a funeral more than at that moment.

Introvertedpanic

My cousin's wife was kicking the back of my chair throughout the entirety of my granddad's funeral. For some reason, she was also carrying on a complete conversation with my sister, who was supposedly really sad, the whole way through the service. For context, I was 14 and my cousin's wife was in her mid- to late-30s. Just ridiculous.

VaultBoyNewReno

I had a fit of unhinged laughter at my father's funeral just about the time people started to gather at the mortuary. In my defense, my mother had a nervous breakdown, my father passed just four days after we found out he had lung cancer, and there were a lot of horrible things surrounding the funeral organization. My mom had just flipped, my siblings were 15 and lost, so I was left to handle it all at 23 years old. I kind of lost it.

MsLibraryOwl

The officiant moved the partner of the deceased back a couple of rows, apparently because they “weren’t family". But her real reason was worse. The deceased and the partner were in a gay relationship, and the officiant had a big problem with that. I was furious. And then it got worse. The officiant decided to make the entire funeral about mental health, and how everyone should get help.

Nothing about the life of the loved one. No celebration of their accomplishments, of the beauty they brought to the world. Nothing. Yes, the deceased had taken their own life, but 80% of the congregation still believed it was because of physical health reasons. We would’ve coped with the knowledge, but telling us it was a "sin" only as a platform for the rest of us to “seek help” was heartbreaking. Only funeral I’ve ever complained about.

Teacher_too

Someone’s kid thought it would be funny to give the corpse a wet willy. The kid was like seven years old, and I’m almost positive he didn’t even know the deceased. After it happened, everyone just stared at him, aghast, and looked around for the parents. The whole family dragged their kids out of the door and they did not return.

DJ_cli

My minister was once waiting in a room off the sanctuary before a funeral when he heard scuffling noises. He went to investigate—and witnessed a horrific sight. The brother and sister of the deceased had pulled the body out of the casket and propped it between them. They explained that they didn’t have a recent photo of the three of them and were delighted when the minister showed up to take the picture.

Waiola

I took my ex-boyfriend to my grandma's funeral even though he only met her once.  I needed the moral support as it was very unexpected and I was super close to my grandma. Now, my ex likes to cosplay and dress up like rock stars. That being said, I told him to please tone it down. It's not the time or the place to show up dressed as Alice Cooper or Nikki Sixx.

So, while he does tone it down SLIGHTLY, he still shows up dressed in a big theatrical black trench coat—in the middle of summer—with a red button-down that was left half unbuttoned. He also had a bunch of giant cross necklaces. Not to mention a little Nikki Sixx makeup to top it all off. I remember asking him if he'd please reconsider changing into something that wasn't as intense. His response was ridiculous.

He got mad and accused me of being like his controlling mother. My grandma was a little, old, God-fearing lady, and she of course had a group of friends she went to church with. Not to mention all the people she went to school with, most of whom probably thought the Beatles were dressed too strange to be popular. So, he was being whispered about and glared at the entire time. Which he loved, because any attention was good attention in his eyes. He also signed her funeral book as “Alice Cooper".

LoopZoop2

This is a story my father told me from when he was a child. There was a church beside the farm where he grew up in rural South Carolina that had no electricity. There was a funeral there one evening, and the church was lit throughout with candles. The church building had existed since just after emancipation and was in really bad shape.

In particular, the flooring had been severely damaged by termites. Well, during the funeral, the floor gave way, making the casket tumble and the body fall out. Everyone ran out of the church in terror. Making matters worse, the candles that were on the casket fell to the floor and set the church on fire. The whole community watched outside as it burned to the ground.

TigerTownTerror

We went to support my husband’s cousin when his dad passed. At first, everything was really normal. But at the end of the wake, before leaving, a woman waddles up to the front of the church. She is not his wife or the mother of said cousin. In fact, no one knows who she is. And then the deceased’s web of lies suddenly fell apart.

She is the mistress! He had been living with her for years, on the side. Mistress took the microphone and, I’m not making this up, told a story of how caring he was and went on about the time she fell through the floor in the kitchen and he comforted her until rescue came. It was like watching a movie.

DarlingPrincess

The worst thing they did was have a funeral at all.  For the past 20 years, both my grandparents would tell us that they didn't want a funeral or anything special after they passed. They told us this regularly, at least once a year for 20+ years. Then my grandfather passes, and my mom and aunt have a weird little funeral for him.

It made me a little mad, but my grandmother seemed to be OK with it, so it didn't bother me too much. A few years later, my grandmother passes…and they throw a full-on funeral at a funeral parlor with a fancy coffin and all that. They spent over $15K on stuff that my grandmother didn't want, using my grandmother's money. I was SO angry. People need to respect last wishes.

SecTrono

At the end of my grandmother’s funeral, the priest pulled my grandfather aside and asked for more donations. My grandfather has donated thousands over the years to the church, so the fact that the priest asked at my grandfather’s wife’s funeral is disgusting. I didn’t know, however, until after we left, otherwise I would’ve probably punched him.

writerlover182

The family didn't allow for his twin to speak. Straight up skipped over the allocated time for the living twin to get up and speak about his brother when the brother passed from cancer. The twin who was his last remaining immediate family. I don't think I can ever forgive the wife for putting him through that. She treated him so horribly all throughout the sickness. And her reasoning was chilling.

She was awful to him from the start of the cancer diagnosis. We (my family) think it's a weird resentment that the healthy twin who ran marathons and didn't eat red meat got very sick, and the less healthy twin didn't. It was just bad genetic luck despite them being identical. On top of which, she has ALWAYS been a control freak, so it got really bad when he got sick.

This woman controlled who could see him and when, controlled his phone, etc. Honestly my father, the twin, found out about the passing of his brother in line at a Starbucks. He was buying coffee for his brother and a friend walked in and told him then and there. An hour after his brother had passed. And then, yep, didn’t let him speak at the funeral.

teutthexx

My grandma's sister passed recently, and they were holding a service at my aunt's house before the burial. My gran, closing in on 90, deaf as a post and suffering from vascular dementia, lost patience with the celebrant as she was about halfway through the reading and loudly announced, "Oh, will she not just bloody shut up?!" at the top of her voice.

My poor mom was completely mortified, although the rest of the family was very understanding. Luckily, no one returned the "favor" at my gran's service the following year.

ShadyElmm

A local boy passed after being hit by a car while riding his bike. I think he was like 11 or 12 at the time. His sister, known to all to be very attention seeking, immediately was doing news interviews. This just seemed odd, considering he had only passed earlier that day, but whatever, people grieve differently I suppose. But it didn’t end there.

At his wake, she took a few photos of him in the casket and posted it to her public Instagram story. It was super bizarre and just bad taste.

Basic_Priority

A friend of the family with a notorious drinking problem showed up to the visitation and service extremely out of it. She is not a sad drinker; she is a happy, huggy drinker, so she went around sloppily hugging everyone—even people she didn't know. She flubbed introductions and condolences to everyone for about an hour, then tripped over a settee in one of the sitting rooms of the funeral home and face-planted.

Maxwyfe

My mom tells this story of what I did at my grandmother’s funeral every chance she gets. I was like five years old, and I was handing out the funeral home’s business cards to all the old people. You know, because they would need it soon. I was a consummate gentleman.

Olorin919

My uncle passed and the priest was new in town, young, and nervous as heck. He got stuck in a loop. You could tell he was trying to break out of it, but instead, he kept repeating the phrase in different and more horrible ways: “He may be in Heaven with the Lord, but his wife is still on earth with us. She is alone and needs our comfort". Oh, but he wasn’t finished.

“When we go home tonight, we have friends and family, but she’ll be in an empty house, she’ll wake up to an empty house in an empty bed, she’ll be alone from now on and we need to remember to invite her to things because she’s alone". At one point, one of my other aunts huffed loudly to get him to stop. It didn’t work.

He ran himself into the ground telling us how empty and alone she is now that her husband is gone. Yikes.

DarlingPrincess

When my wife's grandmother passed a few years back, we arrived at the cemetery with the funeral procession, and they hadn't even dug the hole yet. They did the entire graveside ceremony thing with the casket sitting on a gurney in the grass. All the while, there's a guy waiting in a backhoe just up the hill. It all seemed so strangely...I don't know...unprofessional?

craggy_cynic

I once had a professor at my junior college who had a “funeral policy” that if you were going to miss his class because you were going to the funeral of someone, you literally had to take a selfie with the body or ashes to present to him the next day as proof. It was an actual, legit thing that he had written into the syllabus of his class. I had to contemplate my argument against it when my grandpa got extremely sick halfway through the semester.

unregrettablyhere

My late great-grandfather left one of his stepdaughters in charge of the estate when he passed, a move that left the family stunned because she is a psycho and he of all people had the least patience for people like her. To this day, we have no idea why he did it. But one thing is for sure: It was an enormous, colossal mistake.

Pretty much before his corpse was cold, that woman started pilfering from my great-grandmother and robbed her blind. I don’t have an exact dollar amount, but it was well into the six figures and enough that she could live comfortably for the rest of her life. This woman took everything. Everything. But apparently that wasn’t good enough for her.

During the process, she and her daughter had my great-grandma move in with them and then refused to let the family see her. When their sins came to light, they were convicted and the judge only didn’t send them behind bars because my great-grandma begged him not to. So fast forward to m great-grandma’s funeral. They’re still around, and they’re still horrible.

While the pastor is talking, it quickly became apparent that the two psychos had lied to him and spun elaborate stories about how they were wonderful and were basically living angels. As the pastor went on, with what everybody in the room but him knew darn well was bull, my great aunt just completely snapped and stood up in front of everyone.

She apologized to the pastor for her upcoming outburst, and read the two of them the riot act in front of God and everybody. Unfortunately, there is no happy ending here as the perpetrators were not punished whatsoever and are still happily living with the assets, but at least they were finally publicly called out and are largely ostracized from the community.

Thenegativeone10

I was at my wife’s grandfather’s funeral and all was well. There was elevator-like music playing in the background, soothing stuff at the beginning. But once the song finished, this extreme grunge metal song came on. Everyone was crying and looking around like, what the heck is going on. The funeral director was standing in the back and didn’t even notice, I had to go ask him to change the song.

stevejenowski

I was really young when my dad passed, around five or six years old I believe. There’s a video somewhere of this where I stood up in the middle of his funeral and yelled out, “I’m hungry! Does anyone else want any fried chicken?!” My aunt immediately rushed over and took me out of there to get food, like the saint she is.

bloopzy

The funeral director put the flowers in my grandma’s hearse. They were lovely flowers, don’t get me wrong. But there was one embarrassing problem. They were in upside down, so as we rode behind the hearse, we quickly realized it did not say “Mom” but now simply said “Wow".

GiantEnemy

When my father passed, his awful second wife had compiled a playlist of all his favorite songs. Jimi Hendrix's “National Anthem” rendition from Woodstock started playing, and my half-brother made a funny comment to help lighten the mood. My stepmom didn’t like the song, and my brother said, “Hey mom, it's your favorite song".

Instead of just letting it play, she snapped at my brother to turn it off. She also didn’t introduce me or my aunt and uncle to anyone at the funeral, and in fact barely acknowledged us at all. She was horrible to the very end, and she had the audacity to try and say she loved me in front of everyone. I just looked at her and left.

I didn’t know my dad's family, but I was stuck with them when he passed. At the cemetery, they're all off by themselves while we wait for the hearse with the ashes to show up. I walk over and say, "It's now 1:05. My father is late for his own funeral". No one said anything. They just moved slowly away. Well, I thought it was funny.

bigtimejohnny

My father's phone rang during the middle of a eulogy. His ring tone is the music from Psycho. I was sitting right next to him doing the best I could to sink through the pew I was sitting in.

techniforus

My uncle was angry about something in my grandmother's last will and testament. So during the funeral, he performed an act of brutally petty revenge. He went out to the parking lot and keyed everyone's car. It should be noted, he has severe brain injury from a motorcycle accident that causes him to be constantly angry and paranoid. Still...

PancakeExpirationDate

My aunt passed. Her husband has Asperger's and didn't really know how to cope with social situations; that was always her job. She chose to be cremated and have her ashes incorporated into a reef ball, so at the funeral, I asked my uncle how long the reef ball would be around, and after a few conversational rabbit holes, we ended up talking about the percentage of my aunt that was in the atmosphere vs. the percentage that ended up in the reef ball because of the cremation process.

My uncle and I didn't realize this was weird until my mom tapped me on the shoulder and we saw that the entire funeral party was looking on in horror. My uncle is chill though, and we still talk.

Zouea

My grandfather asked me if I would do the eulogy at his funeral. He's not sick, just prepared, and I said of course. He said he didn't want me to feel pressured to do it, and I replied “Not at all, I'm looking forward to it”—luckily, he has a sense of humor.

whatsallthefussabout

My uncle passed. He was gay. My grandmother couldn't handle that. My uncle left a letter to be read at his funeral. I don't know if my grandmother planned it all alone or what, but she gets to the part that says, "And to my nieces and nephews, I want you to know..." And instead of reading what was there, she went on this huge, insane tangent with tons of swearing about how "None of us should be like him, commit his sins, etc. that he passed as a punishment".

It was the most hateful few minutes I can ever remember hearing. It was so disrespectful to everyone and so terrible. She was an ugly person. I remember it going on and my dad sitting beside me and just cursing under his breath and whispering to me to stay calm. They already had a bad relationship before leading up to the funeral.

Then he told us all to come with him, and we walked out and left. She didn't care, but that was really the last straw for my dad with her. Whole thing was a gong show. I wish he'd said something, but he loved his brother, the part he did say which was first was actually beautiful. Screw that woman.

billbapapa

My student’s mother passed. I went to the funeral with the principal and the student's integration aide. Honestly, I still can’t believe what I witnessed on that day. After the funeral, her father walked right up to his own daughter and her grandmother and said "I want her out of the house by tomorrow morning". She was just 11 years old. It was heartbreaking.

MrsAlwaysWrighty

My great uncle had a very Catholic funeral. If you know Catholic funerals, it's just a big Catholic mass with blip about the person who passed. Anyway, my great aunt is that person who is friends with everyone, so a lot of people were coming to the funeral. I went early to the church to make sure it was set up, check in with the priest, etc. I run into a complication.

One of her neighbors, a little old lady, came in with her 30-year-old granddaughter. She said she was Jewish and had never been to a Catholic ceremony before, and asked what would be or what wouldn't be appropriate. One thing that came up was that if you're not Catholic, you don't go up and receive communion, you just stay in your seat.

So fast forward to the ceremony, which was beautiful and emotional. We as a family go up first to receive communion. As I'm walking to the side, I hear a slight commotion behind me. It turns out the granddaughter went up to receive communion, and instead of laying out your hands, she just plucked it out of the priest's hands and started walking away with it held between her fingers and in front of her. I turned and saw the priest chase after her.

You would have thought she tried to set the church on fire, the way the other little old ladies were carrying on about it. I still kind of chuckle over it.

lissalissa3

I went to the funeral of a co-worker’s fiancée. Obviously a very tragic time, but it quickly turned darker. The girl’s ex-boyfriend showed up and as people were lined up to say goodbye, we all witnessed him lean into the coffin and kiss her on the lips. I will repeat myself: The ex-boyfriend of the deceased woman kissed her corpse at her funeral...In front of her fiancé. Her brothers quite literally threw him out.

GurgleQueen636

Six years ago at my grandmother’s funeral, myself and my cousins were asked to carry my dear Nana’s coffin through the chapel and place her down up front. I’m the shortest of the cousins, so I was at the back with my other vertically challenged relative. All was going well until we walked past our many teary family members.

I’m trying to keep my composure as I hear my mother sobbing. Start to lose it. Tears fall down my face. Then it happens. I stumble. Fall to my knees, knocking my cousin in front of me. Oh God. Before we know it, we’ve dropped dear old Nana’s coffin. Noooooo. Coffin falls to the floor. The lid comes off. Nana's arm falls out. Pallbearers rush to help.

More sobbing. Screaming. Children wailing. I was mortified. When we were walking out, we found Nana’s false teeth on the floor. I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life. At the wake, people kept asking me if I was alright. I wasn’t. And I’m still not.

conehead

Sources: 1, 2

Bette Davis was actually born Ruth Elizabeth Davis on April 5, 1908. She would be known as “Betty” (note: not yet Bette) to her friends…presumably for her middle name, not her first. She dropped the “y” for an “e” into Bette after seeing a friend reading Honoré de Balzac’s novel, La Cousine Bette. It took years before Davis found out that the character was a bit of a bad girl—kinda like the over-the-top women that Davis often played...

When asked why went into acting, Davis cited a 1926 production of The Wild Duck starring Peg Entwistle. Just three years later, Davis snagged the Entwistle’s role in said show. However, Davis's childhood idol met a horrific end. Entwistle infamously climbed to the top of the Hollywood sign and jumped to her end—and just like her hero, Davis would grapple with dark times too...

Right from the beginning of her career, people had polarizing opinions about Bette Davis. As a sign of her, ahem, combative personality, Davis actually got snubbed by a New York theater troupe called the Manhattan Civic Repertory Theatre. Their reasons for turning down one of the greatest actresses of all time? Her, and I quote, “frivolous” and “insincere” attitude.

When Davis travelled to Hollywood for her first screen test in 1930, she made a long, arduous journey—just to get royally insulted at the end of it. She waited at the airport for ages, having been told that a studio head would meet her there. Eventually, she just left, assuming that there had been a miscommunication or, worse, she had been stood up. Oh, but the truth was even worse.

For her entire career, Davis had to struggle with Hollywood's harsh beauty standards. She was a beautiful woman, but to Hollywood executives, she'd never be a screen siren. Davis learned this the hard way. It turned out that the studio head had been at the airport to pick her up. Instead, he assumed she wasn't around because he didn't see anyone attractive enough to be an actress—even though Davis was right there. Ouch.

While Davis failed her first Hollywood screen-test in 1930, she was “used” in screen tests for other male actors. This involved “intimate” work for which she will ill-prepared. To quote Davis, “I was the most Yankee-est, most modest virgin who ever walked the earth. They laid me on a couch, and I tested 15 men ... They all had to lie on top of me and give me a passionate kiss. Oh, I thought I would die". Spoiler: Young Bette’s modesty will become very ironic later on.

Davis wasn’t putting on airs. She really was an awkward, inexperienced young woman. While growing up, her father was cold and distant, while her mother was religious and prim. Davis quickly learned two things: Good girls waited until marriage—and marriage was no walk in the park. According to Davis herself, her parents made each other miserable, and when they finally split, she felt overjoyed.

With such a healthy relationship unfolding before her eyes, you can probably guess that Davis’s own romances would be, well, let’s just say it: Huge messes.

Despite Davis’s rough start in Tinseltown, she did eventually land a contract with Universal Studios. In 1931, a cinematographer praised Davis’s “lovely eyes” and put in her in her film debut, The Bad Sister. Unfortunately, this movie was not the star vehicle that Davis had hoped for. In fact, it was such a disaster that Universal dropped Davis, leaving her on the hunt for work. And that wasn’t the only source of trouble in Davis’s life.

Remember how Davis grew up with strict parents who were trapped in a miserable marriage? Yeah, that had some consequences on young Bette. In 1932, she married her high school sweetheart Harmon Nelson. She was just 24 years old on her wedding night—and true to her repressed upbringing, she’d never slept with anyone before. So far, Davis had done everything by the book—but it wouldn’t save her.

Davis’s first marriage was far from idyllic. Her husband Harmon Nelson (who preferred to be called “Ham”—you do you, bud) could be controlling and cruel. While married to Nelson, Davis became pregnant twice. Both times, Nelson ordered her to abort the baby. In the 1930s, that wasn’t just emotionally horrific. It was incredibly dangerous too.

Poor Bette. Life really wasn’t kind to her in the early 1930s. As she tried to break into Hollywood, Davis endured mean comments about her looks. When she tried to dress more seductively for a screen test, director William Wyler loudly mocked her to the crew and stated, “What do you think of these dames who show their chests and think they can get jobs?"

On the other end of the spectrum, chief of production Carl Laemmle, Jr. described Davis as having “about as much...appeal as Slim Summerville,” her gawky male co-star. Thanks!

After a string of failed launches, Bette Davis was at her wit’s end. She planned on packing it up and going back to New York—just before she booked The Man Who Played God, a film about a deaf pianist. Davis’s performance (and her unique looks) finally got her noticed. With a hit in the can, at long last, her star was on the rise.

Look, you can’t be an iconic Hollywood star without rubbing some people the wrong way—and wowy, Bette Davis is no exception. Her feud with rival starlet Joan Crawford is the stuff of legend, but few people know how it started. Well, here’s the beef: Back in 1933, on the exact same day that Universal Studios planned to release an article announcing Bette Davis as the Next Big Thing in movies, Joan Crawford swept in to take Davis’s thunder with a stunning announcement of her own.

Imagine it: Bette Davis wakes up, rushes to get the morning paper, and immediately sees red. Instead of reading about her status as Hollywood’s most exciting It Girl, the front page is taken up with the news that Joan Crawford was divorcing her famous husband Douglas Fairbanks Jr. For the first time—but hardly the last—Crawford took Davis’s thunder.

The newspaper shuttled Davis’s “grand” announcement into a tiny little paragraph in the Reviews section. It was the beginning of a now-legendary Hollywood rivalry.

By 1934, Bette Davis had only been in Hollywood for two years—but she’d already appeared in a whopping 22 films. Thankfully for her health, the 22nd movie was the charm. When Davis played a villainess in Of Human Bon-dage, her performance electrified audiences. Well, all audiences except the one that mattered.

No one could hold a grudge quite like Bette Davis. Literal decades after she didn’t win the Oscar for her adaptation of Somerset Maugham's most famous book, she was still fuming. In her memoir, Davis said that when she didn’t take home the precious golden statuette, people were so incensed that they demanded the Academy Awards hire independent vote counters. Did they really? Or did Davis just have a big case of sour grapes? We’ll never know—but one thing is for sure: Davis was ticked. 

For Davis, this was her big make or break moment. She could follow up her rave reviews with another hit—or she could follow Warner Brothers’ orders and appear in a string of so-so movies. Unfortunately, back in old Hollywood, studio executives ruled the roost. Davis basically had to do whatever WB told her, and that meant watching her promising career flounder in lame material. If WB thought Davis would let them ruin her career, they had another think coming.

Warner Brothers would soon learn not to mess with Bette Davis. Instead of acting in another stinker, the actress went out and got herself a shiny new contract with an English studio. She flew overseas and filmed some British flicks as a way to tell WB that if they wouldn’t give her good roles, she’d find someone else to work for. It was an amazing “screw you” to the studio—but there was one problem with Davis’s plan.

You see, Bette Davis was under contract at Warner Brothers. Legally, she wasn’t allowed to just up and leave—never mind work for anyone else. WB sent over an injunction telling Bette to get back to the USA where she belonged. But Bette wasn’t backing down without a fight. She straight-up sued Warner Brothers. Unfortunately, the law suit...didn’t go smoothly.

At first, Bette’s big gamble didn’t quite pay off. She took Warner to court and lost hugely. But then, because Bette Davis is an absolute legend, she somehow managed to turn her failure into a stunning success. She returned to Warner Brothers—and instead of being a chastened, meek starlet, she managed to negotiate herself into a bigger paycheck and those meaty roles she wanted all along. Bette, teach me your ways.

But even with her super-size confidence, Davis couldn’t get everything she wanted. She was desperate to book the role of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With The Wind—only to lose it to Vivien Leigh. Why? Oh, because Bette was too busy shading her leading man. Producers would only give Scarlett to Bette if they could get the heartthrob Errol Flynn to play Rhett. Davis thought Flynn had the acting ability of an old shoe and outright refused to be in the movie with him. Ouch.

As we all know, producers didn’t bend to Bette’s will. But don’t feel too bad for her—Davis’s career was just heating up. While filming the movie Dangerous with her iconic frenemy Joan Crawford, Davis got embroiled in a fiery love triangle. Davis fell for her elegant co-star Franchot Tone...who was already dating Joan Crawford. What could go wrong?

Despite being a married lady, Davis pulled out all the stops while she pursued Tone—and Crawford definitely noticed. Determined not to let Davis win, Crawford pressured Tone into a quick engagement while they were still filming, which meant that poor Bette had to watch the newly-betrothed couple celebrate on set. Davis declared that she would “never forgive” Crawford for taking her man.

What’s a love triangle without some shade? Joan Crawford once sad that the reason Tone chose her instead of Bette was simple: “He thought Bette was a good actress, but he never thought of her as a woman". Yep, the claws were coming out—and by the time the Oscars rolled around, Crawford and Davis’s catfight got even uglier.

At the 1936 Oscars, Crawford and Davis took their feud to another level. Here’s the deal: Davis hadn’t wanted to attend the ceremony because she was sure she wouldn’t win, so as a “Screw You” to the studio head who made her go, she intentionally wore an incredibly ugly dress. Well, the joke was on Bette. She won the Best Actress trophy—and had to march up to accept it in a heinous gown. That’s when Crawford struck.

On Davis’s way up to the stage, her unrequited love Franchot Tone gave her a congratulatory hug. Meanwhile, Tone’s new bride Joan Crawford crossed her arms and turned away from Davis. When Tone basically made Crawford acknowledge her co-star, Crawford sneered and delivered an acidic one-liner: “Dear Bette! What a lovely frock".

Yeah, Davis’s first Oscar win wasn’t the blissful experience she expected. But it did provide one good thing! According to Davis, the Academy Awards are known as “Oscars” because of her. She said the “posterior” of her Best Actress statue, which she won for her 1935 role in Dangerous, reminded her of her first husband, Harmon “Oscar” Nelson.

Kudos to "Ham" for having a pert derriere, but if you ask me, that's about all he had going for him. When his wife's career took off, Nelson absolutely refused to let her buy a house. He insisted that she wait until he could afford to buy his first house. His reason? Good old fashioned patriarchy. Nelson refused to be so “emasculated” by his wife.

Yeah, this marriage wouldn't last long...

In 1937, Bette Davis was a bonafide A-Lister—and like any rising star, it was only a matter of time before she left her starter spouse behind. When Davis filmed the movie The Great Lie, she struck up a passionate affair with her co-star George Brent. He fell for Davis hard and even proposed, but Davis declined. With that, her first affair went kaput—and another fiery romance began.

To use one of Davis’s own iconic lines, “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night". In 1938, Bette Davis signed on to the movie Jezebel, directed by William Wyler. To say that filming was dramatic would be an understatement. Right off the bat, Davis and Wyler felt a connection and it didn’t take long for them to start a full-blown affair.

When Davis looked back on her life, the only man she remembered fondly was William Wyler. That says a lot about how much he meant to her. During filming, she fell deeply in love with the director—and her passion didn’t go unnoticed. After the movie came out, the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper accused Davis of having an affair with her leading man, Henry Fonda. According to Hopper, you couldn’t look at someone that way if you weren’t truly in love with them.

Hopper had it right—but she also had it wrong. Fonda wasn’t even on set when this footage was shot. The person that Davis had been looking at hadn’t been her co-star. It was her director, standing just behind the camera.

Davis later said that Wyler was “the love of my life—no question". However, their romance was bumpy at best. When filming wrapped up, Davis learned that she was pregnant (and no, her husband was not the father). Davis hoped that the pregnancy would, shall we say, encourage Wyler to propose. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.

After Wyler failed to get down on one knee, Davis quietly terminated the pregnancy and continued her tumultuous affair. However, things didn’t last long. Sadly, Davis and Wyler were just about the worst communicators you could imagine. Davis often acted cold, hoping to attract Wyler by playing at being the cool girl. Wyler, meanwhile, struggled to penetrate Davis’s emotional walls. Eventually, everything came tumbling down.

When Wyler and Davis called time on their affair, Davis did what any girl would do: Rebound. She attended a swanky Hollywood party where she met the most notorious womanizer in the biz: Howard Hughes. When Hughes asked her out, Davis accepted, bluntly saying, “I was flattered, I was married, I was bored, I accepted". Heads up: This tryst got out of control fast.

At the same time as Davis was busily romancing Hollywood’s finest, she was also—oh right—married. Her husband, “Ham” Nelson, suspected Davis of sneaking around and became so desperate that he hired a private investigator to follow his wife and see what she was doing. Said PI was in for the shock of his life when he stumbled upon Davis and Hughes in bed together.

This was a ready-made celebrity scandal. The papers hounded Davis, asking her if she was really seeing Hughes and if she’d be getting a divorce from “Ham". Another starlet would have given a flustered reply, but not Davis. She sent off a tart telegram, letting the gossip columnists know that she was on a “vacation” from her marriage. Iconic.

Good ol’ “Ham” Nelson decided to make Bette’s vacation permanent. After the scandal leaked, Nelson divorced Davis for a slew of incredible reasons. First, he cited “cruel and inhumane” treatment, which you’d think referred to Davis constantly cheating on him. But no—Nelson had something else in mind...

To this day, if you look up Bette Davis’s first divorce, you’ll find some primo content. In the newspapers, Nelson said that the specific reason he divorced Davis was because she dared to like her job more than him and, best of all, because she “read in bed” too much. However, another version of the divorce is even more outrageous.

Some sources say that Nelson didn’t want to get divorced, even after all Bette’s affairs and novel-reading. Instead, Nelson knew that being Bette Davis’s husband meant enjoying a very comfortable lifestyle—so if Davis wanted to end their marriage, she’d have to say goodbye to a big fat paycheck too. Davis was determined to find another way

When Davis heard about her hubby’s ultimatum, she went to her mega-loaded boyfriend Howard Hughes and told him to pony up. Unfortunately for Davis, Hughes refused to pay Nelson off, leaving Bette in a lurch. She grumpily gave Nelson the money he wanted, then dumped Hughes for being cheap. And then Davis played dirty.

Davis always told it like it was. When she was asked about Howard Hughes’s abilities, she quipped, “Howard Huge, he was not". Call the burn unit! Man down.

With her first marriage over, Davis threw herself into her work and signed on for a movie called The Old Maid. Little did Davis know, this decision would kick-start another signature feud—this time with an actress named Miriam Hopkins. Hopkins started things off on the first day of filming, when she arrived on set wearing one of Davis’s dresses from her Oscar-winning performance in Jezebel. You see, Hopkins had also auditioned for the part—and clearly, she was still bitter about not getting it.

According to some sources, the reason for Hopkins’s burning hatred for Davis wasn’t about Jezebel. Instead, Davis may have had a fling with Hopkins’s husband, the Slavic filmmaker Anatole Litvak.

You know a set is messy when you’re tempted to make a movie about the making of a movie. While filming The Old Maid, Hopkins and Davis became hellbent on making each other miserable. They’d mess up each other’s takes, get in each other’s light, and made a competition out of arriving to the set light, just to keep the other from being able to film.

The sparring actresses even posed for a photograph where they wore boxing gloves, trying to “joke” about their very real, very extravagant feud.

The stressed out director of The Old Maid later said that he didn’t direct the movie—he “refereed it". With a comment like that, you’d think he hated Bette Davis—but you’d be wrong. Davis was so charming that even though she made the director miserable, he still couldn’t resist her. The two had a brief affair during the film. Dear God, please give me 1/10th of Bette Davis’s charisma.

What can I say, Bette Davis loved feuds. Hot off her fight with Hopkins, she took a role alongside her old enemy Errol Flynn. When asked about her co-star’s talent, Davis side-stepped the question by complimenting Flynn’s beauty. It seemed like she was going to be nice—until she added this zinger, “Flynn openly said he knew nothing about acting, and I admired his honesty because he was absolutely right".

Bette Davis did nothing halfway. Ask Errol Flynn, her co-star in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex. A scene required Davis to hit him—which she did with way more force than needed. Flynn complained to which Davis just quipped “If you can’t take a little slap, that is just too bad!” Can’t take a hit? Just quit.

1940 wasn’t just the year that Bette Davis shaded Errol Flynn into oblivion. It was also jam-packed with romantic drama. Hollywood lore claims that Davis’s old flame William Wyler re-entered her life and demanded that she marry him the next week. He said that if she didn’t, he’d close the door on their relationship and find someone else.

Thanks to Davis’s investment in a lifetime supply of emotional barriers, she turned down Wyler’s admittedly tense proposal. Sadly, she regretted that decision for the rest of her life. Wyler made good on his word. He found another woman and he married her, leaving Davis in the cold. When the actress looked back on this period in her life, she admitted that she played hard to get with Wyler—and that clearly, she’d gone too far.

Here's some classic Bette Davis shade. Before he was President of the United States, Ronald Regan was Bette Davis’s co-star in Dark Victory (1939). Davis appraised her future Head of State as “dull".

After turning down William Wyler, Davis went out and rebounded hard. She got married to a hunky innkeeper named Arthur Farnsworth. However, their romance didn’t last long. Just three years after they tied the knot, Davis tragically lost her second husband and went wild with grief. You see, Farnsworth’s passing wasn’t just heartbreaking—it was strangely suspicious too.

Farnsworth passed out in a Hollywood street and perished two days later. When the autopsy came back, it revealed the cause of his demise—and it was jaw-dropping. According to the report, Farnsworth had suffered a skull fracture two weeks before he passed. The authorities were suspicious enough to question Davis about this injury. To this day, her testimony raises more questions than answers.

Davis testified that she didn’t know what could possibly have caused the fatal injury, though she also said Farnsworth fell down the stairs while running to answer the phone. While Farnsworth’s strange end was classified as an accident, to this day, people wonder if Davis flew into one of her trademark rages and could have pushed him.

Credit to Bette Davis—you couldn’t keep her down. Even during these tough times, she hustled. She became the first woman to run the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (better known as the people who give out Oscars). However, in a classic Bette Davis move, she quit when the rest of the committee didn’t follow her orders.

Davis moved on from the kerfuffle with the Academy by creating the now-legendary Hollywood Canteen. As WWII raged on, Davis felt like she had to fight—so she started the Canteen as a way to raise money for the war effort. Nowadays, this seems like the obvious thing to do, but back in 1940s Hollywood, most actors and studios refused to get political. Davis risked it all by making her opinions known—and the real reason she went to bat was heartbreaking.

Remember Davis’s one true love, William Wyler? He was Jewish. During one of their recent films together, Davis saw first-hand how much WWII made Wyler suffer. She watched as he stressfully worked to get his family out of Europe and into safe territory. Was her work at the Hollywood Canteen a way to make amends with Wyler?

While running the Canteen, Davis made it clear that she would stand up for the oppressed—and that didn’t just mean victims of WWII. As Davis organized a benefit at a white establishment, she made sure to hire Black musicians and invite the Black actor Rex Ingram to be her date. In the segregated world of Old Hollywood, this was a big risk—but Davis knew she’d be on the right side of history.

Amid all her social justice activities, you know that Bette Davis still found time to squeeze in some dramatic romances. Around this time, Humphrey Bogart allegedly tried to seduce Davis. His plan hit a snag when his mother burst in on Bogart and Davis and kicked her son out of the house. As she gave Bogie the boot, his mother screamed that he was, “a slave to [his] genitalia".

Even this, ahem, eventful night had nothing on Davis’s next romance.

They say that the third time’s the charm—but not for Bette Davis. In 1945, she tied the knot with her third husband, the painter William Sherry. By all accounts, it doesn’t sound like a particularly happy time in Davis’s life. Sherry viciously beat Davis, causing her to go to the doctor multiple times. Once, her physician sadly asked her, “How could any bright woman like you marry that man?”

It’s safe to say that Sherry was Davis’s worst husband—but for some reason, he’s also the father of her only biological child. In 1947, when Davis was almost 40 years old, she welcomed her daughter Barbara. Keep little Barbara in the back of your mind because boy, oh boy, will she cause trouble in the years to come.

Don’t get intimidated or anything: Bette Davis is the first actor to be nominated for five consecutive Academy Awards. Most impressively, they were all in the category for Best Actress, which she dominated with nominations every year from 1938 to 1942. However, by the late 1940s, all that had changed. Bette’s career was going just about as well as her marriage.

Bette was an amazing actress, but our girl was not the best judge of character—and I mean that literally. She unwisely turned down more than one famous part, including the title role in Mildred Pierce. After Davis passed, the part went to her arch-enemy Joan Crawford. Davis bitterly watched as her rival won an Oscar for a role that Davis thought she was above. Awkward.

By the late 1940s, Davis needed a hit—and fast. After giving birth to her daughter, her career began to slow down. She started a production company, only to release a critical flop. Her other flicks failed to money and worst of all, Davis had to watch as her rivals strode ahead of her. In a humiliating twist, Davis dropped out of a movie called Possessed only to be replaced by—guess who!—Joan Crawford. Rubbing salt in the wound, Crawford then received an Oscar nod for her performance.

Thankfully, Davis’s luck was about to change.

In 1950, Bette Davis was back with a vengeance. Her classic film All About Eve revived her career and re-cemented her as the greatest actress in Hollywood. It also allowed Davis to meet her next hubby: her co-star, Gary Merrill. They began to see each other during filming and by the time the movie wrapped, they were determined to be together—come what may.

On July 3, 1950, Davis officially divorced her awful third husband—then the ish hit the fan. Evidently, both spouses had a competition to see who could move on faster. Davis married her fourth husband less than a month (!) after her divorce paperwork went through. Meanwhile, her ex-hubby promptly married the nanny that had lived with him and Davis. Nothing suspicious about that...

Bette and her new hubby stayed married for ten eventful years and adopted two children together. However, just like all Davis’s other attempts at wedded bliss, this one didn’t work out. In an apocryphal quote, Davis explained why she and Gary didn’t make it by saying, “Gary was a macho man, but none of my husbands was ever man enough to become Mr. Bette Davis".

It’s a delicious quote—but the reality is that Davis was very unhappy in love. And soon, her romantic life would get even worse.

By 1959, Davis’s fourth marriage was on its last legs. Maybe in a last ditch attempt to rekindle her old romance with William Wyler, Davis paid a visit to the director on the set of his new film Ben-Hur. Sadly, Davis’s attempt at a reconciliation failed spectacularly. Wyler’s reaction to Davis was the worst possible option: Indifference. He greeted her politely but distantly, as though they’d never been together. His coldness broke Davis’s heart.

Around this time, Davis received an offer that she couldn’t refuse: 90 glorious on-screen minutes to make digs at her rival Joan Crawford. 1952 saw an eager Davis play a loosely veiled caricature of Joan Crawford in The Star. She played Margaret Elliot, a washed-up Oscar-winner who suffers a series of indignities for her bad attitude. The screenplay was even written by Joan’s frenemy.

For now, Davis was winning the long-running feud, but soon Crawford would get her revenge. Enter: What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

In the history of Hollywood feuds, nothing trumps Bette Davis’s rivalry with Joan Crawford—and the reason is simple: What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? This campy masterpiece saw Davis and Crawford face off. Sure, while the cameras rolled, they (mostly) kept things under control. But the second they turned off, the leading ladies were at each other’s throats. Let’s dive into the petty—and eventually downright cruel—rivalry...

First off, Davis was weary about working with her old enemy, so she only agreed to be in the movie if the director could guarantee that she’d play Jane (the title role) and if he promised her he wasn’t dating Joan Crawford. Was Davis’s old jealousy over their past co-star Franchot Tone coming out? According to her, nothing could be further from the truth. She just didn’t want the director giving Crawford more close-ups. With that, these leading ladies were off to the races.

Crawford won the next round in this Hollywood hate match. During a scene where Davis had to drag Crawford across a room, Crawford hatched a brilliantly mean plan. She knew that Davis struggled with back pain, so she stuffed her pockets with rocks and made herself nearly impossible to move. Some sources even say that Crawford intentionally messed up multiple takes so that Davis was exhausted and in intense pain by the end of the day.

It didn't take long for Davis to strike back at Joan Crawford. Knowing that Crawford was the widow of the Pepsi Cola Company CEO and that Crawford sat on the company’s board of directors, Davis hatched a petty plan for revenge. Naturally, Davis installed a pop machine on the set of What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?—it only stocked cans from Pepsi’s enemy, Coca-Cola.

Davis wasn’t afraid to look deranged and even did her own makeup to play an unhinged has-been in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? No professional “make-up man” wanted his name attached to how grotesque Davis wanted to look. To quote the actress, “One told me he was afraid that if he did what I wanted, he might never work again". Soon, Davis turned her total commitment to her role into a way to insult Joan Crawford...

By the time the publicity tour for What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? rolled around, Davis and Crawford could barely keep their hatred under wraps. They pretty much decided to pass on promoting the movie and just use the press to publicly insult each other. Davis got the first dig, infamously declaring that sure, “Mrs. Crawford is a movie star” but Davis was “an actress". Crawford wasn’t going to take that sitting down.

In another interview, Crawford insulted Davis’s pride and joy: Her status as the greatest actress of the time. Crawford tartly shaded Davis’s acting abilities by saying, “Bette and I work differently. Bette screams and I knit. While she screamed, I knitted a scarf that stretched clear to Malibu". As you can imagine, Davis was ticked. She took the low road by claiming that Crawford “slept with every male star at MGM except Lassie". And our girls weren’t done yet...

In a twisted act of self-awareness about her waning star (or maybe a publicity stunt), Bette Davis put out this employment ad in the papers just nine days after filming What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?: “Situation Wanted, Women. Mother of three—10, 11 & 15—divorcée. American. Thirty years’ experience as an actress in motion pictures. Mobile still and more affable than rumor would have it. Wants steady employment in Hollywood".

In 1963, Davis thought she had this feud in the bag. You see, she’d received an Oscar nomination for her performance in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? while the Academy snubbed Crawford. However, Crawford didn’t just accept her defeat. Instead, she got to work and crafted a now-legendary plan. She got in touch with all the ladies that received nods for Best Actress and let them know that in case they didn’t want to attend the Awards, she’d be happy to pick up the Oscar on their behalf.

Nowadays, the thought of letting someone else accept your Oscar is outrageous, but the 1950s were another world. Since all the other nominees lived far away from the venue, they happily took Crawford up on her “generous” offer. And that’s how, even though Joan Crawford didn’t even get a nomination, she still managed to waltz up and smugly accept the golden trophy—as Davis fumed in the front row.

What caused Hollywood’s most famous feud? Sure, Franchot Tone didn’t help matters—but according to multiple sources, he wasn’t the real reason for Davis and Crawford’s rivalry. Heads up: Joan Crawford was bi and she had a big crush on Bette Davis. She once told a friend, “Franchot isn't interested in Bette, but I wouldn't mind giving her a poke if I was in the right mood". Davis, who was tragically straight, felt creeped out by Crawford’s feelings, and so an iconic feud was born.

Davis made it clear that even the Grim Reaper himself couldn’t stop her hatred of Crawford. In 1977, after her old rival passed, Davis allegedly delivered one final insult to Crawford. When asked what she thought of Crawford’s passing, Davis declared, “You should never say bad things about the dead, you should only say the good. Joan Crawford is dead. Good". Note to self: Do not cross Bette Davis.

However, just a year later, Davis shocked everyone by—gasp!—saying something nice about Crawford. Apparently, Davis drew the line at supporting daughterly “ingratitude". When Crawford’s daughter Christine penned her shocking memoir Mommie Dearest, Davis stood up for her old rival. She said, “I was not Miss Crawford’s biggest fan, but, wisecracks to the contrary, I did and still do respect her talent. What she did not deserve was that detestable book written by her daughter". Stay classy, Bette.

Joan Crawford's daughter Christine Crawford

Davis’s defense of Crawford proved to be a little prophetic. In 1985, Davis’s own estranged daughter B.D. published her own tell-all book about Davis. This memoir was an absolute barn burner. It permanently ended Davis and B.D.’s relationship. Mother and daughter never spoke to each other after it came out. So what exactly did B.D.’s book say? Oh, strap in.

According to B.D., her mother was a raging alcoholic who regularly tormented her children. B.D. alleged that if she misbehaved, Davis would pretend to take too many pills, then lock herself in her bedroom as B.D. panicked outside. When Davis emerged the next morning, B.D. alleges that she smugly said, “I hope that taught you a good lesson".

If that sounds too outrageous to be true, you’re not alone. B.D.’s book is rarely seen as credible—and when we get into her later allegations, you’ll understand why. Spoiler: B.D. has some...personal issues.

In public, Davis put on a brave face. But in private, her daughter's betrayal cut her deep. According to Davis’s long-time personal assistant, Davis had endured a great deal of pain over the years, but “nothing compared to the betrayal of B.D.’s book. That broke her heart".

After her daughter’s book My Mother’s Keeper came out, Davis felt blind-sided. Just two years later, she published a rival memoir where she remembered her decades in Hollywood and not-so-subtly said that her daughter’s tell-all was a pack of lies. Then, because the Davis family can’t resist a highly-publicized fight, B.D. responded to her mother’s new book by publishing another book about how awful Davis was. Woof.

In other words, Davis’s elderly years were just as dramatic as her time as a Hollywood starlet. Sadly, they wouldn’t last much longer.

Bette Davis loved Kim Carnes’ hit song, “Bette Davis Eyes". She even thanked Carnes for cementing her role in song history as well as film history.

1983 was not a healthy year for Bette Davis. Not only did she learn that she had breast cancer, the actress also suffered four strokes and became paralyzed on the left side of her face and left arm. As though all that wasn’t enough, the paralysis occurred within just two weeks of Davis's invasive mastectomy surgery. Poor Bette was in a tough spot.

Even during (and after) her intense physical therapy following her four strokes, Bette Davis just couldn't give up her most dangerous habit. The Hollywood star continued to smoke more than a pack a day until her passing. She preferred Vanguards and lit them up them constantly. Davis couldn’t even let them go for a 10-minute interview.

After suffering numerous health setbacks, Davis knew that her time on earth was coming to an end. When the time came, she faced the end with her trademark gusto. In 1989, Davis and her assistant were relaxing in Europe when Davis learned that her breast cancer was back with a vengeance. According to doctors, the legendary actress had mere days to live. Davis took the news in stride—but she had one final request.

Davis liked to be in control. She never pitched herself as a victim—and even her end wasn’t going to change that. As she lay on her deathbed, Davis told her assistant not to let her son come see her. In Davis’s words, she didn’t want “this bedraggled body” to be her child’s final memory of his once-indomitable mother. As usual, Davis got what she wanted. She passed, with only her assistant at her side, on October 6, 1989.

It looked like Davis’s days of making trouble were finally over—but the star had one last trick up her sleeve.

When Bette Davis’s will came out, it ruffled a lot of feathers. The star split her significant fortune between two people: her adopted son Michael and her long-time assistant. Unsurprisingly, she did not leave anything for her daughter B.D. Indeed, Davis used the will as a place to get in one last dig at her wayward child, writing that she “intentionally and with full knowledge” left B.D. out of the will. However, she also left another, far more surprising person out too...

Back when she was married to Gary Merrill, Davis adopted two children: her son Michael and a daughter named Margot. As you might have noticed, Margot did not receive anything in Davis’s will—and the story behind this is equal parts suspicious and upsetting. You see, Margot Davis did not have a charmed life. At three years old, she began to display some odd traits. When Davis and her husband took little Margot to the doctor, they received life-changing news.

It turned out that when Margot was born, she suffered a brain injury that permanently affected her development. No matter how old Margot became, she would never be a mature adult and she would never be able to live independently. Distressed, Davis placed Margot in an institution when she was still a toddler. During Margot’s younger years, Davis often visited her, but as time passed, Davis became tight-lipped about Margot. And then the mystery deepened.

When Davis’s will became public knowledge, people were quick to notice that Margot had been shunted to the side. While Davis did at least acknowledge that Margot existed, the only thing she said about her daughter was that she “intentionally” excluded her from the will. To this day, it’s difficult to figure out exactly what happened between them or who is providing for Margot now.

While Margot has never commented on the will, Davis’s other daughter B.D. seems happy to bring up her thorny relationship with her mother. The born-again Christian hosts an...interesting...YouTube channel where she discusses her faith and, no lie, claims that her mother was a literal witch. In recent years, B.D. has claimed that Davis placed a “demonic” curse on her and that Davis cast spells on her enemies. Make of that what you will...

Nowadays, Bette Davis is best remembered as a legendary actress who committed herself fully to her craft. Called “The Empress of Hollywood,” Davis was one of the first famous female character actors. She wasn’t afraid to play “ugly”—now a staple for a gorgeous leading lady who wants an Oscar—and she justifiably went down in cinema history as a true original.

When asked about her legacy, Davis focused on her celebrated career, saying she’d like to be remembered as a “good worker” who “did the best [she] could".

Bette Davis entombed herself in style. She is interred in a specialized crypt between her sibling Bobby and her mother Ruthie—but Davis's name is in the bigger typeface, of course. Her tomb also reads “She did it the hard way". Apparently, Davis had this epitaph in mind for almost 40 years, as early as when she was filming All Above Eve (1950), when the director suggested it. What better place to plan your gravestone than the watercooler?

However, Davis had some mixed feelings about her life. To the end, she knew she was a great actress (she once called herself “the female Marlon Brando”), but she also said that her famously unlikable characters cast a pall on her life and even threatened to overtake her real self. In Davis’s words, no matter where she went, she “had to take all those" roles with her.

To me, that’s a sign that Davis made a truly unique impact on film. As she herself once said, “I do not regret the dust I kicked up". Cheers to you, Bette Davis.

Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, , 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, , 25, , 27, 28

A friend didn't have coins for a vending machine, but she did have a dollar bill. She folded up the dollar bill and forced it into the coin slot, and then did not understand why she did not get her item.

Yeahiprobablydidit

I was going through security at the American border, and the border official stopped me, telling me that I needed to show a different form of ID. I asked why, because I had given them my (American) driver’s license. They insisted that I needed a US document like a green card or something. I was really confused, because I’m a US citizen, and my license is a US document.

Then I realized what had happened; they were confused about the name of my state, which is called the District of Columbia. I explained how the District of Columbia is, in fact, an American state. It is long for DC. Like Washington DC. As in, the capital of the United States.

agangofoldwomen

I'm fairly certain that people who have to work at front-of-house desks deal with so many stupid people that they start to lose their own sense of sanity. I once decided to go see my doctor about something and, as it happened, my bus home from work stopped right outside my doctor's office, so I decided to just walk in and see if I could make an appointment there and then.

The waiting room was empty, so I walked up to the woman at the desk, who asked if I had an appointment. I told her I didn't and would like to make one. She told me that I'd have to call the number, and pointed to it on the digital signboard. I asked if I could just make an appointment with her, and she again pointed out the number on the sign.

I asked whom I'd be talking to when I called that number, and she said that she would answer the phone. So I took my phone out of my pocket, looking her in the eye the whole time, and called the number. The phone on her desk started ringing. She actually said "Excuse me one second!" answered the phone, and then I had a conversation with her. On the phone. While standing right in front of her.

I asked for an appointment. She asked when I wanted it. I said that right now would be good. She said OK, took my details, and hung up. She then looked at me and said, "How can I help you?" I told her that I have an appointment and she told me to have a seat. I went and sat down while she typed some info into her computer, and then the digital sign board popped my name up, and she spoke into the her microphone to call my name, as I'm sitting there.  When I went up to the desk she said, "Hello, sir. How can I help you?"

BadgerSituation

A co-worker of mine bought a low-flow showerhead. A few days later, I asked him if he had noticed a difference while in the shower. He gave me a funny look, and then explained that he didn’t take showers. Apparently, he had filled his BATHTUB using the new low-flow showerhead because he thought it would use less water!

pdfrg

My wife's cousin and her husband fell on self-induced hard times and needed a place to stay for a bit. We set up a queen-sized air mattress in the living room for them. For three weeks, I woke up to go to work every morning and saw them sleeping on it sideways, with their legs hanging off the edge. One day, she asked me to buy her a bigger air mattress because the old one was hard on their backs.

I told her to turn her body the other way on the mattress - the thing even has a built-in pillow on one end, it’s pretty self-explanatory. Her response? “We can’t, because then we can't see the TV. It hadn’t even crossed her mind to turn the air mattress to face the TV!  The worst part is that that is only one of many stories I have about this lady.

Swervyswervy

My identical twin brother and I used to work as grocery baggers. One day, we were working at adjacent checkouts. A customer saw us, stared, and then asked if we were twins. I answered yes, and her follow-up question was mind-blowing. "Are you brothers?" We just looked at each other, slowly nodded, and then went back to bagging.

Arsenault185

I teach high school English. I was working with a small ninth-grade group and found out that all four of them thought Alaska was an island. They were not kidding. I grabbed a globe to show them that Alaska was not, in fact, an island. They were silent for a minute until one piped up with the dumbest follow-up question. He asked, "But how recent is that map?" I laughed really hard but discovered, again, that it was not a joke.

bmerrick266

Once at my old job, a co-worker came into the break room, and I offered him some chocolate that someone had dropped off for us. He thanked me, popped one in his mouth, chewed it for a bit, and then cheerfully asked me, "Oh do you know if there are nuts in this by the way? I'm allergic to them". I was like, “What?! I've literally never seen a bar of chocolate that doesn't contain the words "may have traces of nuts". Why are you eating this??” And he said, "Oh yeah, good point!" and spat it into the trash. He then happily wandered back out to the front like nothing had happened.

ErwinsSasageyo

A guy had bought some land that had a really old house on it and wanted to get rid of it; however, he eventually decided that it cost too much to have it torn down, so he asked the fire department if he could burn it down himself. They said no. A couple of weeks went by, and they got a call about a house on fire. Guess who? The guy had set the old house on fire anyway. He was promptly detained.

Mangobunny98

One time, I watched someone who had missed their exit on the highway stop on the shoulder, back up, turn around, and go up the entrance ramp. I could not believe my eyes. A couple of fun details about this incident really highlight its stupidity: the next exit was only a few miles up the road. Going there and then turning around might have delayed the person’s drive by 15 minutes, tops. There was also no traffic ahead.

snickerdoodle—

This was my first experience in retail where I learned what many customers would be like. Seasons were changing, so we put a lot of shirts that we had to get rid of in the front and made them 50% off. I was working the register when a woman came up to buy her things. I rang her up and could see from the look on her face like something was wrong. That’s when the following happened.

Lady: “Why is this so much?” Me: “Pardon me?” Lady: “This should only be $10 not $20". I thought that maybe her item was on sale, so I asked if she could point out the sign, because I wasn’t aware of it. It was a small store and we didn't have to walk anywhere. Lady: “This sign here". Me: “This sign says that all shirts are 50% off". Lady: “Yes, so why is this full price?” Me: “Ma’am, this is a hat".

AstaticDynamic

Back when the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster happened, we were discussing how the reactor had failed in a science class. Five minutes into the conversation a girl piped up and said, "I don't see what the big deal is. Why can't we just regrow it?" She seriously thought a nuclear power plant was literally a biological plant.

BroomStickLegend

There was a girl in my high school who forced the teacher to pause a documentary about people living in mud huts in Africa because she was upset that they were showing us “fictional” movies in a history class. It took everyone else in the room to convince her that people actually live like that in some places. That’s wealthy-area living for you.

A man's convenience store burned down. At first, it looked like a terrible accident. Then the investigators caught the owner in the biggest, dumbest mistake. He did it himself so that he could get a bunch of insurance money. They figured it out when they saw that the owner had conveniently stopped the milk and bread deliveries one day before the "accidental" fire. Buddy was not a mastermind.

parsons525

Someone I knew from school was pregnant, and she knew she was having identical twins. The day before the scan to find out if they were male or female, she posted on Facebook asking her friends to guess girls or boys. One friend of hers replied with, “One of each!” The mum-to-be replied, “They’re identical". The person actually responded again with, “It could still happen!” No honey. Just no.

hrbrox

A summer camp counselor made all the kids on a school bus keep the windows up on a hot day on an hour-long trip so that they could “feel the air conditioning" coming from the front of the bus. Thing is, she was completely wrong. Even though I was about 10 years old at the time, I tried to explain to the 40-year-old counselor that the "air conditioning" she was feeling was the wind coming in through the bus driver’s open window. She still didn't believe me.

I begged her to ask the bus driver to confirm that the bus did not have air conditioning, but she didn't want to bother him while he was driving. She finally got hot enough that she asked the bus driver if the bus had air conditioning. He jokingly replied, "The bus only has air conditioning when the windows are down and the wheels are turning". She then looked back at me and said, "See? I told you the bus had air conditioning!" and proceeded to force us to keep the windows up.

AUSpartan37

I once rescued a co-worker on the side of the road with a flat tire. While waiting for the tow truck, I pointed out the nail at the top of his tire, commenting that the problem was clear. He scoffed, looked at me like I was the stupidest person in the world, and exclaimed, “That’s not possible, because it’s only flat at the bottom!” I just walked away and never brought it up again.

AliCracker

A girl I knew was complaining about her car making a weird noise. She kept bringing it to the repair shop and they kept finding that nothing was wrong with it. So she sold her car and bought another one. She complained that the same weird noise was in the new car too. Then one day she was in the car with a friend of mine, who was driving.

He veered out of the lane just a little bit and hit the rumble strip along the edge of the highway. “That’s it! That’s the noise my car makes!” The girl said excitedly. “What, this?” He purposely drove onto the rumble strip. “Yes!” She said. She sold her car because the “weird noise” it was making couldn’t be fixed. Her nickname was rumble strip after that.

shhhhnotsoloud

When I was a kid, I had a real old transistor radio, which I used to listen to old music. One day, I asked my parents for a newer radio—so that I could receive and listen to newer music. Not my finest hour.

Mear

I was working at a grocery store in the US that had a Coinstar machine. Basically, you could place all of your unwrapped change in it, and it would be converted for a small fee into a receipt that you could claim for actual cash. I was walking past and noticed a woman struggling with the machine, so I stopped to help her. Big. Mistake.

It turned out she had accidentally hit “Spanish” as a language selection. I quickly explained what she needed to do, figuring she couldn’t read Spanish. I ran through how it worked and showed her where the receipt would print out that she could turn in at customer service for the cash. She turned, looked at me and said, “but I don’t want Spanish money!”

dwintaylor

I once had to explain to a girl that she couldn’t grow her hair down in front of her face like a curtain, and just cut out eyeholes. Even after explaining it, she couldn’t grasp it, and brushed me off as being "too smart".

Beef_Jumps

I once worked in a Midwestern US grocery store deli, and I was trying to explain to a woman that the name brand and generic brand of the macaroni salad that we carried were, in fact, identical. The woman yelled at me, saying she could only have the generic brand because, “One is made with mayo and the other is made with mayonnaise and I don’t like mayo". When I tried to explain that mayo is an abbreviation of mayonnaise, she just said, “I’m from the south, I know my food” and stormed away.

lauraligator

One day, a friend was making a sandwich in our college dorm. It had walnuts garnished on top of the bread. I then remember him telling me “Oh look there’s walnuts on here!” before he proceeded to eat the entire sandwich. At the time, I didn’t know he was allergic to nuts. I left to shower and when I came back, my jaw dropped: There were two paramedics in our dorm taking him out on a stretcher.

Luckily, he recovered. The following day, I asked what happened, to which he replied, “I accidentally ate some walnuts, which I’m allergic to, and by the time I went to get a Benadryl, my throat had started to close and I couldn’t swallow it, so I had to call an ambulance". I was just utterly shocked how he even let this entire situation happen. I really couldn’t believe it. He knew there were walnuts on the bread and still ate it?!

breathelikeatree

I have an identical twin sister. My sister and I worked in adjacent buildings connected by a skywalk. One day, I thought I saw her as I was walking across and cheerfully said hello—to a mirror—in front of a bunch of coworkers.

geneofinterest

A friend of mine from an African country told me that when they were in Europe, someone in an elevator asked him if they had elevators where he came from, as if my friend should be amazed to be riding in one. He told them no, jokingly, and when they asked if it was hard walking upstairs all the time, he said "No, we take a helicopter to the roof and walk down". They seemed impressed.

wtfiswrongwitupeople

My stepbrother was baffled that dogs were color blind because he could see his reflection in our dog’s eye when he looked very closely, and it was in color. It was not a black and white reflection, he reasoned, so how could the dog be color blind? I tried explaining it to him and I don’t think he really got it.

BluePen07

I’m an identical twin, and I have been asked all manner of utterly ridiculous questions about it throughout my life. I think my favorite was when a girl once asked me, “Do you ever get yourselves mixed up with each other?” I responded, “Are you asking me if I ever sometimes think I’m my brother?” She replied, “Yeah,” as if it was a valid question. No. I don’t.

Rottenox

While driving from one big city to another, I stopped in a small town to eat at a fast-food chain in Texas. I ordered my food, got my orange number, and sat down to wait for my order. The lady who was bringing out orders had this "I give up" demeanor as she was calling out numbers that guests weren't claiming.

Each time this happened, she spoke to a couple of tables to seemingly figure out who the food was for. Then I heard her call for number 55 while holding a tray of food for one person. I was number 54, and noticed I was the only single-party guest there. We made eye contact and she headed towards me, looking grumpy.

She confirmed my order with me and said, "Sorry, for some reason the computer prints 1 number higher on our side". I immediately asked, "Well then why don't you just call out one number lower than what's printed?" She froze and I could see the gears turning in her head. I thanked her, and she went on her way.

SergioFromTX

My friend was trying to take a selfie with his phone in selfie mode, using the front camera. The lens was smudged, so we told him he should clean it. He then turned his phone over and began to clean the camera on the back. He turned it back over and tried to take a selfie again, and couldn’t understand why it was still smudged.

ThatsPreposterous6

My boss asked me to file the spam mail. This man was one of those people who think they are the smartest person in the room, and nobody is allowed to question him. So, I thought, spam folder, okay. Weird, but okay. I went through the emails and couldn’t find any spam mail that wasn’t already in the spam folder.

The afternoon arrived and he stomped over to my desk area, wanting to know why the spam wasn’t in the spam folder.  He then threw a Manila folder on my desk. The folder was hand-labeled “Spam". My jaw nearly hit the floor. He apparently printed spam mail out and filed it. Catching the skepticism on my face, he insisted that the IT guy told him that’s where spam goes, so he had got himself a folder and that was it.

theWildBore

I gave a multiple-choice quiz to my high school students this year. I went to grade the first question and saw that instead of choosing option A, B, C, or D, a student had written in his own option and circled it: "E) I don't know". He went on to do this for roughly two-thirds of the questions on the quiz. I appreciated the honesty, but guessing to have a chance at some points or at the very least just leaving it blank might've been a bit wiser. Oh well.

meatfrappe

During the pre-hotspots and widespread WiFi days, I had an Editor-in-Chief ask me for “access to the server” before she went on vacation. I set her up with VPN and FTP access for all the servers she used and called it a day. The next week, she called my boss screaming, because she was at “the cabin” in the middle of the woods and had no Internet.

Apparently, I was not only supposed to divine that “access to the server” meant a wireless Internet service, but also somehow empower her “new,” neon-orange iBook to access some mystical WiFi network made from sunshine and rainbows. My boss wanted me to apologize, but I told him that the only apology she’d get from me is that “I am deeply sorry I assumed you weren’t a moron".

Debaser626

I accidentally locked my purse with my keys and cell phone in my apartment. I went to the office to ask maintenance to let me in. The woman at the desk said she would call maintenance, and asked for a phone number they could reach me at. I said there wasn’t one, because my cell phone was locked in my apartment. She insisted she needed a number.

I said I could give her the number, but that I wouldn’t be able to answer if they called. She suggested I get my phone out of my apartment so that I could answer when they called. I rolled my eyes at her and said if I could get in my apartment to get my cell phone, I wouldn’t need maintenance to let me in. She never did understand me. But maintenance did show up ten minutes later.

Suzanne_Marie

In March 2020, a friend was freaked out to hear that there was a case an hour away from her. She thought she should get in her car and drive in the other direction to keep ahead of it. She genuinely thought the virus was approaching like a wave of zombies and was an hour from reaching her.

sweadle

When I was in university, I brought hummus to class one day. A girl who sat next to me was like, “Oh that looks good! What is that?” And I said it was hummus and she went, “Don’t you mean dip? Hummus is the capital of Saudi Arabia!” And then I just explained to her that hummus is a type of dip made from chickpeas. Then I offered her some. I thought it was just a brain blip. I was wrong. 

We were class friends for a little bit, but I had to stop studying with her because when we talked about Latin America and poverty in class, she informed me that to “cure” Latin America’s poverty, Peru should just get rid of Machu Picchu and replace it with a giant resort to attract tourists. She felt that Machu Picchu was too old and that no one cared about it anymore. I found new people to study with.

shadesOfcool

We were in seventh-grade science class and the teacher was telling us about the vacuum of space. A girl I knew raised her hand and asked, “If a spaceman talked into a rock and handed it to somebody, would they hear it?” The class was silent for a few seconds before our teacher explained that rocks are, in fact, not alien tape recorders.

SkrtSkrt42069

I was born in Toronto and then moved to the US. In middle school, people would ask me if I lived in an Igloo, or even if I had TV and electricity. Over time, I realized that too many people asked about it for me to chalk it up to isolated stupidity. I can only hope the internet has improved general knowledge of how other societies live, and of basic geography.

bellymus1

Back in my senior year of high school a bunch of friends were eating lunch together in the cafeteria. All of us had to explain to two things to a truly stupid girl: why time zones exist and why you can’t raise chickens without bones. First, she argued that China should just have to “deal with” keeping the same date and time as the US. We tried explaining the International Date Line and all of that, but to her, it was all preposterous and unnecessary.

The conversation somehow devolved into her suggesting that scientists should find a way to genetically engineer chickens to be raised to slaughter-age, as we already do, but without bones so that people don’t have to deal with them while cooking and eating. She now has a Master’s degree and teaches elementary school, so it’s likely she’s learned a thing or two since then. For the children’s sake, I sure hope so.

ProperLineweights

I work for Parks Canada in Yoho National Park. I have been asked this question not once, but twice in my career: “Where do you keep the animals at night?” To this day, I still find great joy imagining what they thought was going on each night as we “collected” every large animal in the Parks, including moose, grizzlies and mountain lions, just to name a few.

akednfamous

I spent seven years working for Transportation Security Administration in the US. I had a pretty sweet detail where I would assist passengers who did not have ID, or assist TSA agents if they had questions about the validity of the given ID. One day, I got a call on the radio asking for assistance in verifying an ID. I had no idea what I was in for.

I went over and asked what the issue was. The agent handed me a driver’s license and says he, “can’t accept this Canadian ID". Hearing this, I assumed it was expired or had the wrong name. I took a look and saw that it was an Alaskan driver’s license. I quickly approved the passenger and sent them on their way.

I then spent 10 minutes explaining that a) Canadian driver’s licenses are acceptable according to TSA regulations and b) Alaska has never been a Canadian territory. This co-worker has a Masters degree in mathematics and served 25 years in the US Air Force.

rosewill357

I worked at a deli for a summer job, and a woman came in and asked if we had any meat without spices or sauces. She then proceeded to tell us that "the doctor" had said that her dogs got sick because she kept feeding them pizza, and they couldn't handle the spices. I suggested that she stop feeding them pizza. She then said, "Oh but they love pizza so much, I feel bad for them. I'm probably still going to feed them pizza".

mythirdpersonality

Sitting in a 300-person lecture for a first-year University Astronomy class, I witnessed a girl raise her hand and ask, "Is the sun in our solar system?"

chameleon913

I work at a grocery store. I once had to explain to a woman that apples did not contain any gluten, meat, or dairy ingredients. How can one think apples contain dairy? She thought gluten was found in every major grain, and that apples were a grain because they "have seeds".

Dangers_Squid

A girl once told me that the London Eye was a giant statue of an eye in London, which was pointed towards England. When I pointed out that London is in England, she said that the city of London had been moved. Her perception of history was that since England and France had fought so many wars in the past, they had switched the names of their capitals. Then her reasoning somehow got even stupider. 

This was because, "English people don't want to invade London and French people don't want to invade Paris, duh". According to her, before the English gave up the name London to the French, they built a giant statue of an eyeball to look back at England from its new home in France, like the city missed its homeland.

Harroff

I had a concussion and was getting X-rays taken. They gave me a lead blanket to wrap around my twig and berries. Instead of wrapping it around my waist, I took it and wrapped it around me like a cape. I could not for the life of me understand what they wanted me to do. I blame the concussion.

Yeahiprobablydidit

I was helping a colleague with his graduate thesis film. My job was to animate a solar eclipse, since we couldn't shoot one for real. I animated it using some real-life reference footage to make it look realistic. When I showed him, he asked why the moon was black and had no detail. I asked him if he had ever seen a solar eclipse. He replied, "Yes of course, but I want this one to look surreal since it's the moon in front of the sun, it's not like a normal solar eclipse".

At this point, it became clear something was amiss, and after asking a few more clarifying questions, it became clear he had no idea that the large object passing in front of the sun during a solar eclipse is, in fact, the moon. I confronted him about it and he apologized for "not being great with astrology".

My_New_Philosophy

I just learned that people in my workplace, a paper mill in Maine, are taking extra facemasks from the boxes that are provided by the company. However, they aren't wearing them or using them, or even taking them for their families; they're taking them and throwing them out, under the impression that if they get rid of them faster, then they won't have to wear them for as long.

That's right, while first responders and healthcare workers are in danger, sometimes because they can't get the appropriate supplies, these people are just taking face masks and throwing them out. It even got to the point where a few employees rushed the temperature-taking room, took as many whole boxes of masks as they could carry, and made a point of dumping them in the trash in front of the person taking temperatures that day.

Belasrose

My good friend is from Estonia, and he came to visit me in Germany. He was in a bar waiting for me, chatting with his girlfriend in Estonian. As the language is not really known, they attracted the attention of the neighboring table, and were asked about their origins. As you know, everybody is a little bit more relaxed after a few libations.

My friend was fluent enough in German to reply. By the time I made it to the pub, he had persuaded the table next to him that Estonia had no electricity, that he communicated with me through snail mail, and that they had borrowed their neighbor’s horses and ridden for over a month to come to visit me in Germany.

CaptainAdder

I demolished my right foot in a motorcycle crash and had to have the top of my foot removed. A guy I worked with asked me when it would grow back. I explained that the skin and stuff was going to have to be grafted, but that the tendons and bones that had been removed were gone forever. He looked me straight in the eye and asked, "Why don't they just cut the whole thing off and let it grow back?"

rugernut13

I got a bad grade in geography in high school. My teacher kept trying to push me to do better, and suggested I talk to my parents about it. I very reluctantly told my mom that I was failing geography. I’ll never forget her response: "How irresponsible can you really be Justin? How do you fail geography? It's just shapes!"

I_Am_Justin_Tyler

Sources: 1, 2

In 1925, Sellers was born into comedy. His parents, Bill and Agnes Sellers, performed in variety shows, and Peter made his stage “debut” at just two weeks old, when a family friend carried him on from backstage. But from the beginning, his childhood was no laughing matter. Case in point: Although his parents originally christened him “Richard Henry,” they switched it to “Peter”…after his stillborn older brother. Yes, that’s more than a little creepy—and it wouldn’t get better.

As a young boy, Peter showed inklings of the dysfunctional relationships that would eventually eat up his life. He and his mother had an extremely close bond, but it wasn’t necessarily a healthy one. While Agnes was domineering, Peter was cringing and shy, and their dynamic had a dark symbiosis to it. Despite this, his mother had no problem fobbing her young, only child off for weeks at a time while she and his father went touring.

Hmm, I wonder why every adult relationship Sellers ever had turned out to be a horror story.

By 1946, Sellers was 21 years old, had served in and survived WWII, and had decided to pursue a career in the theater. After some time spent scraping up revue shows and minor television parts, Sellers decided to make his mark in a very bold way. Even at this young age, he was clearly an excellent mimic, and he called up BBC producer Roy Speer and pretended to be star radio host Kenneth Horne to get the company’s attention.

Lucky for Sellers, it actually worked. Speers dubbed him a “cheeky young sod” and gave him an audition. It was a date with destiny.

Partly through his work with the BBC, Sellers met up-and-coming comics Harry Secombe and Spike Milligan, the two men who would help him start the legendary radio comedy The Goon Show—which one publication dubbed "probably the most influential comedy show of all time". Besides inspiring none other than the Monty Python performers, The Goon Show also launched Sellers and his friends into the beginnings of stardom. Unfortunately, this is also where the cracks came in.

Around this time, Sellers met the beautiful Australian actress Anne Howe. From there, things moved incredibly fast—some would say much too fast. He proposed just a year later, and by 1958, they were married and had two children together, Michael and Sarah. At this point, Sellers could have settled down into fatherhood and cruised into a happy life. Psst: He didn’t.

For one thing, Sellers wasn’t your average family man, and he could be downright cruel to his new wife. According to one story, the pair were in their apartment one afternoon, with Peter working in his study and Anne around the house, when there was a ring at the door. When Anne answered it, she found a telegram Sellers just sent from the other room ordering her to, "Bring me a cup of coffee. Peter". As we’ll see, though, this neglect was just the beginning.

Family life and radio fame wasn’t enough for Sellers, and in the 1950s he began to pursue a film career in earnest, starring in titles like The Ladykillers with one of his idols, Alec Guinness. Yet behind the scenes, things were already crumbling. Despite a steady stream of work, Sellers hadn’t quite cracked superstardom, and his personal shyness began to turn into crippling insecurity that he would never make it in Hollywood. Soon enough, this insecurity became something much more sinister than that.

Unable to confront the idea of failing as a film star, Sellers turned to mysticism to comfort himself. While this isn’t anything new in Hollywood, Sellers’ brand of spiritualism certainly was. He not only met with astrologer Maurice Woodruff, who would eventually control many of his career decisions, the comedian also came to believe that the old, obscure music performer Dan Leno was personally haunting him. Yeah, something wasn’t quite right, but no one knew it yet.

Eventually, Sellers worked hard enough to get noticed, and around 1960 director Anthony Asquith asked the comic if he wanted to star as Indian doctor Ahmed el Kabir in his romantic comedy The Millionairess. Initially, Sellers turned the part down, likely feeling that the work wasn’t substantial enough for his considerable talents (not, you know, because of the problematic portrayal). But then he made a discovery that completely changed his mind.

Sellers finally agreed to play the good doctor for one reason and one reason only: Because he found out that his co-star would be none other than Italian bombshell Sophia Loren. He wasn’t shy about his motives, either; he excitedly told the press, "I don't normally act with romantic, glamorous women...She's a lot different from Harry Secombe". Surprising almost no one, this was a recipe for utter disaster.

Although still very much married to Anne Howe and with two young children at home, Sellers had no problem striking up a very “close” relationship with Loren on set. How close? Well, that remains a mystery—while some of Sellers’s nearest and dearest believe they had a full-blown affair, others believe it was just a “strong friendship". Yet according to Sellers’s own confessions, it was anything but innocent…

Whether or not Sellers actually sealed the deal with Sophia, he made an incredibly mortifying revelation to his wife. One day after working on set with Loren in close quarters, Sellers confronted Anne and told her point-blank that he was in love with Loren and there was nothing she could do about it. At first, the conversation didn’t go far past the admission. Then Sellers upped the stakes again.

Without much in the way of role models when he was a child, Sellers was never a very good father or husband, and his obsession with Loren made him an even worse one. One evening during this time, he woke up his young son Michael in the middle of the night for the sole purpose of asking him a bone-chilling question: “Do you think I should divorce your mummy?” And he didn’t stop there.

By 1962, Sellers was full-on pestering his own children about his marital status. He asked both Michael and his sister Sarah "who we love more, our mother or him". Although Sarah demurred that she loved them both the same, Michael defiantly said, “No, I love my mum". Sellers’ response was brutal. He kicked both children out of his presence and declared he never wanted to see them again.

Wouldn’t you know it, Anne Howe and Sellers divorced later that year. Ironically, though, just as Sellers hit a low in his personal life, his career skyrocketed.

The very same year his marriage broke down, director Blake Edwards offered Sellers his star-making part as the bumbling Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther. Like so much in Sellers’s life, this too was a strange windfall. Edwards only approached him after actor Peter Ustinov backed out of the part, and more than that, Clouseau wasn’t even the main character and took a backseat to David Niven’s lead role in the film. But Sellers wanted to upstage everyone.

In many ways, Sellers created Inspector Clouseau as we know him. Although the script already had the bare bones of the role, Sellers invented everything else. Clouseau’s confidently foolish personality, his costume of a trench coat, and everything from his accent to his makeup and his thin mustache came from Sellers. The actor’s immense involvement in the character—particularly after The Pink Panther became a smash hit—earned Sellers comparisons to greats like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.

In short, Sellers’s life was back on a high note…so of course he had to go mess it up again.

While Sellers made audiences laugh all around the world on celluloid, the real man was an absolute nightmare on set. Even before The Pink Panther, rumors abounded of Sellers’s difficult behavior on location, from showing up late to bungling his lines, especially when he didn’t particularly like the part he was playing. At one point when reuniting with Blake Edwards to film A Shot in the Dark, the actor and director were at such odds that they would only communicate through notes.

As time wore on, Seller’s diva temperament turned downright alarming.

At the height of his fame, everybody knew that Sellers had a strange and violent aversion to two extremely innocuous things: the colors green and purple. He claimed green gave him “strange vibrations,” and not only refused to wear the hue, he also refused to act opposite of anyone who did. As for purple? Well, somehow, his reaction to that color was even more disturbing.

Allegedly, Sellers picked up his distaste for purple from his former director Vittorio De Sica, who once called it “the color of death". That was all it took for Sellers. His fear of the color was so strong that his publicists would have to desperately pre-screen his hotel rooms for any trace of the shade, lest they suffer a violent outburst. In short, Sellers was clearly mentally unwell—but his downward personal spiral was just getting started.

In 1964, Sellers got another brief lucky break. He starred in the instant classic Dr. Strangelove under famous auteur Stanley Kubrick, one of the only directors he never clashed with. More than that, the film showcased Sellers in no fewer than three parts—as President Merkin Muffley, Dr. Strangelove himself, and Group Captain Lionel Mandrake—that were chock full of comedic gold.

For a man like Sellers who lived for his characters, it was a dream come true. And then in walked his Helen of Troy.

In 1964, high off his successes, the middle-aged Sellers met the painfully young Swedish actress Britt Ekland, who was just 21 years old and in the bloom of her beauty. Their love story was wrong right from the start. Far from loving her for her mind or talents, Sellers had caught sight of Ekland’s photo in a newspaper. After he realized they were staying in the same hotel, he “thought that I would like to meet what I saw". As always, things moved at a rapid pace from there.

Soon after arranging to meet Ekland, Sellers took her out on a date. Two days after that, he called the actress up and said, “I have told the press that we’re going to get married". Unfortunately, Sellers kept his word; that February, the couple married just 10 days after first meeting each other. But if Sellers hoped that the second time was going to be the charm, he couldn’t have been more wrong.

As quickly as Sellers got together with Ekland, it all turned sour. The exact thing that attracted Sellers to the actress—her obvious beauty—also made him incredibly jealous and certain that she would cheat on him with any or all of her equally attractive co-stars. Whenever this paranoia took him over, he would then react by trying to control Ekland. These antics started out relatively small, but soon grew to untenable proportions…

The first sign of Sellers’s need to control his new bride manifested in him choosing what she would wear, from top to toe. Starting just after their honeymoon, photographers snapped Ekland in a fur coat that Sellers had picked out. As she admitted, “He decided what I was going to wear. He just pre-decided everything without ever asking me". But the worst was yet to come.

While the new couple were still in the throes of passion, Ekland nabbed a part in 1964’s Guns at Batasi. Yet Sellers, unable to stand her being away from him on location, phoned her up one day and demanded she take a day off. When the production said no, Sellers had someone drive her to the airport anyway and fly her to California, where he was, to spend the weekend with him. That’s when it went from controlling to chilling.

When Ekland landed in California, she only had the clothes on her back—but of course, Sellers had taken care of that, too. He brought her back to a luxurious mansion, where he’d kitted up an entire walk-in closet full of items for his bride. As Ekland remembered, “He’d bought everything you could possibly need as a woman who didn’t have any clothes, from evening gowns to bikinis. The bikini was actually of mink…I was floored". And this was just phase one.

Almost as soon as Ekland’s plane got in, Sellers had one of his personal doctors look at her. Within seconds, the paid medic claimed the hale 21-year-old was too “sick” to return back to filming Guns at Batasi, and needed to spend an indefinite amount of time recovering…alongside Sellers, naturally. Feeling she had no choice in the matter, Ekland complied. The consequences were bitter.

Producers unceremoniously fired the starlet from the film, making her ever more dependent on Sellers. Not that the comedian was satisfied…

In truth, Sellers’s insecurities over Ekland’s youth and beauty only grew as the weeks went on, and they drove him to distraction in his own professional life. At the same time that Ekland’s firing fiasco happened, Sellers’s was filming Kiss Me, Stupid with director Billy Wilder and co-stars Dean Martin and Kim Novak. To say his set experience took a nosedive during this time is a huge understatement.

Sellers had a rough reputation when it came to directors, but his clashes with Wilder hit a new low. Obviously upset about his issues with Ekland, Sellers also started picking fights with Wilder on set over their differing artistic visions for the film. In short, the comedian’s personal and professional lives were ramping up in tension, and it was all about to reach a breaking point. A really bad one.

Since his wedding to his young, nubile bride, Sellers had become obsessed with reaching what he called “the ultimate” climax in the bedroom. One night, he went to infamous lengths to get what he wanted. In April 1965, just before he got frisky with Ekland, Sellers inhaled amyl nitrite “poppers” to boost his performance in the boudoir. Instead of helping, it caused a terrifying incident.

As a result of the intense stimulants, Sellers pushed his body to the brink and quickly went into cardiac arrest right in front of Ekland, and right in the middle of the act. In fact, over the next three breathless hours, the comic had a whopping eight heart attacks. Although he somehow managed to survive the ordeal, he certainly didn’t escape it unscathed.

As it happens, having eight heart attacks in three hours is extremely bad for your health, and Sellers was forced to drop out of Billy Wilder’s Kiss Me, Stupid to focus on his recovery. In response, Wilder had zero sympathy for his difficult former lead; when the auteur heard the reason why Sellers called it quits, he sniped, "You have to have a heart before you can have an attack".

Sellers eventually returned to work, and in 1967 he was starring in Casino Royale, a James Bond parody featuring a slew of Hollywood heavyweights like Orson Welles and Ursula Andress. In the film, Sellers played the straight man Evelyn Tremble, a baccarat master set to face off against Welles’s villain Le Chiffre. Yet with so many things Sellers, the comedian had to start some unforgettable drama.

With multiple writers and an ensemble cast, the set of Casino Royale was a notoriously messy affair, and Sellers didn’t make it any better. Reportedly, he was annoyed that the film had turned into a comedy, and wanted to be in a serious Bond film instead. According to biographer Roger Lewis, Sellers kept re-writing the script to try to make his character more heroic and less parodic. Only, there was a far bigger threat on set.

In the midst of his desire to be a serious Bond actor, Sellers couldn’t help but compare himself to his co-star Orson Welles. After all, Welles had already written, directed, and acted in some of the most famous and lauded films in history, Citizen Kane among them. Welles intimidated Sellers immediately—and even worse, Sellers had good reason for this reaction. According to insiders, Welles scorned Sellers, calling him “that amateur". And their feud was just ramping up.

With tensions simmering, the straw that broke the camel’s back between Sellers and Welles was a doozy. One day, Sellers’s old friend Princess Margaret came to visit the set…only to deal him a painful snub. Rather than greeting Sellers the instant she saw him, the royal went up to his rival Welles first, exclaiming, “Orson, it’s been so long!” The damage was now complete, and soon both actors refused to be in the same shot together. Still, trust Peter Sellers to leave one brutal parting gift.

Sellers aimed most of his dissatisfaction about Casino Royale toward Joseph McGrath, one of the film’s six directors. It was McGrath who first heard of Sellers’s intention never to be in the same frame as Welles—and when he said that simply wasn’t possible, Sellers exploded. The actor physically attacked McGrath before stalking off and refusing to work with him anymore.

Sellers eventually left the film, leaving writers scrambling to partially replace him and work around his existing footage. The loser in all of this, however, was Britt Ekland, since Sellers now had time to focus on destroying their marriage even more…

Just after he stormed off Casino Royale, the government honored Sellers by making him a Commander of the British Empire….only his investiture ceremony was a complete farce. The night before, Sellers and Ekland got into a rip-roaring fight and she visibly scratched his face. To cover it up, Sellers had to hire a makeup artist before he walked into Buckingham Palace.

God knows why, but after this Ekland and Sellers still agreed to star in a film together, the upcoming comedy The Bobo. Yeah, about that…

If Casino Royale was chaotic to film, The Bobo was an utter monstrosity. Ekland and Sellers—surprise!—fought constantly while on set, but nothing compared to Sellers’s outburst one afternoon. He went to director Robert Parrish and commanded him to fire his wife, saying, “I'm not coming back after lunch if that [w]itch is on the set". Things were so bad that even Ekland admitted that the union was now “an atrocious sham". It’s no wonder, then, that the pair of them went down in flames.

While The Bobo was still filming, Sellers’ mother had a heart attack and went into the hospital. Sellers, however, was too wrapped up in his own personal drama to visit her, and she passed just days later. Her lonely end devastated the comedian, and he never quite got over his mistake at not saying goodbye. His wife Ekland, however, had no more emotions left to give—so instead, she settled on vengeance.

Abandoning any hope of cordial relations, Ekland served Sellers with divorce papers almost immediately after his mother’s passing. Sure, it was kicking Sellers when he was down…but even his friends had to agree it was the right thing to do. Sellers’s old The Goon Show pal Spike Milligan even sent Ekland a congratulatory telegram when he heard the news. Ouch.

But if people thought Sellers had finally hit rock bottom, they soon found out how wrong they were.

The next years of Sellers’ life showcased a series of bad career decisions—he had a string of flops—and even worse romantic choices. In 1970, with his mid-life crisis still going strong, the 47-year-old Sellers tied the knot with 23-year-old model Miranda Quarry, despite admitting he didn’t think he should remarry. As his next mistake would prove, he was very right.

In 1973, with his third marriage predictably failing, Sellers fell into a chaotic affair with Liza Minnelli after watching her perform. The pair were so mad about each other, they got engaged within three days of striking up a romance…despite the fact that not only was Sellers taken, Minnelli was already engaged to Desi Arnaz Jr. Then, within a month, their flame burned out as fast as it had ignited, though Sellers still got divorced anyway.

It was at this point that friends really began to worry about Sellers—and he gave them plenty of reason.

Around this time, confidants started to suggest that Sellers was in the middle of a nervous breakdown. One talk show appearance gave an even darker suggestion. When TV host Michael Parkinson invited Sellers on his show, the comedian felt insecure about going on without any character to hide behind and insisted, “I can’t just walk on as myself".

Accordingly, he dressed up as a Gestapo officer before sitting down to the interview. Soon, this tendency grew disturbingly pronounced.

In 1978, Sellers made a guest appearance on The Muppet Show, but again declined to appear as “himself". Instead, he made several costume changes and tried on a variety of accents. Then, when Kermit assured the comedian he could just be himself, Sellers replied, “I could never be myself...You see, there is no me. I do not exist...There used to be a me, but I had it surgically removed". Um, creepy.

In the mid-1970s, Sellers tried to revive his slipping career. He starred in several more Pink Panther movies and earned accolades, renewed relevancy, and a buttload of money in the process. But behind the scenes, the situation was more alarming than ever. His on-set tantrums were only growing, and his Pink Panther director Blake Edwards confessed that, "If you went to an asylum and you described the first inmate you saw, that's what Peter had become. He was certifiable". One particular episode made this all too clear.

While on the set of one of the Pink Panther films, Sellers found it difficult to slip back into character, and had a particular issue with how to play a certain scene. When Sellers and Edwards called it quits for the day, Sellers’s mind still couldn’t stop whirring. He later called up Edwards in the middle of the night and proclaimed, “I just talked to God! And he told me how to do the scene". Well, that didn’t go down very well.

The next day on set, Sellers showed up and tried out the fruits of his divine inspiration…only to find out they were rotten. His new approach was so bad, Edwards reportedly quipped, “The next time you talk to God, tell him to stay out of show business!” For all the director’s joking, however, it was becoming painfully obvious that Sellers needed a break. In one happier version of history, he took one. In this version…he had one last, ruinous romance.

As Sellers got older, his women stayed the same age. In 1977, he married the 23-year-old actress Lynne Frederick in a ceremony practically no one wanted to happen. In short order, they had fallen into the same old cycle of passion, control, and outbursts. The only difference? Frederick’s biddable personality was even less equipped to deal with Sellers than any of his other wives; one friend compared it to a boxing match between “a heavyweight and a featherweight".

In 1979, Sellers got one last chance at a “serious” career when he starred in the extremely well-received black comedy Being There as the simple-minded gardener Chance. Sellers poured his heart and soul into the role, going method and staying well away from co-stars and journalists while filming. It paid off, and the part earned him an Academy Award nomination. Yet as always, Sellers had to go and destroy his own happiness.

Soon after Being There came out and charmed critics, Sellers asked his 15-year-old daughter Victoria her own opinion of the film. She answered that she loved it, and added likely jokingly that, “You looked like a little fat old man". At this, something in Sellers snapped. Recalling his tantrums with his other children Michael and Sarah, he threw his drink on Victoria and demanded she “get the next plane home". Then he doubled right down.

When Sellers’ eldest daughter Sarah got wind of this fight, she told her father she disapproved of his actions. In retaliation, Sellers sent her one of the cruelest telegrams known to man. It read: "After what happened this morning with Victoria, I shall be happy if I never hear from you again. I won't tell you what I think of you. It must be obvious. Goodbye, Your Father". In a sad twist, this would be one of the last things he ever communicated to his daughter.

For years, friends had been trying to get Sellers to seek medical help, particularly for his physical ailments with his heart. However, despite several other heart attacks, Sellers always refused to admit anything was gravely wrong. At one point, he even collapsed on set in Dublin and then went to Cannes just two days later. In the summer of 1980, it caught up to him in the most tragic manner possible.

On July 22, Sellers had plans to meet with his The Goon Show buddies Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe for dinner in London; he had been away and a reunion was long overdue. He would never make it. That afternoon, Sellers sat down to lunch in his hotel and collapsed from yet another heart attack soon after. This time, he wasn’t so lucky: He passed in the hospital just a couple of days later at the age of 54.

Yet like all good comedians, Sellers had a few more surprises in store for both his friends and his enemies.

When Sellers’s Goon Show friends heard he was never going to reschedule those dinner plans, they were heartbroken. However, they also reacted with characteristic black humor. Harry Secombe joked that, after all, Sellers would do “anything to avoid paying for dinner". But at his own funeral, Sellers got Secombe back for the wisecrack.

Sellers simply couldn’t resist playing one final practical joke as mourners buried him on July 26, 1980. During the private service, Sellers had insisted that they play the song “In the Mood” by Glen Miller, specifically because he knew that all the Goons despised the schmaltzy tune—he wanted to prank them by forcing them to sit and listen to it in respectful silence. Still, not all of Sellers’s last testaments were so cheery…

Just before he died, Sellers was hiding an enormous secret. As he always did, he was growing tired of his marriage to Lynne Frederick, and there is some evidence that even in the weeks leading up to his death, Sellers was trying to cut Frederick entirely out of his will. To his children’s dismay, he didn’t complete the paperwork, and Frederick got the vast majority of the estate anyway.

Before passing, Sellers was working on another Pink Panther film, Romance of the Pink Panther. Once he died, the studio was eager to capitalize on the tragedy and replace the legendary comic with his rough contemporary Dudley Moore. Wisely, Moore turned the opportunity down, and director Blake Edwards equally refused to recast the part, believing no one could replace Sellers.

Sellers was a man of many talents and many voices, but he had one skill few fans know about. He was an extremely talented drummer, and in his youth, Sellers toured England as a drummer with the Entertainments National Service Association. His friend Spike Milligan noted that Sellers was so good on drums, he might have been a jazz drummer if comedy didn’t work out.

Sellers obviously suffered from mental health issues throughout his life, but as his demons got worse, he remained staunchly opposed to seeking any professional help. Besides causing him a world of trouble, it also makes his ailments difficult to diagnose—but his ex-wife Britt Ekland had one idea. Ekland believed that Sellers suffered from bipolar personality disorder.

Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Leigh's birthday is suitably explosive. Little "Vivian Mary Hartley" entered the world on Guy Fawkes' day of 1913. Although she'd be known as the ultimate Southern Belle, Leigh was actually born in Darjeeling, India to a Scottish father and an Irish mother. However, some sources say that Leigh's mother may have also been Armenian or Indian. To succeed in Hollywood, Leigh would keep that part of her heritage secret.

When Leigh was six years old, her parents shipped her off to an English boarding school where she didn't see her own mother for two long years. Since Leigh couldn't confide in her parents, she revealed her dreams to her school friends. She said she'd be “a great actress someday". Leigh was right, but she didn't realize the awful toll that Hollywood would take on her.

In the 1930s, Leigh fell head over heels for Herbert Leigh Holman, a lawyer who was a whopping 13 years older than her. Even though Leigh had been studying acting at the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, she dropped out to be with Holman. The mismatched couple got married on December 20, 1932, and unfortunately, their honeymoon phase wouldn't last long.

Even though their significant age difference would soon tear them apart, Leigh and Holman had a few happy years together. After all, Leigh gave birth to her daughter Suzanne a mere 10 months after she and Holman walked down the aisle. While Leigh was delighted to have a baby, looking back, there was a dicey detail about Suzanne's birth. When Leigh became a mother, she was only 19 years old.

According to Hollywood lore, Leigh was incredibly ambitious and would stop at nothing to book a role. For instance, when she heard that she got a part as an uncredited extra in the movie Things Are Looking Up, she moved heaven and earth to be in the film. When she got the offer, Leigh was on a romantic cruise with her husband. She immediately left the ship for the role...which came with one single line.

As Leigh started to act, her agent told her that "Vivian Holman" simply wouldn't do. After rejecting several cringe-worthy suggestions from her agent, including "April Morn," Leigh took her new last name from her husband’s middle name. She also changed "Vivian" to the much more sultry "Vivien". With her new name, Leigh was ready to claw her way to the top of Hollywood, no matter what it cost her.

In 1935 Leigh finally got her big break. At 22 years old, she booked the role of the risque Henriette in the scandalous play The Mask of Virtue. Her performance received standing ovations and widespread critical acclaim, launching Leigh's whirlwind ascent to Hollywood's top tier. Her star was officially on the rise...right as her personal life got very messy.

When Leigh was in The Mask of Virtue, she attended a play starring England's most exciting new actor: Laurence Olivier. Little did she know, that trip to the theater would change her entire life. As Leigh gazed at Olivier, she told a friend “That’s the man I’m going to marry"...helpfully ignoring the fact that A) Leigh was already married to Holman and B) Olivier was already married to Jill Esmond.

Vivien Leigh was one gutsy lady. After Laurence Oliver bowed to the adoring crowd, Vivien paid him a sneaky visit in his dressing room. After introducing herself and chatting with the up-and-coming thespian, Leigh coyly kissed Olivier on the neck as she sauntered out of the room. Obviously, he was immediately smitten.

After her star turn in The Mask of Virtue, Leigh immediately signed a huge contract with a producer and made a big-budget movie called Fire Over England. The movie was a major coup for Leigh's career, but the real appeal wasn't the script. It was the co-star: None other than Laurence Olivier. It didn't take long for the actors to strike up a passionate affair.

Olivier and Leigh started out as co-workers, then became friends, then turned into lovers. On paper, they shouldn't have been together—both were married with young children—but the heart wants what it wants. Olivier left his wife and toddler son less than a year after he met Vivien Leigh. Because neither of their spouses would give them a divorce, the new couple had to keep their relationship a secret.

The passion between Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh burned hot both on screen and off. In surviving love letters between the two stars, Olivier reveals their fiery relationship, calling Leigh "very naughty" and writing that he woke up "absolutely raging with desire for you my love". In an especially kinky passage, he even reveals that he wore Leigh's undergarments. But the fun times would end soon.

In 1937, Vivien Leigh had the world at her feet. With her career on the upswing and a handsome actor by her side, she seemed unstoppable—until mental illness reared its ugly head. When Leigh played Ophelia on stage in Hamlet, she had a brutal bipolar episode. As Laurence Olivier stepped into her dressing room, Leigh suddenly started screaming at him. The incident rattled Olivier, with him later describing how it was like a switch flipped. Leigh started shouting at him, then immediately stopped as though nothing had happened. Sadly, her illness would only get worse.

When Leigh decided to make her mark in Hollywood, she refused to be shortchanged. Olivier had landed the lead role of Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, so Leigh set her sights on playing his love interest Cathy. The director, however, wanted Merle Oberon. He refused to give Leigh the role and gently offered her a supporting part instead. Leigh angrily replied, "I'll play Cathy or I’ll play nothing". It was a gutsy move, and it paid off.

In 1937, Leigh broke her ankle and recovered in bed, passing the time by reading Margaret Mitchell's epic romance Gone With the Wind. When she found out David O. Selznick planned to make a movie of the novel, Leigh told her agent to make sure she got an audition. “I’ve cast myself as Scarlett O’Hara,” she told a journalist—and Leigh would do anything to make her wish come true.

Selznick knew that Leigh was an incredible actress, but found her “too British” to play Scarlett. After a soft let-down, he figured he'd never hear from Leigh again. Oh, how wrong he was. Leigh pursued the role with, as Olivier said, "demonic determination". She moved to L.A., half because her main squeeze Olivier was there, but also because she was determined to convince Selznick he was wrong.

Luckily for Leigh, Selznick’s older brother Myron was Olivier’s agent. He took Leigh to meet his little brother David and apparently told him, “Hey, genius, meet your Scarlett O'Hara". Myron just knew that Leigh would be perfect for the part. After that, Leigh impressed the director with an "incredibly wild" screen test. With that, Leigh finally won the role.

When Leigh got the part of Scarlett, she beat out established movie stars like Tallulah Bankhead, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Greta Garbo, and Katharine Hepburn. And that’s not to mention the over 1,400 other women who had auditioned at national casting calls! Leigh was thrilled, but her experiences on set would change her rosy outlook.

The shoot for Gone With The Wind was a complete nightmare. Production dragged on for months on end, with Leigh regularly working gruelling 16-hour days. She became so stressed that she would smoke four packs in a single day. When she was at her wit's end, Leigh even overdosed on sleeping pills. And it gets worse.

Over the course of filming Gone With The Wind, the studio had to hire not one, not two, but three separate directors to helm the cursed project. The second director, Howard Fleming, was so miserable that he thought about driving his car off a cliff. Unsurprisingly, the cast was miserable too. Both Leigh and Gable were sure that the movie was going to be a huge flop. And then David O. Selznick came around and served up yet another humiliation to poor Vivien Leigh.

David O. Selznick thought that Leigh was the perfect girl to play Scarlett. There was just one, well I guess technically two, problems: Her chest. Selznick demanded that Vivien pad her chest to make her assets look larger. In the end, Leigh had to tape them together to achieve Selznick's desired look.

Throughout all the humiliating demands and long days, Leigh also had to contend with this slap in the face. She worked almost twice as long as her co-star Clark Gable...and made about a fifth of his paycheck. Ouch.

After the brutal production of Gone With The Wind, Leigh must have been relieved that all her blood, sweat, and tears paid off. Not only is the movie the highest grossing flick of all time, it also led Leigh to Hollywood's greatest achievement. At just 26 years old, she took home the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role as Scarlett O’Hara. Sadly, her joyous night would take a chilling turn.

Winning an Oscar is a huge deal for an actor, so it makes sense that Olivier would be a little jealous of Leigh's achievement. However, according to Olivier's son Tarquin, his dad was more than ticked. Apparently, on the couple's way home, Olivier grabbed Leigh's Oscar and could barely keep himself from whacking her with it. In his words, "I was insane with jealousy".

Despite the scary ride home, 1940 was a happy year for Leigh and Olivier. That was the year that Olivier’s wife and Leigh's husband finally agreed to divorce their respective spouses. By August of that same year, Leigh and Olivier were an official couple at last. They had a secretive wedding, with Katharine Hepburn acting as the matron of honor. Tragically, their walk down the aisle came at a heartbreakingly high cost.

Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier made a huge sacrifice to be together. As part of their divorce agreements, they both had to give up primary custody of their children.

Olivier and Leigh's first joint venture was a complete bust. The couple invested over $10,000 into a stage play where Olivier would be Romeo and Leigh would perform as Juliet. Unfortunately for them, the production was a total failure and they lost a tremendous amount of money. After that, their once-unbreakable bond began to show signs of strain—and it didn't help that Leigh was undergoing another brutal bout with her bipolar disorder.

In the 1940s, Vivien Leigh's bipolar disorder plunged her into a world of terror. As her agent said, she'd become furious and her voice would turn “hard, rasping, contemptuous". But her eyes were the worst: They would transform into the cold "eyes of a stranger". After fits like this, Leigh would black out. She’d have no recollection of yelling and would feel incredibly afraid, embarrassed, and sorry.

Leigh really didn't need any more suffering, but life had other plans for her. In 1943, while volunteering for allied troops in North Africa, Leigh fell ill. It wasn’t until 1944 that she was finally diagnosed with brutal case of tuberculosis. She spent some time in the hospital and doctors thought that she’d recovered. They released her but years later, they'd realize that they had made a fatal mistake.

After clawing her way back from the brink of death, Leigh planned to revive her film career in 1944, only to star in flop after flop. Leigh couldn't get a role she desperately wanted in her husband's movie Rebecca, then she unwisely turned down the lead in Pride and Prejudice. She was utterly distraught, and things would only get worse.

On the set of one of Leigh's unsuccessful flicks, she encountered something far worse than commercial failure. When she shot Caesar & Cleopatra in 1945, one scene called for Leigh to run across a freshly polished floor. She did so, only to suffer a brutal fall...while pregnant. The accident caused Leigh to miscarry, which in turn led her to fall into an extreme depression. Leigh would regularly cry on the floor in grief. Film historians now believe this to be the first irreparable crack in her psyche.

It's important to remember that Leigh's life wasn't defined by mental illness. She was also an incredible woman. She could speak at least three languages, adored Siamese cats, and even had a photographic memory. It's said that Leigh could memorize all her lines after reading a play once. If she was having a bad day, she'd have to read the script twice. She's a legend for a reason!

Leigh's bipolar disorder made itself known in more ways than screaming and wailing. It also made Leigh's libido skyrocket, leading the actress to have intense, uncontrollable intimate urges. The actress would regularly cheat on her husband by sleeping with strangers, taxi drivers, and delivery men in an effort to satisfy her desires.

By 1948, Leigh and Olivier's marriage was in shambles. At a show in New Zealand, they aired their dirty laundry for all to see. Leigh freaked out over losing her footwear and wouldn’t go on stage. In return, Olivier yelled at his wife and angrily hit her. Leigh then hit Olivier right back. Stunningly, all this happened in front of the entire company. Looking back, Olivier said this was a sign that their marriage wouldn't last.

While Leigh and Olivier were touring in Australia, Olivier happened to discover a hot new talent: the young actor Peter Finch. Excited, Olivier immediately hired Finch to join him on stage. How did Finch repay Olivier for his big break? Flowers, or a night on the town, perhaps? Not so much. Instead Finch promptly slept with his wife, Vivien Leigh.

Here's an especially sad detail about Leigh's affair with Finch. By the time 1948 rolled around, it's said that Olivier was so exhausted by Leigh's endless mood swings and insatiable bedroom drive that he was "relieved" that she found someone else.

From Leigh's perspective, 1948 was a gruelling year. Her marriage was falling apart, her bipolar disorder was acting up, and she was struggling with other health issues as well. The actress suffered from extreme insomnia and would sometimes struggle with basic impulse control. Around this time, Leigh's unhappiness and stress would manifest in a chilling way. The prim British actress would rant, rave, and swear uncontrollably.

The stereotype of the tormented artist doesn't come out of nowhere. At the same time as Leigh's personal demons were making her miserable, she was also playing the role that would solidify her place in Hollywood history. As a trained stage actress, Leigh jumped at the chance to act in Tennessee Williams' new tragedy A Streetcar Named Desire. Her performance as Blanche Dubois earned rave reviews, but the role took a horrible toll on Leigh's mind.

Few characters are as tragic as desperate, doomed Blanche DuBois. After inhabiting Blanche's fractured psyche for over 300 performances, Leigh admitted that “playing her tipped me into madness".

When Hollywood decided to adapt the play for the screen, Leigh once again had to fight for her seat at the table. Even though the director didn't think she'd be right for the part, Leigh convinced him, as well as audiences around the world. She picked up her second Academy Award for her performance in A Streetcar Named Desire. But as with her last Oscar, Leigh would go from victory to complete despair in a painfully short time.

Vivien Leigh used one of her Oscars for a truly majestic purpose: She turned it into a doorstop that would prop her bathroom door open. Throughout all her struggles, you have to give her credit for staying humble.

Even when Vivien Leigh was dealing with debilitating mental illness, she still managed to be irresistible. When she filmed A Streetcar Named Desire, Marlon Brando apparently wanted to have an affair with his co-star. According to him, Leigh had an unbeatable derriere, and the only reason he didn't pursue her was because of his friendship with “Larry” Olivier. Even though Brando didn't make his move, another of Leigh's co-stars decided to shoot his shot.

In 1953, Leigh was set to star in a movie called Elephant Walk, only to endure a mental breakdown so bad that Paramount Studios replaced her with Liz Taylor. During Leigh's brief time on set, she became paranoid, her insomnia worsened, and she’d even hallucinate. Olivier hadn't accompanied her to the shoot, so Leigh found comfort in the arms of her co-star, none other than her ex-fling Peter Finch.

After being fired from Elephant Walk, Leigh boarded a flight back to Los Angeles. While in the air, she became so distressed that she tried to end her life by jumping out of the plane.

By this point, Leigh was completely out of her mind. She would scream for hours in her dressing room, until eventually being sedated and sent back to England. Once there, her husband Olivier felt that he only had one option left. He placed Leigh in an asylum for three months, where she endured multiple painful sessions of electroshock therapy.

Leigh's struggles should have been private, but then as now, word of a starlet's breakdown managed to get out. After Leigh left the asylum, she appeared on stage in England. As she performed, audiences were rapt, but not at her acting talents. Instead, they whispered that they could see the burn marks that electroshock paddles had left on Leigh's pale temples.

Leigh and Olivier's marriage had been through the ringer at this point. They managed to weather Leigh's affair with Finch, but their time was coming to an end. Audience members could hear the actors cruelly taunting each other during performances. Off stage, Leigh made matters worse by fixating on scathing reviews. They accused Olivier of underplaying his roles so that he wouldn’t outshine his less talented wife. Olivier tried to convince Leigh that it wasn't true, but the damage was done.

In 1956, 44-year-old Vivien Leigh miraculously became pregnant with Olivier. The unlikely mother hoped that the baby could give her and Olivier a fresh start, but fate had other plans in store for the couple. Leigh had a miscarriage and, like the last time she lost a baby, she fell into a horrible depressive spiral.

Losing her baby while playing another tragic Shakespearean role proved to be a bad combination for Vivien Leigh. While touring Europe for a production of Titus Andronicus, Leigh had a breakdown. At one point, she went into a public park without her clothes on. Later on, she flew into a rage and beat Olivier with a wet towel, leading him to throw her across the room.

After almost 20 years with Leigh, her latest breakdown proved to be more than Olivier could take. He left Leigh and settled down with Joan Plowright. Looking back, Olivier said that he would “never love anybody as much as Vivien” but because of her mood swings, he couldn't stay with her. With that, the once-unbeatable couple went their separate ways.

While Olivier was romancing Joan Plowright, Leigh quickly fell into the arms of the actor Jack Merivale. He was well aware of her bipolar disorder, and assured Olivier that he’d take care of Leigh. With Leigh in safe hands, Olivier officially divorced her in 1960.

After Leigh and Olivier's divorce, Olivier tried to stay amicable with his ex-wife. He wrote Vivien a letter where he thanked her for handling their break up "nobly and bravely and beautifully" even though it must have been horrible for her. Olivier was right. It was around this time that Leigh attempted to end her own life.

After her marriage ended, Leigh's behavior became even stranger than usual. She once rented a car and became so upset by its color that she demanded to have it repainted. She also insisted on taking her Renoir and Picasso paintings with her everywhere she went. When she signed up to act in a play, she hoped the creative outlet would help. Unfortunately, Leigh was wrong.

In 1963, Leigh starred in a stage musical called Tovarich. It was, in a word, a disaster. Leigh had an intense breakdown that made her blank on her lines, sing songs up to three times too fast, and even assault her own co-stars—while they were on stage with a full house watching. Her behavior was so uncontrollable that at one point, she had to be restrained and sedated. Even through immense pain, though, Leigh won a Tony for her performance.

Vivien Leigh had long battled bipolar disorder—but when filming Ship of Fools in 1965, one episode ended in an utterly horrific turn. During an assault scene, Leigh struck fellow actor Lee Marvin so hard with a high heel that it scarred his face. Because of this incident, Ship of Fools would end up being Leigh’s final appearance on film. She didn't have much time left, and unfortunately, what little she had would be deeply sad.

In the summer of 1967, Leigh's tuberculosis came back with a vengeance. As she lay in bed and attempted to recover from the illness, the actress rose to use the washroom. Unfortunately, on her way, she collapsed. By the time Leigh's partner Jack Merivale discovered her, Leigh had already breathed her last. She passed in London on July 8.

Even though Leigh and Olivier had broken up seven years ago, the acclaimed actor rushed to see his ex-wife one last time. He  insisted on staying with her body until the authorities removed it. After that, Olivier helped Merivale organize Leigh's funeral and arranged for Leigh to be cremated, with her ashes spread near her beloved home.

When people heard of Vivien Leigh's demise, the London theaters paid her a heartbreaking tribute. Each and every one turned out their lights for an hour to honor Leigh's memory. However, the most touching tribute belongs to Leigh's great love, Laurence Olivier.

In the weeks before Olivier's own demise, he reportedly watched a movie with Leigh. As he began to weep, Olivier simply said, "This, this was love". Even though their relationship didn't last forever, Leigh felt the same way about Olivier. The actress once said, “I would rather have lived a short life with Larry [Olivier] than face a long one without him".

Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, , 10, 11, 12, 13, 14

My parents’ neighbor owns a landscaping company, so he has a dump truck. His house is set further back from the road than theirs, so his driveway, which is right on the property line, extends past their house and next to their backyard. One time, my dad noticed the neighbor turning the dump truck around in my parents’ backyard when the ground was very soft from some recent rain.

He went back, and sure enough, there were giant ruts in my parents’ yard. When my dad confronted the neighbor about using their backyard to turn around, the neighbor's response floored him: “I’m sorry, but if I turned it around in my yard, it would have left ruts in my lawn". So he knew it would leave ruts, then decided he didn’t want them in his yard, so he left them in my parents’ yard instead.

livecaterpillarflesh

There's a particular type of person who, for some inexplicable reason, feels like they're the only thing standing between society and total collapse. That was my neighbor. She was aloof and paranoid, and she'd imagine threats from almost everywhere...which made the fact that she thought of herself as some kind of secret agent all the more annoying.

This neighbor was always trying to find ways of getting me (and anyone else whom she thought of as suspicious) to move out of the building. She'd stage loud telephone calls with "headquarters" about the alarming behavior of the other tenants, like my tendency to get home after nine in the evening, which was clearly scandalous.

She'd also frequently yell at the people who'd stand on the corner to light up. On one occasion, I heard her shouting at someone over the placement of a flowerpot in their window, which was obviously an indication that they were selling illicit substances. Then, one afternoon, I found an "official notice" taped to a wall in the stairwell.

It was perhaps the most ridiculous attempt at a government-sponsored document that I'd ever seen.  The atrocious grammar, poorly Photoshopped seal, and the distinct absence of any legitimate contact information made the thing about as realistic as a scene from NCIS. Furthermore, the reference to "the past two years" seemed to indicate me as her primary target, since I was, as far as I knew, the only resident who had been there for less time than that.

Still, since the notice was clearly meant to scare someone, I decided to return the favor by taking a page out of my neighbor's own playbook. This led me to stand outside of her apartment while staging my own fake phone call: "You should see the notice; it's terrible! Haha, yeah, it's like they didn't know that impersonating a federal official can get you into some serious trouble! Anyway, the real FBI are on their way, and they're going to dust for fingerprints. Whoever made that notice is looking at a lot of time behind bars!"

I went back inside my apartment after that... and within seconds, I heard my neighbor's door open. There was the sound of hurried footsteps rushing towards the stairwell, followed by an equally hurried retreat. When I went out to check five minutes later, the notice was gone. I've since moved away, but for the rest of the time that I lived there, the lady never bothered me again.

RamsesThePigeon

I had a neighbor who always let his dog run free. It would get into our yard, give our dogs fleas, eat all their food, and teach them how to escape. No matter my mom's complaints, this neighbor denied his dog was getting out. So, being fed up with the situation, my mom got some satisfying revenge: She dyed his dog purple (with a non-toxic product, of course) and sent it on its merry way.

The neighbor kept his dog contained after that.

lorelei_fluss

When I was 13 years old, a new neighbor moved into the house next door. We shared a driveway with her. The families in our neighborhood are really close to one another and everyone likes to have get-togethers and block parties. So, when she moved in, we all got together and had a little celebration to welcome her. Immediately, it became clear that she did not like my dad.

A while later, we found out that she’d been telling our neighbors that my dad was being inappropriate to her at the party. I know my dad would never act like that, but he isn’t a native English speaker (he’s Middle Eastern, which is relevant to the story). Maybe some wires got crossed and there was a misunderstanding. So my dad went over to apologize to her. It did not go well.

She told my dad to leave, which he promptly did. Then, she put up the security cameras. They absolutely covered her house getting views of pretty much every angle including lots of shots of our shared driveway. “Whatever,” we thought. “A lady has a right to put cameras on her house”. But then the authorities started showing up. She called them claiming that we had messed with her cameras and that my friends and I were shining laser pointers at them.

The officers ended up leaving pretty quickly because the supposed "crime" she accused us of was not captured on any of her cameras. We thought she was done with her antics after that, but we were wrong—she then started claiming that we were poisoning her yard. She spent a lot of time on her lawn gardening and growing plants, and for some reason, every six months or so, she’d cut everything down and start over.

Anyway, the authorities came back but they couldn’t find any evidence. We didn’t even have any poison, nor had her cameras picked anything up. We had absolutely no motive to poison her lawn. So she started an inquest with the department of agriculture. A pesticide use investigator showed up, interrogated us, and took samples from her yard.

While that was going on, we had a few other interesting encounters with her. Once, she bought a giant floodlight and pointed it into our windows in the middle of the night. The fire department had to come and unplug it. Another time, our dinner was interrupted when a massive hazmat truck came blaring down our street. Men in heavy gear poured out and charged into her house, then, minutes later, they disappointedly filed out.

One guy came and told us that she had bought a Geiger counter and used it wrong, and she had thought that we had irradiated her house. Finally, things came to a head when she sued us to get an order of protection. She claimed that my dad was a member of a sleeper cell intent on destroying her. She also claimed that he had used his skills as an engineer to develop a device that she referred to as a "white ion laser" which would allow him to turn invisible and sneak into her house.

She submitted one terabyte of film from her cameras, all of which was annotated with such incriminating evidence as “My neighbor leaves the house, my neighbor enters the house". There were also tons of photos and notes. But that's not the most horrifying part. It was here that we discovered that her cameras were pointed into my bedroom and she had been filming me for years.

I was a young lad by this point so there’s probably video evidence of some pretty embarrassing teenage behavior out in the aether now. We later legally forced her to move the cameras, but she kept moving them back, so I just kept my blinds closed for the better part of a decade. During the trial, the department of agriculture report came back.

It was determined that our neighbor had poisoned her own lawn by over-fertilizing it. She received a fine for contaminating the groundwater. We obviously won the lawsuit and countersued her to get our own order of protection. We also had to legally get the files on us at the FBI and CIA closed since she had reported us to both agencies.

Despite losing the suit, she continued to live next to us, occasionally calling the authorities on us for non-issues. They were called on us a total of 37 times. It’s now been ten years and she’s finally moving out. Why you might ask? Does she feel guilty for accusing us with no evidence for a decade? Had her paranoia finally driven her to move? No.

She didn’t pay her property taxes for six years and her house got taken from her. She tried to sue the city on a bunch of occasions as well and failed. This is only a summary of the situation. There are tons more. I haven’t even gotten into her kids, her horrible husband, the video she posted to YouTube of her dog passing...

squamesh

I didn't really interact with my upstairs neighbors when I was living in my first apartment, but I did know that their religion prohibited them from ending any life...including roaches. Their apartment became a breeding ground and the roaches would spill into the rest of the building, including mine below. It was a horrible experience and I felt so hopeless because it didn't matter how clean I was. Those bugs were always everywhere.

SharpTenor

When I was 10, my neighbor—an 80-something-year-old man with a Christian radio station—shot and ended one of my dogs. When I went looking for my dog, I asked my neighbor if he had seen him. He told me that he'd taken aim at a dog like that in the morning. Frozen, I asked where he was so I could bury him. He told me that his body was in the dumpster and that he would end me too if I didn't get off his land.

I ran through the woods back to my house, screaming in anger and punching trees until my knuckles were torn and bloody. When I got home, I called the authorities and the K9 unit came out to my house. They retrieved my dog's body and I buried him. The worst part was that my dog was very sweet (I know that generally sweet dogs can be threatening, but it was very against his nature).

My neighbor had tied him up, then took him out and shot him point-blank in the chest. I have never felt more rage in my life. My mom took the man to court and he was charged with unfair treatment of an animal. The judge asked how much money I thought the dog was worth. I was dumbfounded and croaked out that I didn't want money—I wanted my dog.

The neighbor was fined $500 and I made him pay it to the local humane society. The man had the Ten Commandments posted all around his house, so the next night, I took a red sharpie and circled "Thou Shalt Not Kill" on all of his signs. My dog's name was Hershey. He was a mutt that was born in my bedroom, and he was only two years old when his life was taken from him. Such a good boy.

mmont49

My friend's upstairs neighbor has a dog. He never takes it for a walk or outside for a poop. Instead, the dog just goes on the balcony, and when it dries, he just shovels it off onto the cars below. Then, he throws water on it to "clean" it up and the dirty water drips down onto my friend's balcony. She has called the landlord, the city, and the maintenance company about it, but no one will do anything.

We have shouted at him while he was in the act of doing it and he stopped for a minute, but he continues when we are gone. If you knock on his door, he won't answer.

billbro_swaggins

My neighbor hated cats, so put out cat traps, the barbaric type that crushes legs. One day, my cat got caught in one—and when I saw him, I just started screaming. He'd dragged himself home while he was still trapped in it. When I took him to the vet, they found that his pelvis was crushed, so he had to be put down. I had never been so angry in my life. And that's not even the worst part.

My neighbor was only given a warning...He was later charged due to his treatment of his own pets, but he never did get punished beyond a fine. I hate that guy.

tmaegan

This happened on a week-long cruise. The first two mornings, our neighbors on both sides were ridiculously loud. They were basically screaming in Spanish and constantly waking us up. We didn't go to bed until 4 am, so they cut into your sleep. On the third night, at around 11 pm we went to our room, blasted the TV, and left it like that all night.

You could hear it outside our door, and it was very loud like they were. The next morning, what do you know—the neighbors realized that other people could hear them and they were quiet for the rest of the cruise.

Permalink

When I was in elementary school, our neighbor's four dogs would always poop in our backyard. My mom asked the neighbor many times to pick it up, but he never did. So every morning before school, my mom would send me and my brother on 'poop patrol'. At first, we just put the poop in the neighbor's yard, but our neighbor never got the hint.

My mom then had us put the poop on his porch...That's when he got a fence and the problem stopped.

opalescenttreeshark

I had two neighbors; we'll call them A and B. They absolutely hated each other—Neighbor A really took pride in his lawn being “pristine” and that caused Neighbor B to complain over things like leaves and lawn clippings ending up on his lawn. The authorities were even called over this issue multiple times. This went on for a year.

Eventually, Neighbor B got fed up—and pulled the most diabolical move ever. He intentionally planted clover on his lawn. He waited for it to flower and then set up an industrial fan to blow it over to Neighbor A’s lawn. I aspire to this man's level of pettiness every day.

knowledgekills12

Back in the late 70s, my mom had a terrible upstairs neighbor who would play loud music all the time. She would bang on the ceiling with a broom to get him to turn it down, but he never would. One day, there was no music, and my mom, an aspiring nurse, was concerned. She went upstairs to investigate and found that the guy had broken his leg.

He was laid up in a cast so he couldn't get up to keep changing the records. She, being the nice person she is, nursed him back to health. That solved the music problem because...that was also how my father met my mother.

Alis451

I was living in a shifty part of town at the time. I had a couple of older neighbors who could have starred in a Hoarders marathon. The garage door was bowing out and splitting in areas due to the amount of garbage forced into it. To top that, they had hundreds of feral cats with horrible defects. They kept the front door open 24/7 so the cats could come in and out of the house, at least the ones that lived long enough to.

I would have to crawl under my house to remove the lifeless ones so my house didn't reek every few days.

Arrendersi

My neighbor accidentally fired a pistol and the round went through our sliding glass door and ended up in the pantry. We were alerted when 80% of the glass in our sliding glass door fell onto the floor. I'm 5'7" and I could walk through the sliding glass door without opening it. The round was found in a box of pancake mix about six inches over my head, so the odds of it hitting me had I been in the kitchen or walking around my house were very high.

nobodytrickedme

I moved a lot growing up so I've had a few. One of my neighbors in Florida was a known kleptomaniac, but he would take the most random items around the neighborhood. When someone moved out of a house, he would dig up the plants from the yard and sell them online. We would just wake up one morning and all of the plants would be gone with the trail of dirt leading to his house.

When his house foreclosed, he took all of the doors off their hinges before moving out. He also took another neighbor's bicycle when they left their garage door open. The owner knew it was him, so he just walked over to his house and took it back without calling the authorities. We also later found out that he was going through a nasty divorce from his wife... who was once his therapist.

ArtbyTMD

I used to have this obnoxious neighbor who invited herself over all the time. If we had multiple cars in the driveway, she assumed we must have had company over, which meant free food for her. She would peek over the fence, see that we were grilling, then would come over to find out what was up. My dad had a semi-trusting relationship with her and he let her know where we kept a spare key should there be an emergency. BIG mistake.

We walked in a couple of times after being gone and found notes from her on the counter. That meant she had used the spare key, gone into our house while we weren't there, and probably snooped around. My dad told her she was not allowed to come in when we weren't there and she apologized...but then, the next day, there were brownies on the counter with a note that said "Sorry".

She clearly disregarded what he said to bring us apology brownies! But the last straw was the worst of all. My dad had left the house one day and I was taking a shower. When I stepped out in just a towel and ran to the laundry room, there was a random woman sitting on the couch.

After freaking out, I learned that she was a Jehovah's Witness and was let in by my neighbor who apparently was snooping around while I was in the shower. She just left the lady alone in my house. My dad came home and changed all the locks that day and told her not to come over ever again. We also ignored her any time she knocked after that.

She hated us after that and she clearly thought all of her actions were completely normal.

Notfunliketheysaid

I grew up with a crazy neighbor who would get tipsy every summer night between about 5 to 8 pm, and I mean EVERY night like it was his job. He was always playing some tunes on the radio, and he also did this thing where he would come out onto his porch once an hour to let out a lion roar. It was weird, but I got used to it.

None of the people in the neighborhood had any issue with him because we all just assumed meant he had some real personal demons; plus, he never did anything else that would be a cause for concern. His behaviors became normalized in our community. For example, whenever I heard him start to roar, that was always my signal that I should head home because dinner would be ready soon.

Later on in life when I was in my late teens and I started drinking, my friends and I would go to this one house in the neighborhood that had a porch with a clear line of sight to my neighbor. This is when we dubbed him "Crazy Man"—he would come out onto the porch, roar for a bit, and we would all kind of laugh and say to each other, "Dang, Crazy Man is really loaded tonight, huh?"

Eventually, we started talking to him and we came to find out that he was actually a very nice person and not at all the angry tipsy guy you would think he was. He would even respond to the name "Crazy Man" and he seemed to enjoy the half-coherent conversations we would try to have with him. Sometimes, he'd toss us down a few bottles and have a quick chat with him, but you always had to initiate the conversation, or else there'd be no way for him to know that we were there.

Permalink

I have a horrible neighbor who loves calling the authorities any chance he gets. If we left our car doors open too long, or if we get too close to his yard or anyone else's yards, he would complain. He's calmed down a bit over the years, but it used to get heated between him and this family that lived next to him for a while. The worst part is that they were just as bad.

They beat their dogs, left them locked up in their backyard, and never fed them. They also screamed at each other, often out in the open, and one time, some of their relatives came over and they pulled pistols on each other. I think they may have even tried to burn their house down because they couldn't get it to sell. Needless to say, nothing happened because he called 9-1-1 within minutes.

Permalink

Years ago, my wife, kids, and I rented a townhouse. We had been there for four years, and we were on a month-by-month lease. The owner told us that she would not be extending the lease because she was selling the unit. No big deal, but the lease ended in July and we were told this in May. We scrambled but were eventually able to find a great house in an excellent neighborhood to buy.

It was during the housing crisis so we got a huge deal, too. We paid about $100K less than the neighbors. Anyway, at the townhouse, there were a few neighbors who would ogle my wife. I don't blame them, but they were all married except for one guy named Brian. Brian was divorced a few times and had kids in their 20s that lived with him.

He would constantly run outside if he saw my wife out there. He would mention to her that he saw her going to the store or to the mailbox or whatever. But then it started getting creepy. We had a community pool and when he saw her going there with our kids, he'd follow so he could hang out with her while she was in her bikini.

It creeped her out so much that she would wrap a towel around herself until she confirmed he wasn't at the pool. I had to have words with him more than once about this. Moving day came and we hadn't told any of the neighbors we were moving because why would we? Brian came over as we were loading the truck and asked my wife: "Which one of you is moving out?"

I stopped and told him, deadpan as could be: "Both of us". He was hoping it was a divorce situation so he could try to take my place. But wait, there's more...I came home from a work trip one day and my wife told me that Brian was driving past our house. I don't know how he did it, but he found out where we live. We still live in the same city, so I think he either saw my wife and followed her home one day or just drove around until he found us.

We live in a cul-de-sac. There was no reason for him to be driving there. One day, my wife took my car because I had to take hers in for maintenance. The doorbell rang and it was none other than Brian. He was obviously stunned to see me answer the door and he started to stammer some nonsense about why he was there. I told him, in no uncertain terms, that if I ever saw him near my home or my wife ever again that it would be the last thing he did on this Earth.

I made him acknowledge that he understood me and he scurried to his car and left as fast as he could. It's been a few years and neither of us has seen Brian. Every now and then I'll see a car I don't recognize on our cul-de-sac and I always look at the driver...just in case.

Val_Hallen

My next-door neighbor came over to borrow a ladder when my husband wasn't home. He gave off a really weird vibe—he "steadied" me from behind when I was taking the ladder down from the wall hook. At the time, I just told myself I was being overly sensitive, but I should have paid attention to the red flags right then and there.

Later that week, my husband and I ran into him and his wife in a store. He greeted me with a kiss on the cheek...It was weird, and my husband thought so too, but we still didn't look into it too much. We shrugged it off and assumed he was just being overly friendly. Then, a few weeks after that incident, we were visited by a government agency that asked us a couple of questions about him.

Apparently, he needed a security clearance where he worked. There wasn't a lot to report as he seemed okay. But one early Saturday morning, he knocked on our door while my husband was at work. I had all four of my kids there. I don't even remember why he came over, but at one point, he took an opportunity to rub himself against me in front of my kids.

I kicked him out, then I immediately called my husband and his wife. She called me back, begging me to retract it, but I assured her that he really did what he did. Somehow, it got back to his supervisor and his clearance was put in jeopardy. They ended up divorced.

pamamaamajamma

While living in Los Angeles, I was staying in a nice area called the Miracle Mile. Most of the residents there are fairly young. I stayed in an apartment complex on the second floor and I had a neighbor under me. My girlfriend at the time lived in Oregon. She came to visit for the first time and we had a lot of fun in the apartment. One day, while walking out, we heard someone downstairs leaving as well.

We made our way to the staircase and once we got down to the bottom floor, my neighbor who lived directly under me said hi. Mind you, this was my first time seeing her after living there for seven months. My neighbor said, “Hey, I’m also from Oregon”. My girlfriend and I exchanged looks, puzzled as to how my neighbor knew where my girlfriend was from.

She then asked us how our dinner date went the night before at Jones'...At that point, we were dumbfounded and assumed she must have been hiding in our apartment. After that interaction, she would randomly come up to my apartment and ask random questions about my girlfriend. Then, toward the end of my lease, I would hear her screaming for absolutely no reason.

I would also see her out in the neighborhood with messy wild hair and smeared lipstick on her face and teeth. She's the weirdest neighbor I’ve ever had.

Permalink

The old lady who lived across from us decided to become an opera singer. She would "sing" to her plants almost daily, from 7 am to noon and from 6 pm to 3 am. And I'm talking full-blown "OooOOOoooaaaaaaoooOOO" practically all day every day. It made things like sleeping hard and she caused my partner so much stress it triggered her depression. She got the authorities called on her twice.

The first time, she sang to the officer's face and closed the door. They had to break in and take her away, but she returned the next day. The second time, a senior officer cursed at her while the younger guy tried to hold his laughter. I bonded with one of my neighbors over our shared hatred toward this loud witch...I think he lived above her, which is probably worse.

Antikristus

Growing up, there was a big Mormon family across the street. At first, they just kept trying to convert us, but as I got older, I noticed the men paying me more attention, especially since puberty hit me like a truck. At barely 12 years old, I could easily pass for a sixteen-year-old with a chest and ample behind. Every time I saw one of the men, they had some kind of comment, mostly about my chest.

The sons who were at least four or five years older than me often asked if I stuffed my bra and they would ask to feel them, as to prove I didn't. Of course, I never gave them an answer and I would just run home. Luckily, we moved right before I turned eighteen because I've heard horror stories about that religion.

Permalink

I live in an apartment and the balcony is a decent size, but one side is a wall that goes about three-quarters up and the other side is my next-door neighbor's balcony. One day, a couple moved in—they seemed to be in their 20s and the girl was pregnant. They were total nightmares. She would sit on the balcony almost every day, talking loudly on her cell phone or chatting with a friend.

That became annoying very quickly, so my balcony door would often have to be closed. She would go inside in the evening, just in time for her boyfriend to sit on the balcony and light one up. Sometimes it was just him, but other times they would be having a party. It sucked for me because I would never be able to have the balcony door open and it'd get quite stuffy inside my apartment.

When the baby was born, their behavior continued until we had to threaten to call CPS on them. After that, the partying stopped. Later on, they had a second baby, and the first one would scream her brains out all the time, which we could hear through the walls. Thankfully, they moved out soon after.

OMGeno1

We had two neighbors get in a feud. They loved tipping over each other's trashcans and scattering trash in the yard. Oh, and since we lived between them, the trash mostly wound up in our yard and they refused to pick it up. Even when our other neighbors recorded them scattering trash across our yard, they denied it. Oh but, here's the twisted cherry on top.

One of them also borrowed our snow shovel and tried to throw animal waste at the other's cars. They missed, hit my mom's, then said we did it to frame them since our shovel had the mess on it.

CrazyCoKids

There’s a guy who lives down the street from me and he's a real piece of work. He also has serious problems with women. When I bought my house, I had a boyfriend living with me. He left me alone during that time, but when that relationship ended, I became this guy’s arch-nemesis apparently.

He would come onto my property and take my stuff. He has stolen a porch chair, my garden hose, a string for my trimmer, a doormat, whatever he could find. When I confronted him about it, he told me those items were my “husband’s” property, not mine (even though I’ve never been married). The authorities were called but as long as he gave the property back, nothing happened.

If I had a female friend over, he would shout prejudiced slurs. If I had a male friend over, he would shout derogatory names at me. Again, I'd call the authorities, but they'd only give warnings no arrests were ever made. And that's just the tip of the iceberg—even worse is he'd alternate between trying to hit my dog with his car and trying to come onto my property to take her.

He would also loiter all the time. He cut down my rose bushes, dug up all of the tulips in my flower bed, and brought his animals into my yard to do their business. I sternly told him he was not to trespass, but he responded that he had the permission of the deceased former owner of my home to come onto the property whenever he wanted.

I told him that I owned the property now and that he was no longer welcome. He then said that I had “no authority” and he asked to speak to my father (who lives 1,800 miles away). At that point, I had enough. This time when I called the authorities, I made sure they served him a written no-trespassing order. He violated it twice and was cited, but he never did pay any of his fines. Unfortunately for me, no further action was taken against him.

But things started to get better from that point on—a new magistrate was elected and I installed security cameras. Between having ample video evidence to easily charge and convict him and having a “changing of the guard” at the magistrate’s office (the previous magistrate was very difficult to deal with, even for the authorities), the whole situation has changed dramatically.

While the problems with this guy aren’t completely nonexistent, the frequency has really decreased.

angrygnomes58

My upstairs neighbor liked to blast Black Sabbath all night long on the weekend. The funny thing is I like Black Sabbath, but I didn’t like it at 3 am when I’d just got home from work after working a twelve-hour shift. I’d be there laying in bed hearing the tune from “Symptom of the Universe” and my brain would be filling in the lyrics.

As many times as I've banged on his door to get him to turn the music down, you’d think he would have learned to have the volume at a decent level by 1 am.

lilfrostgiant

I had a neighbor that thought all the surrounding lands were his. His plot was pretty small, but he thought that if he mowed my lawn EVERY DAY, he would have ownership of it. He even drafted up some papers saying that the city was giving him ownership of my land, which my lawyer quickly pointed out was nonsense. Oh, but he went even further than that.

He would do things like jump in my car and break the clutch so he could push it into the alley and have it towed. He and his wife called the city multiple times on me to get my own vehicles towed off my own property while pretending to be super nice to us...they are a prime example of how Iowan passive-aggressiveness can be extremely annoying.

Anyway, I called a tow company to pick my car up and bring it to a mechanic. My neighbors thought they were successful in getting it towed off the property so they started celebrating, but then my car showed up the next week and they were taken in by the authorities. Ha.

IAmWarbot

One day, my entire street was closed down and we were told by the authorities that we couldn’t leave the block. The other neighbors from across the street called them in after they had found out that our next-door neighbor had a secret lab where they made illicit substances. If it blew up, it would have taken out the whole block.

The craziest part is that they seemed like a totally normal family—the father was a substitute teacher at my middle school, and he and his wife had a three-year-old toddler that would often play outside in their yard.

I've always been pretty lucky with neighbors, even in student areas. I can't think of any I've had trouble with, except for this one guy. He was on a lot of synthetic substances and you could tell that it was quickly spiraling him into paranoia and psychosis. He wasn't someone I knew well, but I didn't mind sitting with him to watch TV together or letting him come in for a cup of tea when things were bad.

Still, I worried about the guy, and I always worried his condition would one day make him aggressive toward me. I hope he's doing better now.

permalink

I bought my first house last November. The neighborhood was a mix of nice, young families and some questionable people. Some yards were very nice, while others looked like they hadn't been mowed in years. The neighborhood sat on the edge of a very nice suburb of the city. Our backyard was beautiful—it had a large shed, privacy trees on both sides, and a seven-foot privacy fence in the back.

At the beginning of summer, my girlfriend and I had put up those backyard lights that went from the tall trees across the backyard and connected to the shed. I also installed back deck speakers so we could enjoy music when we had friends and family over. We had met no neighbors at that point. One day, I looked outside and my jaw DROPPED.

I noticed that one row of the hanging lights was cut. We also noticed that someone had put wood beams on top of my fence posts so we couldn't tie our light strings up there. I was in the house while my girlfriend was in the shed, and all of a sudden she came running in. The neighbor was screaming at her over the fence.

We didn't know who he was screaming at—he was just screaming, saying things like "You think I'm afraid of you?" and " I will put you 10 feet in the sky". My girlfriend came to get me, and at that point, I'd already had bad day. Mind you, we had NEVER seen this person before, NOR could we see him over the fence. I came out of the house and I started screaming back: "HEY, IS THERE A PROBLEM?" over and over with a VERY stern voice. No response.

I then decided to go over there to be a good neighbor and see if everything was okay. Well, behind the door, I heard him say, "If I have to open this door, I will end you". I shrugged and left him alone. Then, 15 minutes later, he was back at it again. This time, he sounded tipsy, and he began threatening us again, saying: "I will end your life, I am not scared".

I don't know what triggered him to act that way—Was he messed up in the head? Bored? Did he have a problem with the previous owners? Anyway, I decided to call the authorities and they said they would send someone over. This was on a Monday evening at about 11 pm. He was still yelling as we waited for the officers to arrive. He then got very personal and called all of us out".

You, your wife, your dog, and daughter...I am going to end you all". At that point, I realized things were getting real. So I called 9-1-1 again and told them they needed to send someone over ASAP. When the officers finally arrived, they couldn't really do anything even after I told them what he had been doing. As they went over to his place, I watched intently.

I saw them on the second floor of their house as the officers were knocking on their door below. Suddenly, they shut the lights off in the house. The officers got more aggressive with their knocking, so much so that you could hear it echo throughout the neighborhood. Finally, they got in and they were there for about 15 minutes. Soon after, one of the officers returned to my house.

He proceeded to tell us that they are known addicts in the area and that they had been in and out of that house HUNDREDS of times over the past year. He also said that they had no wall on the back of their house—there was just a tarp placed over an area where the roof was caving in, and there were weeds growing everywhere. It was uninhabitable.

I asked him how they could possibly live there and afford it without being kicked out. The officer guessed that the house must have been owned by that family for generations. Ever since we called the authorities on them, they haven't given us any problems, but it was disappointing to be told that we'd have to watch ourselves in our own backyard because of these unpredictable psychos.

Taylor1401

The town I live in has a lot of people with boundary issues. My last place was in the downtown area and the place had this long back patio space that stretched behind three units. I was at the far end, and there was no reason for anyone to cross through my side. Yet, the middle guy who had two dogs let them do their business all over my side.

He didn't pick it up all winter, so my partner piled the mess up onto the guy's backdoor. Another annoying thing about the dogs is that they would bark outside our window at 8 am every morning, without fail. The dude worked from home, so we blared metal music in the morning when we were in class. We didn't feel bad about it either. After all, he was the only one we shared a wall with.

smokesmagoats

My neighbor used to let her dogs, which were Siberian huskies, run loose. Even after one ran out into the street and was hit by a car (we lived in a pretty busy city), she still refused to put them on a leash. One day, it got personal. One of her dogs got into my house and mauled my cat. My neighbor didn't say or do anything until about a week later when I happened to bump into her on the street.

She asked, very casually, how I was doing and I said I was still pretty upset over what happened. Her response? She shrugged and said, "Yeah, sorry about that," and then continued on her way. I don't think I spoke to her again after that.

slowsunslumber

I grew up in a trailer, so our "front yard" was the neighbor's "backyard". This was also back in the days of clay litter, so we had to dump all the litter in the trash once in a while, then rinse the litter boxes out and let them dry before refilling them with fresh litter. Not my favorite chore by any means, but I had to do it.

My neighbor came out one time, yelling that I couldn't do that. I gave him sass back, saying that I had just as much right to be there as she did. She yelled that I was a horrible kid and that she was going to tell my parents that I was being rude to her. I told her to go right ahead—it's not like I wanted to be cleaning the stupid litter box anyway.

I told my parents about the interaction afterward and the neighbor never said anything to them. But then, a couple of weeks later, we made a shocking discovery—my cat was deceased. I was devastated, and my parents wanted to get to the bottom of it. They found out from their friends who worked at the local grocery store our neighbor had recently bought rat toxins.

Again, this was a trailer park. If she had had rats, then we would have also had rats. There was not proof enough to take her to court, though.

chaela_may

We had neighbors that got kicked out of a bad area and moved next to us. They were a family with teenage kids. Both parents were gaming the system for disability. For example, they would use wheelchairs whenever they went out even though they were walking fine. They also made a huge amount of noise, and at daft times too.

I can't remember why, but we got back one day and the neighbor's son got in my face and threatened to hurt me while I was getting a small child out of the car. I am 6'3" and this guy is like 5'10", so he couldn't actually get up in my face like he was trying to do. I first made sure the kid was safe as that was my primary concern, then I went inside and called the authorities.

It turned out that when they arrived next door, they had called the authorities before us. They turned up thinking that I was the one who threatened him. Luckily for me, the officers already knew this guy had a record. I, on the other hand, didn't have any involvement with the authorities other than having my bikes nicked years ago.

Two weeks later, the house on the corner got raided for selling illicit substances. I am hundreds of miles away from them now. Yay.

AnotherNewme

I lived in a nice condo community in San Diego in college and the head of the HOA was this grumpy old man who had nothing better to do than sit around and wait for some noise to complain about. I lived two doors down from him while a couple of my friends lived next door. He would complain that my friends were cooking too loudly during the day, walking too loudly at night, opening cabinets too loudly after 9 pm, etc.

He also complained that my car was too loud (I have a Mustang with high-flow mufflers). My roommate had the exact same Mustang with the same exhaust, but apparently to him, only mine was the problem. One time, he complained that I started my car at 6:30 am and woke him up because his walls were shaking. Mind you, my car was on the street, which was a good distance away from his unit.

My roommate, whose window was right above my car, slept through the noise and he had his window open. There were at least four other cars in the complex that I counted that were louder than mine that went through the area at all times of day and night. To top it off, the complex is in a busy intersection less than half a mile from Interstate 5. I’m pretty sure he just sat up all night waiting for me to start my car so he could complain.

He is someone who never had anyone over, so I’m sure he did that to pass the time.

peedubb

We had a hoarder next door. The bugs she brought along with her were bad enough, but she was old and forgetful, and on more than one occasion, she put food on the stove and just left it. Smoke would billow from her apartment and I would have to call the fire department so they could race over there, kick in her door, and prevent a fire.

She also liked to hoard newspapers, among other things, so her apartment was basically a tinder box. On top of that, there was this creepiness that took over her whenever her family came over to remove everything from her house. She would just stand there, staring at the dumpster. Much of the stuff they would carry to the dumpster I would recognize as something I had thrown out, sometimes even years earlier.

When we asked her to let the exterminators into her apartment, she would rude and defensive. It would be one thing if she had been a sweet old lady with a problem that she acknowledged and apologized for. But she was downright mean if you asked her to open her apartment up and let pest control keep the monster roaches at bay.

Galileo182

When I was in my 20s, I had a creepy neighbor who lived in the apartment next to me. He always acted very weirdly around me. I heard disturbing things about him from people who knew him so I tried to avoid contact, but he would not leave me in peace. He once asked me to turn my wireless LAN off because it gave him headaches.

He also once offered to take photos of me in my lingerie because, according to him, he is "such a good photographer". He didn't take no for an answer and really tried to convince me. It got so bad that I didn't open my door unless I knew he wasn't there. I had to tell my friends to make sure to talk to me on the doorbell system before coming up, otherwise, I would not open my door. It was scary.

MissAuriel

My boyfriend and I moved into a cute little apartment together in south Florida. Shortly after, an older gentleman moved in next door. He initially seemed like a nice enough guy, but kind of lonely. We invited him over for dinner once because we noticed he'd get take-out often, and we could tell he didn't know how to cook. Biggest mistake of our lives.

Well, apparently, he had bed bugs that hitched their way over and infested not only our apartment but multiple others in the complex. The worst part is the guy knew about them, yet he made no efforts to treat the issue or get rid of them. We also later found out that he was a heavy drinker and I once had to call an ambulance after he lacerated his arm by punching out the windows of other units in the complex.

I spent the next three years constantly having to pay for repairs to my home and car, and I ended up throwing almost everything away and starting over because of him.

nymeria1031

I had neighbors above and below. The ones above would get it on for like four hours and then vacuum for 30 minutes. The ones below would get into fights all the time, with the husband criticizing and verbally destroying his wife over her appearance and addiction issues...then they would get it on like monsters. But apparently, I was the problem because my footsteps were too loud??

alanbastard

I shared a dorm room with this one kid in college. He would only shower on Sundays and only do laundry when he went back home (which was maybe once a semester), so the entire suite smelled terrible due to his BO. That, along with all of the food he'd make in the room, made for an unbearable situation for my nostrils.

The kid would also oversleep, causing him to miss all of his morning exams, then he'd get cranky at everyone else for not waking him up. There was this one time when he was determined to not miss his exam, so he set alarms every two hours throughout the night and nobody in the suite got any sleep. Yet, somehow, the kid still missed his exam.

To this day, I cannot understand how he functioned as a human. We had some real issues with him because he impacted our everyday lives.

fireice113

When I first moved into my building, I had a next-door neighbor who used to blast his stereo at 2 am in the morning. He didn't care if he kept everyone up because "it was his time to do what he wanted". It took me and two other tenants to threaten the landlord with breaking our leases before he would do anything about the guy, but did that solve the problem? Nope.

It took calling the authorities and one of my neighbors actually breaking his lease before the landlord finally kicked him out of there.

CrotchWolf

I’ve lived in the same house for most of my life. My next-door neighbor is a sweet, elderly lady, but she had the most awful grandson imaginable. He'd always blast music and yell at her whenever he went over to her house. My bedroom faces their house, so I could hear it all. The craziest part is that the guy passed the week after I complained to my parents about him.

I felt horrible for complaining after I found out what happened, and I felt even worse when I realized my first reaction to his passing was: “Thank God I won’t ever be bothered by him again!”

Permalink

Before I was in school we lived in a trailer park and our neighbors were always loud, throwing parties. One night, when they were blasting their usual loud music and drinking with their friends, my dad went out and turned off the power. That ended the party. They had no idea it was my dad, and they simply thought they hadn't paid their electric bill.

My dad turned the power back on later at about 6 am the next morning and loud music started right back up. I was so proud of my dad, but we still needed to come up with a Plan B.

SparrowsArt

My neighbors climbed over my fence and into my yard when I was away on vacation to cut down an entire tree. According to them, the tree was interfering with their satellite TV signal. Total pieces of human trash.

nealotron

My mom used to grow her own tomatoes. They were amazing and delicious, and she was always so proud of them. We had them for years when I was a kid. Then, some new neighbors moved in. We never had any problems until they arrived. Their kids were spray-painting on our house, throwing junk in our yard, but the biggest sin of them all...

They took...Every. Single. Tomato. All eight of her plants. They were all totally bare. She was heartbroken and never grew tomatoes again.

Morbywoof

We had next-door neighbors who had rowdy kids, and they never did anything too bad...until one of their parents passed. That's when they became totally unhinged. Over the next few years, they caused us a number of problems. They vandalized the side of our house with graffiti, left lines of nails on our driveway, threw random objects through our windows, and launched water balloons filled with corn syrup and flour into our yard, just to name a few.

And it got even worse as time went on. The kids started selling illicit substances out of their house, and we had to deal with excessive noise as they threw large parties every weekend. They would sit on the front porch with their friends, screaming bad words at each other almost every weekday. We tried calling the authorities on them, and to our surprise, they were already aware of what the kids had been up to since they received calls from other people in the neighborhood.

Unfortunately, their mother covered for them. She'd somehow managed to gain the sympathy of the officers, and then she'd apologize to us privately after they left. All they could do was give them warnings—but that wasn't good enough for us. At one point, we finally decided to set up cameras around the entire perimeter of the house, and we specifically installed them at a time when the kids were outside.

We wanted them to see every camera go up. The moment they realized that they'd be caught on tape if they tried any of their nonsense again, the problems immediately stopped. It's been mostly peace and quiet (with a few exceptions) ever since.

cyrus_hunter

When I was a child, I didn't realize my neighbor was an addict. One time, while my family was about to start eating dinner, a woman opened my front door and screamed into the house: "Please, I need to use your phone to call the authorities!" She was frantic and crying with make-up running down her face. Turns out, she was someone that my neighbor had hired to spend the night with him.

At one point during their interaction, he pulled out a pistol and threatened her in some way. Eventually, he went to get another drink and she seized that opportunity to run to my house. There were other times when I saw him doing pretty horrible things, but this one stands out as it was the first time I saw someone in fear for their life.

jmperez920

One morning, I was in the shower getting ready for work when water started POURING into my bathroom. I mean, water blasting out of my sconce, shower tiles turning brown from being waterlogged, etc. I threw on shorts and ran down to the office. No one was there. I went to the maintenance office. Empty. I called every number for the company I was renting from. No answer.

Lastly, I went to my neighbor's apartment above me where this was coming from, but still no luck. By the time I got back to my place, the entire bathroom ceiling had collapsed and I had water damage visible in two other rooms and a whole hallway. I later found out that his girlfriend had nodded off while filling the bathtub to do laundry (despite there being a giant laundry room in the basement) and the water was running full blast while it overflowed.

She destroyed my apartment and damaged thousands of dollars worth of my stuff. She admitted to exactly what had happened. He came home and tried to talk his way out of it. The maintenance guy shut him down and told him he knew what had actually happened and that he was basically boned. He then made a throat-slashing gesture at me in view of the head of maintenance.

He got evicted as a result of the damage she did and the fact that he threatened to end me. But the nightmare still wasn't over. He blamed me for his eviction, so he started vandalizing my car by kicking off the side window. He slashed a tire as well.

ebimbib

When I was very young, we lived next door to an elderly couple and their adult daughter. The adult daughter had kids and grandkids of her own, but she had some personal issues and she couldn't live on her own with them. I don't remember how it started, but she would venture further and further into our property until one day, she walked right into our house while we were in the living room.

My mother was pregnant and babysitting other children at the time. She was so startled she jumped up and chased her out of the house. On another occasion, she came storming over to our house with a mop in her hand, determined to attack my mother. She had to call my uncle to come over and I remember him putting his entire body weight on the door to keep her out.

We called the authorities on her and she was taken away for psychiatric evaluation. After that, the officers had to come back to talk to my parents because, during her evaluation, she claimed that my mother had kidnapped her son and chained him in the basement. Obviously, none of that was true. After that, if we were playing outside and we saw her, we immediately ran into the house and locked the doors.

I don't know what her diagnosis was or why she was so fixated on my mother. We eventually moved when I was around 12.

xx1xx2xx3xx

Source: 1, 2

Back in early July, my family was going on a road trip to Montana to visit our grandparents. Prior to the trip, I had a horrible, horrible feeling about going. I kept having flashes of car accidents in my head, and I was sure that we were going to get in one if we left. It was so strange, because I have a pretty severe anxiety disorder, but this didn’t feel like my anxiety at all.

I actually never have anxiety about road trips. I love them! Anyway, we left Saturday of that week. I had told my parents I had a bad feeling about driving up there, but they dismissed me as being anxious. I had honestly never felt so certain about something in my life. Getting into that car felt like signing my end.

So, we get about six hours in, and at this point, I start to think I was being ridiculous, and a wave of calmness just washes over me. This is where stuff gets strange. My dad passes an underpass and everything just shifts. I feel like I saw everything in slow motion for a whole four or five minutes. My parents were joking beforehand, but their faces moved so slowly, and then the light in the car started to shift.

This was the scary part, because I thought I must have been going insane. For a few seconds, there was a huge illumination of light into our car, and I looked at my family, and could not tell who they were or what they meant to me. And then, it’s like everything just came back. The light shifted back, and I knew who everyone was.

Still, it felt like something imperceptible had completely changed. I closed my eyes and tried to make sense of the past few minutes. When I reached back to remember, I saw blood, our car, and another minivan in total shambles on the side of the highway right beyond the underpass, and mangled bodies—and that wasn’t all.

I remembered sensations I should not have known: what spattered brain matter looks like, the smell of something burning, the way I couldn’t breathe. None of it had ever happened, yet I remember that the car in front of us had switched lanes even though there was a truck in front of us, realized it at the last second, and hit us with a lateral impact.

I have no history of psychosis, and I have never been in any sort of car accident. This wasn’t PTSD, and I have never had anxiety over being in the car in any sort of way prior to this. And maybe I could have just brushed it off, but I still think about it when I’m driving in my own car. It’s made me a more cautious driver. I don’t know what happened, it was just a weird situation.

I remember having the distinct feeling in that moment that I had passed on in some sense. I am not a spiritually sensitive person by any means, I am a scientist at heart, but this truly was something I cannot explain.

Nestle13

This technically happened last night, but I was just starting a graveyard shift and am only now getting it all down. I work at a gas station chain. We're just outside of a large chunk of suburbs—definitely not "middle of nowhere". We aren't exactly near any other businesses, but we are rarely completely empty for hours at a time.

It was just past midnight, and with everything going on right now, not a lot of things other than gas stations and bars are open at night anymore, so it was a slower evening. I was the only one in the store and a car pulled up to one of the two double-sided pumps out front. The car was a pretty standard white four-door.

I'm not great with car brands, but it was a little nicer, like upper-middle class and probably only a few years old. A woman gets out and starts walking towards our door like she's in a daze. Legit, this woman looked like she saw a ghost. She wanders up, sort of freezes at the door for a second with a thousand-yard stare, before opening it and coming in.

She didn't go looking for anything, didn't start shopping, just sort of stood inside for what felt like ages. Again, bars are still open so I think maybe she's had a rough night or something, so I give the usual "Welcome, let me know if you need any help finding anything". She finally notices me and immediately asks me a question that makes my blood run cold.

She looks at me and says: "You can see me right?" I reply, "Yeah". Like what else do you say? She breaks down crying in the middle of my store, so I'm already headed around the counter to see what's up. I have my cellphone out in case I need to call law enforcement or something for her. I get her to sit down on a nearby pallet of soda and I grab her a bottle of water.

After she catches her breath a little, she tells me "I thought I had died". Again, I'm thinking maybe she is on something, but she's a middle-aged woman who looks like a standard local suburban housewife. So, she asks if she can call her husband to pick her up and wait with me. She has her own phone and does so, not really telling him anything either, just where she is at and if he can come get her.

He says he'll call an Uber and be there as soon as possible. We're waiting, so far nobody else has showed up, so I'm keeping most of my attention on her, and eventually, she starts to tell her utterly unforgettable story. She says, "I was driving home from dinner with my coworkers and as I'm driving through this nearby intersection, a truck ran a red light and hit me".

Now, her car is still at the pump without a scratch on it. She goes on to say she remembers her car being pushed into a pole, going airborne, and then nothing. I tried to calm her down, letting her know that her car is out front and it looks fine, but she insisted that she completely blacked out, woke up in an ambulance for a split second, passed out again, and then woke up again in the driver seat of her car—at the intersection waiting for the light to change, perfectly fine.

This whole thing freaked her out so badly that she drove to the nearest place that was open just so she could get out of the car. Her husband eventually showed up to get her. He asked if I had any idea what happened, and even though she had sort of explained it to me, I just shrugged because no, I had no idea what was happening anymore.

She reluctantly got into the passenger seat of the car and he drove them back home. That was hours ago, after which I worked an entire shift at the station trying to wrap my head around what in heaven’s name I had just witnessed.

TheKarmaDontMatter

A few years ago, I made a pen pal from another state through a website for that sort of thing. We talked a lot, with very extensive and specific letters, for about a year and some months. She told me about her childhood, her high school experiences, and what she was going through at the time. Her family, her house, her city; everything.

One day, she tells me that she was going on a vacation and couldn't send letters, so she sent me her Instagram handle in case of an emergency, or if I wanted to talk to her. Honestly, I had tried to find her before on social media, but her name and surname were too common. We were very close, and I didn't like talking to my pen pals on social media, but one day I wanted to tell her about an accomplishment I made.

So, I go to the username she sent me, but it didn't seem very active. She had no bio, no profile pic, and only one photo. I recognized her face, because we sent pictures of each other. I open the photo and see it was from 2016. It had so many comments. Weird, as she had almost no followers. I thought maybe this isn't her main account anymore.

But then I open the comments. All the comments were from family members and friends she had talked to me about. They were all giving their condolences and saying how much they missed her. I didn't know what to think, so I tried to look up what happened to her. Apparently, she’d been offed in early 2017…the year we started writing to each other.

I was thinking it was a bad joke, so I kept on writing letters as if nothing happened. I asked her specifically about 2017 though, if it had been a good year or not. She told me a lot of things that happened that year, and that she went out with a creepy guy for a while. After that, I got too freaked out and I stopped writing to her.

She stopped writing to me too. But it still haunts me, and I still don't understand what the heck happened there.

noah_idk

I live in a very small town. We have a small grocery store, hardware store, you know the drill. I was done getting groceries and hopped in my car to head home. As I pulled up to the end of the driveway of the store, blinker on to get onto the main road, I see a big, white, lifted Chevy pickup driving toward me that I need to wait for.

I watch it as drives closer to me, remarking to myself that it looks so similar to my husband's, just older and rusted around the edges. It even has the same black emblem and large iron cross bumper. As the truck goes past me, my jaw nearly fell open. Staring at me intently was a man almost identical to my husband...but with a longer, greying beard, and grey hair around the ears.

I quickly gathered myself together and pulled out behind the truck and up to the stop sign that followed. He was staring at me still in his side mirror. Glancing away and then staring at me again. He took off like a shot the first chance he got, and I tried to follow to see which direction he took, but a car was coming and I couldn't get out behind him in time.

The truck sped off toward my road, but I don't know if he turned in that direction or not. I know that it's a little crazy, but I couldn't help feeling the total connection I feel with my husband when I saw his reflection in that side mirror staring at me. It gives me goosebumps to think about it because it was like he knew that I was me, and I was the wrong age, and that he needed to get out of there before I could follow him.

I got home and my husband was there, working in his woodshop. I told him about it and he chuckled and asked if he looked hot when he was old. I mean...he did if it was really him!

heckarooni1288

I'd like to preface this by saying my husband is an electrical engineer and I'm a teacher. Also, we're not crazy people. So, back when my husband and I were dating, my husband was in a terrible car crash. His truck hit black ice and he slid into oncoming traffic. His truck was completely totaled. So was the other truck he hit.

The weird thing is, both he and the other guy were completely fine. Not a scratch on them. All my husband had was a bruise on his knee. The first responders were baffled, as were the towing company and insurance when they realized no one had lost their lives or been severely injured. Fast forward to a few days after the crash, my husband comes over to my apartment.

We're having a conversation about a university class we're both in and he casually asks when I got the flatscreen TV sitting on my dresser. At this point, I've very confused because I've had the little flat screen since I was 13 and I’d had it the entire year and a bit we'd been dating. I asked him what he's talking about, as I've always had that TV.

He told me to quit pulling his leg and asked me what I did with the old tube TV? I had no idea what he was talking about and told him so. He's convinced I had a tube TV. I proceed to get on Facebook and showed him a picture we had taken two weeks prior with the TV in the background. It's a flatscreen in the picture. His reaction was terrifying.

My husband goes white like he's seen a ghost and just stares into space for a minute. His eyes started to water. I asked him what's wrong and he said: "I swear to god, I'm not crazy. You've had a tube TV since we started dating. It was a tube TV when we took that picture". I brushed it off as his head being rattled from the accident and he didn't bring it up again.

However, anytime we hung out in my room, he'd always look at the TV just a little weird. Fast forward seven years, my husband and I have been married for a few years and decide that we're ready to be parents. I'm not on birth control and we decide whatever happens, happens. We're not actively trying, but not preventing it either.

So we're on vacation in Italy, wandering around Rome and I feel like garbage. I’d had my period the week before and it was the worst one I had had in my whole life. As we're walking around, I am suffering from back pain, chills, and horrific cramping. I go to the bathroom in a cafe and hurl my guts out, have diarrhea, and realize I'm menstruating, heavily.

Obviously I'm weirded out, since I had just had my period the week before. I clean myself up go back to my husband and tell him I think I need a doctor. I have a pretty high pain tolerance but this is insane. It's getting to the point where I'm having trouble walking and I'm starting to feel pain in my shoulders. I don't want to ruin our vacation, but I'm starting to really worry.

My husband is smarter than me, sees the state I'm in, and says I'm visibly paler than when I went into the bathroom, so he gets me help. 20 minutes later I'm on a stretcher and being taken to the hospital. An hour after that, I get the diagnosis, and it’s terrifying. I'm being prepped for emergency surgery as the doctor tells me I have a ruptured ectopic pregnancy.

I have heavy internal bleeding and if he doesn't perform surgery I am not going to make it. Six hours later, I wake up very sore and tired. The doctor tells me I've very lucky, and if I had waited any longer to seek medical attention I'd be a goner. My husband stays with me in the hospital the first night, then gets a hotel for the rest of my stay.

A week later we're cleared to fly home and I go through a grueling month of healing from the surgery. Two months after our return, somehow my husband and I get on the topic of fires. He goes on about the dangers of kitchen fires and I say, "No need to worry, we're all set with the extinguisher in the closet". His reaction freaks me out agan.

He looks at me like I have three heads and asks me what I'm talking about. I remind him about the extinguisher in the front closet where we keep the coats. We've had it for three years. He insisted we buy one when we bought our house. My husband shakes his head and tells me he has no idea what I'm talking about and we don't have a fire extinguisher.

I remind him about my memories of fighting about if we really needed one, where to put it, buying it from Home Depot, and also installing it to the wall in the closet. He looks at me with confusion and tells me none of that happened. I get up, go to front closet to show it to him, all the while cursing him for being an jerk for forgetting our two-week fight about it and lo and behold: no extinguisher.

Not only is there no extinguisher, there are no holes in the wall where I know we installed it. No fresh paint, this wall has never been touched...I insist he's moved it and fixed the wall and ask why in heaven’s name he would play such a stupid prank. He continues to insist we've never had one, let alone talked about getting one.

This goes on for several minutes. I'm approaching hysterics, telling him to quit playing with me when finally he says: "Now you know how I feel about that TV". We didn't speak about it for a long time. Later, he brought up his theory that perhaps in another timeline or dimension, or whatever you want to call it, we both actually passed after our related near-misses.

He thinks we reset like a video game and the TV and extinguisher are glitches. I don't know if I agree with him, all I know is that I have never been so rattled in my whole life and every time I get something out of the closet I'm overwhelmed with this feeling of wrongness. I know it should be there but somehow it's just not. I can't explain it. He says he will go to his grave swearing I had a tube TV.

TheCurvedWritingDesk

About a year ago I was at work, helping two customers fill out some paperwork. They were both Chinese, but one spoke zero English, and the other was translating for him. I sat the paper in front of them and looked down to grab a pen. As I was looking down, I heard one of them say, clear as day, "Where do I sign my name?"

So, I looked up with the pen and said, "You sign your name right here, sir". The translator looked shocked and said, "You speak Mandarin?" I had no idea what to say. I was just as confused and shocked as he was. I made up an excuse and said, "I assumed that's what he said," to hide how mind blown I was, but no, I completely heard and understood him.

I don't think he believed me either because he was giving me that look still. It still freaks me out to this day.

Danimal147

So, this happened about seven or eight years ago. My husband and I were laying in the bed one night, watching television. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a child in the doorway of our bedroom. Thinking it was our only child at the time, I tapped my hubby and said “Hey, shhhh, don’t look, but I think Connor is going to try to scare us!”

He turns and looks, and this child walked into our room. I can’t explain it, because it was one of those moments that seemed...somehow different. We watched in silence, soon realizing that this child was NOT our son. He toddles in, head slightly tilted back, curls bouncing and diaper squishing as he goes to the end of our bed.

We see his head go down, like he was crouching, and when we got up to look, he was gone. I looked at my husband and said, “Did we just see a ghost?!” Then, almost as an afterthought, I said, “Well, we know if we have another baby, and he has curls, that he was here before he was born". We both laugh, because we were not trying for another baby at the time.

Fascinated, we go to check on our son, and he was fast asleep. We forget the whole thing, and a few months later, we find out that I’m pregnant. Fast forward to when our new baby, Liam, is two. He toddles in the room, head titled slightly back and curls bouncing, and it hit me like a bucket of ice water. This is the baby that came to visit us!

I mean, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind—but the story doesn’t stop there. Now, on top of that, whenever Liam is staying the night elsewhere, like with my parents, he comes to visit me in my sleep. For example, one time he came and just smiled at me while I was taking a nap. He was in a little red shirt, and his hair was cut short, even though he left with it long.

The next day, I go to pick the kiddos up from mom, and lo and behold—his hair is freshly shorn and he is wearing a little red shirt. I asked my mom, “Did he wear this yesterday?” And she replies “Oh, yeah he did, but he insisted on wearing it today, so here he is". So, I look at him and say, “Did you go see momma yesterday in momma’s dreams?” He just looked at me, all big blue eyes and serious, and nodded his head.

VenusValkyrieJH

Me and my girlfriend have been living together in an apartment for two and a half years. Everything has been normal until recently, when things took a bizarre turn. For instance, for the last three weeks or so, my girlfriend has been putting sugar in her morning coffee, while throughout our entire relationship she's always been very much against it.

It may seem like a small detail, but she's always been complaining about how I don't know what real coffee is since I put quite a lot of sugar. On the first day that I saw her drinking coffee with sugar, I asked her why would she do that, and she looked at me weirded out and said something like "What are you talking about? I've always been putting sugar in my coffee".

I felt a bit confused for a moment, but then we started talking about some other things, so I didn't think any more about it. Until, that is, the morning after, when she did the exactly same thing, and had once again the same reaction. Fast forward a few days and another odd thing happened. We were doing the deed and she suddenly suggested a position that we had already tried once, but it had gone wrong and it hurt her a lot, so we had simply decided not to try it anymore.

Naturally, I was very surprised with her suggestion, and reminded her about the time when it went wrong, and she just completely dismissed it, saying that I probably mixed her up with some ex-girlfriend or that I was just tripping. Today, the weirdest thing happened, which is the reason I'm writing this. In the afternoon, I was working at home.

I'm employed as a PhD student at the computer science department of a university. My girlfriend asked me what's up with a guy who I've never heard of before. I asked her who is she referring to and she said "Well, it's that colleague of yours who you always talk about, the one from the company where you are employed at".

I froze. I asked her to repeat herself, and she said the exact same thing all over again. Then I told her that I don't work at any company nor have I ever worked at any company, since I started a PhD straight after my Master degree. At this point, she also completely froze and we were just staring at each other completely confused and shocked for a few moments.

She then asked me what the heck is going on and I reminded her about the coffee thing and about the position and that I don't know what is going on either. At this point, she started crying too, and asked what is wrong with us. Neither she, nor me nor anyone in both families have ever had any mental problems in the past. We don't know what to do about this.

This happened in 2009, when I was 16 years old. It was the first weekend of summer, and nobody was home when I woke up at around 11 am. I grabbed a snack and went down to the basement to watch TV. I had plans to hang out with a friend at 3 pm that day. Like I said before, I started watching TV at around 11, knowing I had four hours before I was supposed to head over to my friend’s house.

I had only been watching TV for about 30 minutes when my mom came down the stairs asking me where I'd been all day. I said what are you talking about, I've been awake for less than an hour? I look at my watch and see that it's well past 5 in the afternoon. I run upstairs and check my phone to see that I have several missed calls from my friend and my mom.

My mom's side of the story is what makes me nauseous when I think about this, even to this day. She was with my little brother at his baseball game from 1-3 that day. She and my brother WERE home when I "supposedly" woke up and went down to the basement, but neither of them have any memory of even seeing me that morning.

When my mom got home at around 3, she checked the entire house for me, including the basement where I had been sitting on the couch watching TV. It's been 10 years and I still have no idea what happened on that day. It is by far the weirdest thing that's ever happened to me, and although I talk about it with my family like it's a funny little thing that happened, it genuinely chills me to my bones thinking about it.

LegitimatePick3

I had a dream that I was back in high school, at the beginning of first year. Everything was exactly the same, except I had the memories of my life after high school. In the dream I told all of my class that I was from the future but no one would believe me. Only one friend who was very, very smart said that time travel is theoretically possible. This is where it gets weird.

The next day, when I told my friends about it, their jaws dropped. They said that back in junior year, I was acting weird one day, asking time travel questions. They told me I said I come from the future. They also said that I was somehow out of it, that I was there—but at the same time, I kinda wasn’t. I saw the shock in their eyes when I told them what I dreamed.

They even recounted some of the details in the dream that I didn’t tell them. The weirdest thing is that I barely remember that day. I remember some of the stuff that also happened in the dream, but that day is kinda foggy to me. Maybe my friends are joking with me, but I have known them for 15 years and I know a genuine reaction when I see one.

StringTrip

In early December 2015, my now ex-boyfriend’s mother passed in her home following surgery and other health problems related to her heart. She was born with a rare condition. Unfortunately, she went into cardiac arrest and we were unable to save her, so the event in and of itself was extremely unexpected.

A couple of nights later, we decided to go see some friends who wanted to offer their condolences to my ex. Everyone loved his mom. We were all sitting in our friends’ living room watching TV and, to be honest, they were really trying to distract us from everything. One friend, Amy, was just being her goofy self, and I was taking Snapchat videos.

I distinctly remember taking a video of Amy. I saved the video, but when I looked at my screen to watch it, it wasn’t Amy. It was a grainy video with a background that appeared to be outside, and 100% not in a living room, but on the screen was my ex’s mom. She said the words, “I’m okay baby. I’m okay” and multiple other friends saw it on my phone before it disappeared.

She looked young and vibrant and had a huge smile on her face. Someone had tossed my phone to another friend across the couch to see, and the video then disappeared. When we watched the original video back immediately after, my ex’s mom was gone. It was Amy in the video again just like I had seen while recording it in the first place.

My ex and his mom had a very close relationship, best friends really, so when we saw her on my screen letting him know she was okay...it was astounding. I saw it first and everyone noticed I was visibly upset. I cannot imagine what went through my ex’s mind and heart when he saw that, but to this day, it’s something we talk about and something he shares with new friends.

It’s something we simply cannot explain other than her coming through in a glitch to let us know she was okay.

This occurred when I was about 13 or so. My family was moving into a new home, and we were having trouble with a bookshelf that was a little too big, tall, and wide for the doorway. We eventually had to take it apart and bring it in piece by piece. The shelf went into my sister's room, and she helped put it together. Here is where it gets creepy.

She used the shelf for her books and stuffed animal collection. I left her as she was putting things onto the higher shelves, using a kitchen chair to reach that high. As soon as I stepped through the door, there was a huge, loud crash. I'm thinking the bookshelf fell on her, or she lost her balance and fell, so I check.

She is standing with her back against the wall, and she looks terrified. I peek further in...and there is no shelf. It was completely gone. Her things were heaped on the floor in that spot. The chair somehow teleported back into the kitchen. My sister and I are the only ones that heard the crash. And worst of all? Not one person in our family remembers ever having that bookshelf.

AccordingFault8

If I told you what I saw last night you would not believe me. Like, I can't even wrap my head around it. It was the scariest thing I've ever experienced. I can't even talk about it without sounding crazy. So here it goes. I went to do laundry around 2 am with my oldest son. After we put the laundry in, we went to a McDonald's drive-thru to get something to drink.

The drive-thru was packed with about five or six cars ahead of us. I noticed none of the cars were moving forward, and it had been like five minutes already. So, I decided to go around the car in front of me to the next drive-thru lane—this McDonald's has two lanes. As I'm pulling around the car in front of me, I look into their car, only to be greeted by a truly horrifying sight.

I kid you not, both the driver and the passenger looked like corpses. Their heads were tilted all the way back, eyes shut, and they were not moving. I freaked out and tried to pull out of the drive-thru entirely, going around the other cars just to get out of there—but things didn’t end there. In the next car I passed, all the passengers looked the same! Heads tilted back, eyes shut.

I panicked, thinking maybe they were all shot, so I hit the gas and got the heck out of there. I couldn't fathom what happened and I could barely speak. I was hyperventilating, so my son called 9-1-1 and told them what happened. They sent an officer to check. A few minutes later, the officer called us back said everything was fine at McDonald's.

Mind you, my son saw it too. We both saw the car in front of us where the people looked like zombies. This was terrifying. It literally looked like one of those rapture movies, or end of the world type stuff. Needless to say, I can't wrap my head around what we saw or why. I'm still scared. I know I'm not crazy, because my son saw it too—but it feels crazy to even say it.

ntorres2020

Just a few days ago, I woke up in the morning and opened my door, only to find my mother there with a shocked and worried expression, and tears in her eyes. She asked me where the heck I had been and I said that I’d been sleeping right here in my bed. She didn't believe me, and said she’d checked and I hadn’t been there.

So apparently, my family woke up in the morning and I didn't come for breakfast. My dad went into my room and just saw the blanket and pillow—I do sleep with my blanket on my face. Then, my mom came to wake me up. When she took the blanket off, no one was there . Then she panicked and told my dad. They searched the entire house and tried calling me, nothing worked.

Then they asked the neighbors if they had seen me leaving, but the neighbors couldn't help. My mom was very afraid at that point, and they called law enforcement. My dad had gone to the station to file the report in person, and that was around the time that I woke up. We called my dad and told him I was back. He wanted an explanation, and I couldn't give him one.

I said I had just been sleeping, then I woke up, and this whole thing has happened. While I do sleep with the blanket covering my whole body and head, my mom insisted that she took the blanket off the bed and I hadn’t been there. We are all very shaken up still.

iselenaii

My dad works for animal control, and is often called to jobs suddenly. He was called to his female friend’s house one night unknowingly. He showed up to the house and a ton of law enforcement officers were there. That’s when he made a devastating realization. When someone is suspected to be deceased, animal control is often sent in first to get the animals out, just in case they attack, etc.

Anyway, he went in and made a disturbing discovery. Someone had come in and taken his friend's life—but the story didn’t end there. Later, in the middle of the night, my parents got a call on the house phone and my dad answered it. What he heard made his blood run cold. It was his friend’s voice, and she was screaming, yelling, and begging for her life.

He thought she said her boyfriend’s name at one point. My dad was very upset by the phone call. The officers he’d met that night later contacted him to say that her boyfriend had been the one to do it. He still can’t explain it.

cmw19933

My mom and I were on the highway driving home, and there was a semi truck in the lane next to us. Suddenly, the semi swerved into our lane. Luckily, my mom was able to get out of the way before it hit us—but soon after, I began feeling strange. The entire right side of my face felt hot and sticky, I tasted blood, and smelled the very pungent scent of gasoline.

Then my head and right arm started to ache really badly, and I couldn’t feel my legs. Just as soon as the pain started to worsen, it went away. It was replaced with a cold, eerie chill. I told my mom about this, and she couldn’t come up with an explanation. I think I was feeling the pain from another timeline where my mom wasn’t able to avoid that semi.

ProtectorKDraco

This happened in January 2015, when I was three months pregnant with our first son. My husband woke me extremely excited—manic, you could say. He yelled, "Where were you?" It was no later than 4 AM, so I was very disoriented, and immediately started an argument, which ended with me really not remembering going to bed the night before.

When we talked more about it, I realized two days had passed, and I had a complete blackout. The last thing I remembered was throwing out leftovers from the food we ordered for dinner. It was about 7 pm, and my husband went to get his car back from the mechanic. He said I okayed him calling Uber from my phone, but I can't recall that.

He told me that when he came back, I was nowhere to be found. My keys, wallet and phone were there, but I was gone. He immediately went to the only neighbor we used to hang out with at a time, but I wasn't there either. He waited a few more hours, and called law enforcement. From what he said, the next two days were the worst experience of his life.

The hospital kept calling (I'm a nurse), friends I made plans with called, yet no one had any idea where I was. On the third day, I just appeared in our bed in jammies. The door was locked, and my husband didn't even sleep. He was pacing around the house all night. I didn't lose my job, and we had no problems with the authorities, but to this day, I can't figure out what could've happened.

RingingShay

My husband recently took an overnight job to help us out. He's only been there about two weeks and works evenings/overnights, 9 pm-6 am. Last night was no different, and he left home around 8:15pm. Our 11-year-old daughter and I decided to make it a movie night. Around 11 pm, I heard keys in my backdoor and the usual sounds my husband makes when he comes home.

I creep out to the kitchen to make sure it was him, and it was. He told me he needed to grab his knee compression sleeve, walks down the hall, says hi to our daughter as he passes the living room, and goes upstairs. He came back down, gave me a kiss and left again. We finished our movie and went to bed. In the morning when he got home, I made a joking comment about him forgetting his knee sleeve.

He was genuinely confused as I recalled the previous night. Our daughter confirmed everything I said and he still was acting confused. I pulled up our security motion camera on my phone to show him when he popped in quick. That’s when I made a disturbing discovery. There was no footage from the night before, or any other night, of him coming home after he’d already left for work.

My daughter and I both heard him, saw him, and I touched him. But he was never home during that time. Nothing else out of the ordinary happened that night. We seriously have no idea what happened.

worthlesscommotion

Not long ago, I was sitting on the couch as my dog walked by to go sit on her bed, which we have behind the “L” part of the sectional. She had something small caught in her throat last night, I think a popcorn shell, so I was paying attention to her breathing just to make sure she got it out. For a few minutes she was breathing fine, and then what sounded like a light snore started happening.

This is semi-normal for her depending on what position she’s laying in, so I didn’t bother to go over and check on her. That went on for about five minutes, until the most disgusting—and to my now realization, terrifying—snore/cough/wheezing sound started happening. I go over to her to make sure she’s okay, and the exact moment I looked at her bed the sound stopped “mid-breath,” and she wasn’t there.

She was outside with my parents, abd had been for around 30 minutes. There’s no way to get out of the room without walking right past me. I don’t know who’s freaking dog I saw, and what was making that creepy sound five feet away from me, but I’m going to be staying outside for the rest of the day, and hiring an exorcist.

So this evening, my partner and I were upstairs sorting laundry, when his daughter called us downstairs, as dinner was ready. I was heading down the stairs, my partner right behind me, literally two steps behind me. He did his usual thing of tickling the back of my neck as we walked. The bottom of our stairs is wooden so you can hear when somebody steps onto it from the carpeted stairs.

When we got to the bottom, my feet hit the floor as usual. I turned to ask him something...and he wasn't there. He wasn't freaking there. I totally froze for a second and looked up the stairs, and there he was. On the top step, pale and shaking. I asked him what the heck just happened and he kept saying: "I don't know, I don't know, I was behind you and before I hit the bottom, the next step took me back upstairs!"

We are very freaked out. I just can’t explain it.

PotatoPixie90210

For a bit of context, my eyesight is horrible. Even half a foot in front of my face is nothing but blurry color. Yesterday, my mom and brother picked me up to go to an appointment. I was running a little late, so didn’t have time to put my contacts in/do my makeup and was getting ready on the drive. So, while mom was driving I was in the passenger seat with the mirror down.

I took off my glasses to apply my eyeshadow. My brother, who was sitting behind me, asked me a question and I turned to look back at him. When I turned my head back around, I quickly finished my eyeshadow and shut the mirror. I was looking out my window at the farmland just off the road and thinking how beautiful it was.

That’s when I suddenly realized that I hadn’t put my glasses back on, they were sitting on the dashboard. As soon as I had the realization, my perfect vision went back to being just blurred colors. It was instant, like flipping a switch on my sight. It was so shocking that I actually screamed. My outburst startled my mom and brother, so I told them what had just happened.

They said they believed me, but couldn’t think of a rational reason for it. We tried to figure it out for the rest of the drive but honestly couldn’t. To be honest, if there’s some secret to magically fixing my eyesight that I accidentally stumbled upon, then I wish I could find it again!

Valkyrjae

I was on my way to run some errands, riding in my car while on the phone with this friend. I remember the weather being super weird, cloudy but hot—I don’t really know how to describe it, but it felt like the air had some kind of heaviness to it. While I was talking to her, she said a few sentences to which I replied in agreement.

Suddenly, she starts saying the same exact sentences she just said 30 seconds earlier, only in a different tone and pace. It really sounded like she was repeating herself and not like the actual voice glitched and repeated, which is what made it even creepier. So at this point, everything became fuzzy and weird, almost as if I lost sense of time.

In the meantime, I heard my ringtone for text messages going off a few times through the earpiece, but I decided to check them out later on. So, I go on and tell her I’m pretty sure that she already said all of those things to me. The most unsettling thing is that her voice would stop whenever I tried telling her this, as if she was actually listening.

Then, she would continue on repeating herself as soon as I’d go silent, without saying anything about the fact she was repeating herself over and over. It was like talking to someone who was purposely trying not to answer. It felt incredibly odd, especially considering each sentence was slightly different than the previous one, but the meaning kept on being the same.

That’s when I lost her completely. The line gets cut off, so I go check the messages I received earlier. It turns out they were actually from her. Two of them were missed calls, and the last one said I should call her back as soon as I could. I was still actively talking to her at the same time that she was asking me to call her back. It’s definitely one of the most bizarre things that’s ever happened to me.

searchlight01

I have four kids. I know I have four kids, but recently I just feel like there should be another one—but it’s missing. When we go out, I headcount and get flustered because I can’t find the extra one. I have to consciously remind myself there are only four, but my heart just doesn’t believe it. Well, I just put it down as one of those weird feelings and pushed it aside.

But then, weird things start happening. My parents sent some money to my kids. They sent $500. I called them and asked them why they sent so much. They were confused and said that they told me they were sending $100 per kid. I reminded them that I only have four kids. They were silent for a moment then just kind of laughed.

They said they must be getting old because they were thinking there was five—and that’s not all. Tonight, my daughter walked into the lounge room. She looked around said, “I know we’re all here but our family feels small". My son agreed. I hadn’t said anything to anyone about my feelings lately, because they already think I’m ancient and forgetful at 40, but I can’t shake it.

for-the-weirdstuff

I've decided I should share my stories about my little sister. We'll call her Diana here, for safety reasons. My little sister has Down's Syndrome. From my understanding about DS, many people with it are on the Autistic spectrum. My sister is considered high-functioning Autistic as well as having DS. Our mom had tons of difficulties with her pregnancy with Diana. On top of that, there were multiple strange occurrences while she was pregnant with her.

The main one being that, at around six months along in the pregnancy, our mom walked into her bathroom to find the box holding her wedding dress on the floor. That box had been in the attic since we had moved into that house. No one in the house knew how it got there. Mom started having contractions just after that incident, and started bleeding.

Dad took her to the ER, and after a day of her being in intensive care and having multiple tests done, my parents discovered that Diana has DS. After mom gets out of the hospital, she sits me and my older sisters down to talk to us about this, telling us that Diana will have an "abnormality" (her words), and explains to us that she will be different than "other" kids.

I remember very clearly that everyone but me was crying. I remember saying something along the lines of "but none of us are normal". Mind you, I was 12 and for sure my family is not very normal. Fast forward: Diana is born premature. I believe she was born at seven months, but could be off a bit. She has a ton of medical issues and has to have surgery immediately after being born.

She was in NICU for the first two months of her life. We finally get to bring her home after she recovers. She was the tiniest little thing. By the time Diana was about six months old, my parents started doing physical and speech therapy with her, because she wasn't developing the way a "normal" baby would have been by that age, I guess.

I remember we were learning sign language with her until she was about two years old because my mom was afraid she wouldn't be verbal. Mom couldn't have been more wrong! Diana started babbling by about eight months, and she'd always just lay flat on her back and "talk" to the ceiling, and just giggle like someone was playing with her.

Mom always joked that Diana was "talking to angels". Fast forward again to when Diana is about three or four years old. My mom, Diana, and myself are at a little Christmas party at a place for disabled people, where Diana took classes and the rest of us volunteered. The three of us are sitting in these pews waiting for Santa Claus to come on stage, so all the kids can go have their photo taken with him.

Out of nowhere, Diana stands up and runs away from my mom and me, into the crowd. We chase her, and she runs straight toward this older woman we had never met. Diana grabs the woman's leg and starts bawling. My mom and I are apologizing to the woman, saying we don't know what got into her. The woman looks down at Diana and asks her what's wrong.

This is where it gets weird. Diana tells her, word for word, in the clearest way I had heard her speak: "I'm so sorry that your mommy left you". The woman starts tearing up, and tells us that her mother had passed a couple of nights prior after a long battle with cancer. Well, that’s not the only time she freaked us out.

I was visiting with my mom and Diana when she was about 10. Diana starts telling me how she talks to grandpa all the time, even though he passed when she was about five. She starts telling me that she met grandpa’s wife. Grandpa's wife, our step-grandmother, was still alive at this point, and that's the only grandma Diana ever knew.

So, I tell her, "Of course, you've met grandma". She corrects me and says, "No, mommy's mommy". My mom and I both froze. That grandmother had passed when our mom was pregnant with my older sister, meaning none of us had ever met her. So our mom starts asking Diana questions about grandma. She asks, "What color was my mommy's hair?”

Diana responds "Yellow, but not real". My mom goes on to explain to me that grandma wore wigs, because she had been balding after years of battling anorexia, and she always wore big blonde wigs. So, mom asks Diana, "Do you know grandma's name?" She says "Jeannie," which was in fact our grandmother's name.

Diana had never heard about Jeannie before. It's a very sore subject to bring up around our mom, so none of us really know much about her. There have been so many other instances of her just knowing things. When I was in a very toxic relationship—that none of my family knew about—she once called me in the middle of the night.

She was crying hysterically that I needed to leave my house and "come home". Sadly, she was right. After that phone call, my fiancé came home and beat the tar out of me. I left him after that, and honestly can't say I would have had the strength to leave had it not been for that call from my little sister. Even to this day, she says she talks to grandma, grandpa, and other people who have passed.

meta_metalhead

This Wednesday, on the way to work, I went to my usual gas station. I go there every day, five days a week. Well, when I went in, everything was different. All new drink stations have been installed and the food area is completely redone. None of this was different on Tuesday morning and I couldn't believe that they'd redone a whole gas station in one night.

I then go outside and see that two gas pumps are completely gone and there are mulch bags stacked, taking up all the space. None of this was there the day before. I then leave and head to work. Somehow, I turn on the wrong street and get lost. I've been driving these neighborhoods for months, and suddenly I'm lost trying to find my workplace.

I get to work a few minutes later, and I'm starting to panic. I know it sounds silly, but I've always feared changing timelines. My fiancé and I have a timeline safe word, so we know we are together. I call and ask him, and his answer makes me sure that my worst nightmare is coming true. He has no idea what I'm talking about.

We just talked about it at the end of last month, and we've had it established for a while. I've even woken him up at night and asked him after having a nightmare and he's known. But now, he has no idea what I'm talking about. Then the girls start coming downstairs—I work in a group home—and one girl keeps saying how confused she is and how nothing makes sense today.

Later in the day another resident kept saying all she wanted to do was cry and she had no idea why. Then, while running errands, I go down the same street I always do and suddenly there are four houses gone and a grove of trees planted. I've never seen them before and really started freaking. They are next to a building my family owned for the last 20 years.

I know the whole neighborhood—but I hadn’t even hit my final straw yet. I called my mom. She said my sister was going out tonight with her friend Jenna. I have known Jenna since 2003. I asked how much longer until Jenna gives birth. My mom goes silent and asks what the heck I'm talking about. She says she's never been pregnant.

I look her up online, nothing. I ask my sister just a half hour ago and she laughs in my face and says Jenna is infertile and will never have kids. I literally remember the day my sister told me Jenna was pregnant. My sister had told me to guess who, and Jenna had been my third guess. What the heck is happening to my life???

pmmebirthdaydogs

For a few weeks before this while out driving, I’ve observed pedestrians standing at the traffic lights who will reach into their pocket and look at their phone as they’re walking across the road when the light goes green. Nothing significant or strange about this, just one of those mundane things you notice while going about your day.

Today I was driving with my daughter and we stopped at a red light at a crossing and there was a man standing there. Nothing out of the ordinary, denim jacket, black cap, glasses, around 6’2” tall. I thought I’d try to weird out my young daughter, so I came up with a plan. She’s five, so I knew I was going to blow her mind.

I said “See that man? When the walking man goes green and he starts to walk across, he’ll reach into his pocket and pull out his phone and start looking at it. Watch and see". I still can’t explain what happened next. As he walks across, he reaches into his pocket but then immediately takes his hand out.

He looks and points right at me with his mouth open smiling, like a “gotcha!” stance. Of course, my daughter found this absolutely hilarious and I sat there completely mind blown. I must’ve sat there in silence looking at him walk across for the next 10 seconds. I drove on and had a look at him as I drove past and he was smirking and laughing.

I’ve been playing it through my head all day. The windows were up. The radio was on. I wasn’t shouting. My voice was not even remotely raised. He must’ve been about 15-20 feet away from me. I can’t figure out at all how he could’ve heard me. It’s literally impossible. How did he know I was trying to predict he’d reach into his pocket for his phone?

I’ve stopped telling people about the story I’m about to share because everyone assumes I’m making it up or had a stroke or something, but I sincerely feel like it must have just been a glitch in the matrix. This thing happened to me when I was a senior in high school. Let me preface this by saying I was basically a great student and well-behaved teenager.

I never used any kind of substances, was extremely responsible, no mental health issues, wasn’t overtired or under stress, no history of seizures or any other medical problems. So here it goes...Classes at my high school went from 9-4 each day and we had four classes per day. I took a calculus course that was only offered outside of normal school hours from 7:00-8:30.

Then I had an off period where I was permitted to leave campus from 9:00-10:30, and then needed to be back on campus for second period by 10:37. I usually woke up around 6:15, got ready, left around 6:45 and was able to make it to class on time. We had assigned parking so I knew I would have a spot right by my math class.

Some of my friends were in my class so I always got dressed, put on makeup, etc. before class even though it was early. After class, I would always drive back home around 8:30 and study after making myself breakfast, then leave again by 10:15 to be back on time. Well this one day...I sort of just “woke up” in the hallway of my school right before second period.

I ran into my friends and someone asked where my backpack/books were. I literally never used my locker and instead just carried my school work with me at all times. I realized at that point that I didn’t have any of my school stuff, and wasn’t even really dressed for school. I was wearing a t-shirt and basketball shorts, which isn’t something I would typically wear and was usually what I slept in.

I didn’t have my car keys or cell phone. I didn’t have anything with me at all, and I didn’t know where any of these things might be. Even weirder—I didn’t have any memory of driving back to school. I did remember getting dressed and going to my early math class that morning, then returning home afterwards, but had no idea what happened after that.

I instantly felt very anxious and confused about what was happening. I told my friends I had to go and went out to my car to see if it would jog my memory or I could find...anything. When I got to my car, it was locked but was in the right spot. My car was an older model that could only be locked in one of two ways—you could manually press down the lever on each door, or you could turn the key on the driver side door to the right and it would lock all of the doors.

No key fob or anything. Because the door was locked and I always used the keys to lock it, I assumed my keys were somewhere at the school. I had no idea how to trace my steps without any memory before waking up in the hallway, but I went to my math class, looked around and couldn’t find them, and used my teacher’s phone to call my dad, who had the spare.

I told my dad I didn’t really know what was going on but I was locked out of my car at school and had forgotten my school work at home so I needed him to bring me the spare. He was annoyed and asked where my keys where, and sounded really surprised when I said I didn’t know. He eventually made it up to the school and let me into my car.

He looked around the car after letting me in, and suddenly pointed to my back seat where he saw...my car keys. Just sitting there on the seat. At this point he became concerned and asked if everything was okay, and if I was trying to avoid school for some reason. I tried to explain that nothing was wrong, I wasn’t sick or anything, but was near tears.

I was trying to explain that I would never be able to leave my keys in the back seat because I ALWAYS used the key to lock the doors when I got out. But then it got even more weird. When I went to start the car, the battery was gone. We couldn’t find anything that was left on to drain the battery, but it wouldn’t even start when my dad tried to jump it with his car.

So we had to go buy a new battery. My dad was a little spooked and said maybe the doors lock as a safety feature when the battery goes...but that makes no sense, because how could they? So how had all the doors to my car been locked with the keys in the back? Why was my battery drained when I didn’t leave anything on in my car?

Why was I basically back in my pajamas even though I had gone to class that morning in jeans? And worst of all...why did I have no memory of any of this? It was as though all the details of my morning got scrambled and rearranged out of order, or there was some kind of electrical short in the universe. We never did figure out what happened that day, and when I brought it up a few years later, my dad just said “that was a really weird day".

RealAustinNative

My partner and I were getting in bed the other night. He was getting in on his side, and he stopped and sat on the edge for a second. He looked over at me and simply smiled, very lovingly. For whatever reason, there was a very quick shift, and as I was looking at him, like a flash, he morphed into an older version of himself/

His face had matured, but it was still absolutely him. His hair was a little longer and graying. Even his corrective lenses had changed, but were a similar style. It was only a millisecond. But it was SO REAL. He was smiling at me. And it was as if I saw him 20 years from now, in a similar moment. My heart almost skipped a beat. He could tell I was suddenly shaken up, but I waved it off.

bi3rd

Five years ago, my best friend passed unexpectedly. We had a wake for him following the service, at a friend’s house in the country. I'm sitting in a lawn chair, just before dusk, my first drink in my hand. There was a guy taking photos of everyone, and I happened to look over at a group with five guys in back, four in front, getting their photo taken.

They were by the corner of the house, about 15 to 20 yards away. I looked over to see who I might know, and in the back row, on far left, was my deceased best friend, wearing a red shirt, with his arms crossed, with a big smile on his face. I looked down to put my drink down, looked back up, and he was gone. I said nothing that night to anyone, but it had rattled me.

The next day, I called one of our friends, Keith, who had known him for many years, and I told him something was bothering me—that I had seen my friend last night. His answer chilled me to the bone. He said, “You mean over by the corner of the house, back row, on the left? One of the guys getting their picture taken?" I said yes.

He continued: “In the red shirt, smiling at you, with his arms crossed? And when you looked back, he was gone? I saw him too". To this day I have no explanation, but I don't doubt that there is another plane of existence after this one, and that image has brought me peace over the years.

Professional-Can-189

So, this was when I was about eight. My mom, brother, aunt and grandma had all traveled to Chicago. We had been staying in a hotel for about five days. It was very upscale, new, and overall very nice. Those entire five days, my mom would let me run ahead to the elevator when returning to our room from swimming, getting ice, etc.

She would let me ride up alone, since our room was right to the left of the elevator when you got off, and my grandma would always have the door cracked. So, one day, on the way back from the pool, with a wet hair, suit, and towel, I did the same. I ran ahead and entered the elevator. Pressed the button for the seventh floor.

There is only one elevator in this hotel. Once I got to the seventh floor, which I knew by the signs outside the elevator, I went to the second door to the left, like I had maybe 20 times before that week. I knocked and knocked. Nothing. I remember becoming weirdly "alarmed" at this point. That’s the best way I can describe it.

So, while wondering why my grandma wasn't answering the door, I returned the few feet to the elevator and waited for my mom and brother. I saw on the display that the elevator was arriving on floor 7, the floor I was on. It was clearly written on the sign. I see the light and hear the elevator ding. The doors open, empty.

At this point, I just FEEL something is VERY off, and return to the room door, knocking and crying now, getting cold because I am still very wet from the pool. Finally, after no more than one minute, a very old woman answers the door and says, "Dear, I told you already yesterday, this is not your room". I had NOT been there yesterday.

She then said, "It will be fine. I am very sorry, but I am on the phone with my son. Give it a few more minutes, your mother is coming". And then she freaking closed the door! I was shocked. How could anyone close the door on a crying kid who lost their mother, especially a woman who seemed like the caring grandmother type?

Almost immediately after she closed the door, the elevator opened, and my mom ran out crying and grabbed me. She was saying, "Oh honey, where were you!? I have never been so worried". She then went to open the door. This is where it gets really creepy. It wasn’t our room. She was stunned. The whole time I'm trying to explain what had just happened, and my timeline of events had only been about five minutes.

She was still hugging and holding me, and she kinda just went into auto pilot and went back into the elevator with me. She pressed 7 again. The doors closed super briefly and then reopened. The elevator didn't move at all. Once the door opened, we both saw my grandmother standing in the second doorway to the left, crying.

When she was us, she was very happy, running to hug us. Apparently, I had been missing for 45 minutes. Law enforcement had been called, every floor had been checked, they were still in the process of knocking on all doors, and opening even locked, vacant rooms. Apparently, my mother had decided to go and look at the pool to see if I had returned there one more time.

Then, after seeing it was empty, she took the same elevator back up to 7. The only elevator in the hotel. Only THIS time, out of the multiple other times that day, she found me. And, not only that, we were clearly not in the elevator hiding out. As it was the only one. And the officers and staff had gone up and down in the elevator multiple times looking for me.

We still talk about it to this day and can't explain it. Even though it had apparently been 45 minutes, my hair was still wet. The officers were kinda angry until the hotel staff pulled up the camera. The footage was terrifying. It showed me getting on the elevator, but then never getting off. Then, when my mother got on from the lobby, you see her get on.

TEN minutes pass, and then she gets off on the seventh floor with me in her arms. They went through all the cameras, on ALL the floors, which had very clear angles of the elevator on each floor. NOTHING. I swear, the staff was freaked out, as were the officers. They were almost convinced someone had taken me, and then became freaked out and left me shortly after.

They were stumped as to why my hair was still wet. But they couldn't refute the cameras, as they were high resolution, working correctly and everything. I have always wanted to call back and see if they still talk about it years later. I have no clue who the woman was, nor was I ever able to identify her. For the investigation, even after they found me, they locked down the hotel and all possible exits, and had a perimeter.

Every guest in the hotel was more than happy to help. Women from ages 50 on, all willingly let the law enforcement officers take photos. Not one of them was the woman. This woman had VERY blue eyes, like very. The only possible connection I can think of is that the woman and I had almost identical eyes. It’s kind of rare considering how dark my hair is. I really don’t know!

SydneyDanielle23

This happened a year ago. I was shopping at a mall and took a bus there. As I was waiting to take the bus home, I was looking around and saw a woman approaching the bus station from around the corner. She was like 50 meters away from me when I noticed her, and as I was looking at her, she really reminded me of a girl I knew in middle school that I haven’t seen in more than four years. Let’s call her Lucy.

In my mind I went “Holy smokes, is that Lucy? I haven’t seen her in ages". As she came closer to me I realized, that’s not Lucy, it’s a random woman. Keep in mind, at this point there was absolutely no one else I saw at this location for the last 15 minutes and I haven’t seen or even thought about Lucy ever before this moment.

I simply continued waiting and after two minutes, THE ACTUAL REAL LUCY comes around the same corner and starts walking towards the bus station. I couldn’t believe it, what are the possibilities of that happening?

vegancrossfiter

This happened to my sister yesterday, and she’s still freaking out. She's working at home, and every midday she goes to our parent’s place to take the family dog Jazz out for a walk. Yesterday, she went to take Jazz out and he was nowhere to be found. Our dad was grocery shopping and our mom was in the kitchen. When she asked her if Jazz was with our father, our mother asked her who Jazz was.

Long story short, there was no dog. According to them, after our first dog passed, we didn't get another. Thinking it was a strange prank, she searched the house, and she couldn't find anything suggesting the presence of a dog. No dog food, no dog bed, no dog toys, of which he has plenty and they are always everywhere.

Then our dad came home, and still no dog. When she interrogated him, he started to think that she was the one who was joking. After that, she returned to her home because she didn't want our parents to see her while she was freaking out, and she tried to call me. I was nowhere to be found, my cell phone wasn't active, and she couldn't even reach the shop where I work.

They simply didn't answer the phone, which is quite improbable, because it’s mandatory for us to answer the phone. She tried calling some of my friends too, with no success. After that, she went to bed and cried until she fell asleep. This morning I had 16 missed calls from her, with today's date. I called her back worried that something had happened, and she was crying.

She is still very agitated. When she went to our parents', Jazz was there, so she took him home because she wanted him to spend the night with her. She also confessed to me that the day before, she couldn't muster the courage to call our parents or relatives and ask about me, because she was too scared they would tell her she was an only child.

My parents told me that they didn't see her at all yesterday. They tried to call her at midday for the dog, but her phone was on mute, and they concluded that maybe she was busy. I'm so curious but she's still too freaked out to talk about it again.

MarianOfOz

Something weird is happening in our town and only my family seems to notice. The first thing we started noticing were small things like duplicates. We would see someone somewhere, only for them to inexplicably end up somewhere else. For example, my mother and I saw and chatted with an old friend at the grocery store and when we arrived home later we saw on Facebook that this person was out of the country on vacation, and had been for a few days.

They have no memory of speaking to us either. Another time, my mother and brother were leaving a doctor’s office when they saw an old woman in smelly, tattered clothes enter the office and start speaking with the receptionist. While she was talking, my mother and brother got in the elevator and went down to the lobby from the third floor.

Upon exiting the elevator, they saw that the same woman was in the lobby, waiting for the elevator to go up. Sometimes, it would be an event aired live on Facebook that we had already seen days prior, or a child celebrating their birthday twice with the same exact party and photos. I've taken phone calls that were duplicates of calls I had already taken with the other person swearing we hadn't spoken yet.

The scariest thing has been the deaths. There have been four times where very well-known and influential people from the community have passed—and every one of them has passed twice. We hear about it and see all the RIP posts on Facebook. We see the community fundraisers put on to raise money for the funerals, and even see the cars at the church or funeral home…only for these same people to pass a week or two later.

Then all the RIP posts and fundraisers happen again. Only our family seems to notice these things happening. My mother and siblings, and my two kids. We don't know what's happening, and it is starting to scare us.

This has to be the strangest thing to ever happen to me. I discovered it a few months ago and it keeps playing in my mind, because I have a lot of health problems. Last year my dad passed. We visit the graveyard quite often and go to various family members' graves. It's a Muslim graveyard, so they usually have the father’s name and other details on the gravestones.

Near my uncle’s grave, the one just in front of it has my name on it. My name is spelled a little differently than the common spelling, and it was spelled exactly like mine on the gravestone. Both first and last names. It's also got the same birth date as me. But there’s more. My dad, who also has an uncommon spelling to his name, was from a small village in Kashmir.

On “my” grave it has the name of the person’s father. It’s my dad’s name with the uncommon spelling. On the gravestone, it’s stated that the father is from a village. Guess where the person's father was from? Yep, the same village. It's really weirded me out. I know people from that village and contacted them to see if anyone heard of this person. No one seems to have heard of him.

papercut2008uk

My mom was sitting on the couch tonight and I was standing next to her to the right, with my phone on the armrest. I clicked open my phone to show her something and quickly typed in my passcode, with the phone still on the armrest. She very casually said: “That’s your wedding picture,” and pointed to the screen. I asked her what she meant.

She said, “Your lock screen, that’s your wedding picture". My lock screen picture is just a picture of some palm trees from my trip to California. My home screen is also just a different picture of trees. I’m 18 and I’ve never been married. I flipped through all of my tabs and there were no photos open that could’ve even remotely resembled a wedding picture.

When I showed her my lock screen again—the picture of the palm trees—she seemed a bit shocked and said it was weird. She just said, “I saw someone in a wedding dress,” after I questioned her another 10 times about it, and eventually dropped it. When she initially said it, I felt like I saw it too—it was the weirdest thing.

I feel like I saw it but it instantly left my memory and I couldn’t remember what the picture looked like. I believe her that she saw it. Could this be a glitch that showed me my future?

permalink

My girlfriend and I had been together about a year at the time, never had big problems, we are both pretty relaxed people. Never have had a big fight, never had trust issues, the whole shebang. So one day, I was out in front of my apartment building. This was before we lived together. I had seen her the night before, had a nice dinner, gone out to a bar, then gone to my place, after which she took a taxi home.

So, as I'm standing out in front of my apartment building, she pulls up in a taxi. I wasn't expecting her, and was pleasantly surprised to see her. I put out my smoke, smile, and walk up saying something like "Hey, what are you doing here?" Her reaction was devastating. She scowls at me, and slaps me square across the jaw.

Obviously I'm dumbfounded, and at a loss for words so I just kind of looked at her. She never said anything, just barged past me into the building. I followed her up to my apartment, asking her what was happening the whole way. She goes into my apartment, grabs her bag and some of her stuff she left there, throws a few things at me, breaking a glass or two and knocking down a bunch of stuff on a shelf.

She calls me a pig, says she knows everything, and that I've broken her heart. I'm trying to figure out what's going on obviously, and she stops on her way out when I touch her sleeve, glares at me again, and slaps me. She tells me something like, "I hope I never see you again," and walks out. I followed her to the street and she got in her cab and drove off.

The street was pretty empty and I watch her drive off. At this point, I'm just lost for words, scared, and sad. Then, as I'm watching the cab drive away, someone hugs me around my waist from behind. I turn around, and it’s her, in running clothes. She’d been wearing heels and a leather jacket before. I went completely pale.

She said "Hi" in her usual happy-go-lucky tone, then noticed my look and asked, "What's wrong?" I spun around, no taxi. It had literally driven away five seconds earlier, no way it could've turned in that time, and all the lights were red. I didn't say anything to her, just ran upstairs. Her bag was gone, things were still broken, my door still wide open.

So then I told her. We were both monumentally confused, there's no way I could have mixed her up with someone else, and she's an only child. We had security check the cameras, and sure enough, me following a girl to my apartment. The angles weren't great, and the film wasn't great quality, but it was pretty easy to see me and my face.

Hers was always hard to make out. It looked a heck of a lot like her, but never a clear shot.

zeejoo12

So, I was at my friend’s house the other day and we got some drinks from the kitchen and then went up to his room to play some video games. He put his glass of water on his bookshelf then turned around to shut his door. In doing so, he knocked over the full glass of water and it went all over the floor. My friend was pretty angry, as it got over quite a few of his books as well.

So we went downstairs to get some kitchen towels and came back up like 30 seconds later. When we opened his door, we noticed that the wet patch on the floor was gone, so we felt it and it was bone dry. His books that got wet were dry too, and we couldn’t find the glass that we’d left on the floor either. It was then that we looked up and saw a full glass of water sitting on his bookshelf.

This happened years ago, but I still remember it like it happened yesterday. I was with my boyfriend at the time waiting for a bus on a really long main road. As we were waiting, I happened to see an old lady walking in our direction from ages away, and something about her really caught my attention. She was small and old but was hobbling towards us so quickly and with what seemed such purpose.

I don't know why, but I just felt like she was looking straight at me even though she was kind of far away. As she got closer, I noticed she was indeed looking at me with a warm smile on her face, slightly out of breath. Just full-on staring at me. She crossed the road and walked straight up to me as if she had known me for a lifetime.

She put her arms on my shoulders and told me "You are the sole proprietor of your own body". She just stood there smiling at me. She seemed relieved, as if she made it just in time to give me this message. It wasn't creepy at all, just a bit confusing, and so I asked her to explain what she meant. She simply said: “Nobody can touch you if you don't let them my dear. It is your body. Nobody can put their hands on you if you don’t allow it". And just like that she left.

Later that same day, my ex was physically violent with me for the first time. This always stuck with me. Not saying she was an angel or something, maybe just a really batty lady with good timing, but it’s just something I never forgot.

hilepawh

This happened a few years ago. I was driving through east Pennsylvania, and I'm giving this girl I had just met at a friend's house that night a ride back to her place. Now, getting to her house involves going down a one lane road that I had driven on at least 100 times prior to this. At one section, the road meanders around a ridge by making a big right turn, then it does a sharp turn left after a couple hundred yards, and then right again where these two logs laying on the side of the road make a kind of "X" shape on the ground.

It's a very distinctive landmark, at least for me. This is the way this road has always been. So there we are, trying to find topics to talk about to keep the car ride from becoming awkward since we hardly know each other. We take a right turn, round the bend, then a sharp left turn and then...there's a left turn up ahead where there should be a right turn.

Immediately my body goes into fight or flight mode. I remember thinking: "This isn't right, I know there's a right turn here. This is not what is supposed to be here". She knew it too. We both fell silent and just looked ahead in confusion. The road about 100 yards in front of me just turned left and disappeared off into the woods.

To the right there was nothing, just the side of a hill and some trees. It looked completely natural, not like a mirage or anything, yet it felt so strange and almost...intentionally deceptive. None of this made sense. I knew these roads. As we approached the turn, I decided that I'm not going down that road, something "bad" was down that road.

I just made the irrational decision to turn right instead and hope for the best. The girl in the car put her hands on the dash board to brace for impact. My eyes were still fixated down the left-turning road as I started steering to my right, and then as my gaze shifted towards the direction I was now driving in, suddenly I could see the "correct" road in front of me again.

Everything was back to normal. I looked in the rear view mirror and sure enough, the left turning road was non-existent. My hands felt icy cold and I was physically shaking. I pulled over to my right and we just sat there in silence. We contemplated going back to investigate, but just looking at the road behind me gave me a sick feeling in my stomach; she felt it too.

We decided to get the heck out of there and that was that. I was very hesitant to go down that road again and avoided it the best I could after that, but a few weeks or months later, I decided to go back in the day time and check it out. I pulled over at the right turn spot, got out of my car and walked around the area.

This is the part that really freaks me out. I quickly found out that on the left side of the road, obscured by some thick underbrush, was a very steep, rocky cliff that dropped off maybe 200 or 250 feet into a ravine. The phantom road would have taken me directly through a clearing in between two trees that lead straight over the cliff.

If I had chosen not to follow my gut and drove down that road, there's a very, very good chance that we would have been seriously injured or worse. Apparently, several people have crashed in that area by driving down into the ravine—it might just be coincidence, who knows. I don’t know what to make of this event. If I were alone I'd be more willing to write it off as a hallucination or trick of the eye, but I wasn't alone. She saw the same thing I did.

14thCluelessbird

Yesterday I decided to drive to the mall. The one I go to is massive. It’s circular, you can drive around it. It has a massive car park on one side. So, all seems normal on my way to the mall with my girlfriend. As we get there, it looks really quiet. There's about 10 cars there, so I'm questioning whether or not the mall is open, which is really weird.

We drive around to the other side just to see what’s going on, and there's a few people about and a few cars but not much else. So, we decided to go round back to the first side where we normally park, and our plan is to walk to the entrance and see what's up...this is where it gets weird. As we pull up around to the other side again, the whole car park is full.

Literally people walking about everywhere. People sitting outside having coffee. There was even two ambulances. So very weird. Me and my girlfriend were unbelievably shocked. We were speechless and we literally sat in the car for ten minutes just trying to get our heads around it. I haven't felt right since. The time difference for driving round was about two minutes.

It would have been physically impossible for all those cars and people to get there, park, enter the mall, etc. What happened?

RevolutionaryCut5210

This happened a few days ago. My husband and I were at home, just a normal evening. For reference, I'm 5'8" tall and my husband is 5'7" tall. We've been together for years and know very well what the other looks like head on. I had gone to the kitchen to make a sandwich, and something felt off. I wasn't sure what, until my husband asked if I was taller than usual.

I was flat-footed and barefoot, but realized my viewpoint was as if I was on my tiptoes. I could see the top of the fridge, and my hips were above the kitchen counter. I turned to face my husband and he seemed much shorter to me than usual; our eyes are usually pretty close to even but they seemed much lower than mine.

He says he felt like his height didn't change at all, just mine. Understandably, we were both freaked out and were wandering around our apartment trying to figure out what was going on. Suddenly, everything felt right again and I returned to the kitchen; I could no longer see the top of the fridge and the counter was back even with my hips.

My husband returned, and both of us looked "right" again to the other. It was like once we couldn't see each other anymore, it fixed itself.

Ghost__on__Toast

Two years ago, I went on vacation to Spain. It was a package tour for teens. I befriended a guy and a girl there who were a few rooms away from me in the hotel. Since we were over 18, we were allowed to hang out alone outside of the hotel, and so we practically spent the whole trip just walking around town together. I clearly remember adding the girl, let's name her X, on Facebook and talking to her on Messenger.

That's how the three of us were planning our days. I even started a group conversation with X and that boy, let's name him Y. Fast forward to today, It was her birthday, so I wanted to wish her happy birthday on Messenger, and she just wasn't in my contacts. I thought maybe she unfriended me, but looking her up on Facebook didn't bring up anything.

I decided to ask Y whether he'd heard from her recently and he told me he didn’t know any girl with that name. I looked through all the people me and X both added on Facebook during our trip, and even asked some of them about her. Nobody seems to recall meeting her. Y claims we were hanging out with another girl, who I do know and spoke to on the trip, but never hung out with.

I don't know what to make of it and I'm kinda freaking out. I'm thinking maybe my mental health is much worse than I thought, but honestly, there's a huge difference between mild seasonal depression and hallucinating a person for two weeks straight...

tra4sh_p4nd4a

So, my husband gets out of work at 5:30 pm, and gets home between 5:36 pm and 6:00 pm. Sometimes my kids are still eating dinner. Last week I'm getting a head start on dishes, and my kids are still eating dinner. I hear the dogs go off, hear his truck door. A few seconds later he does his distinct throat clear and tells the dogs to quiet down.

He comes in the door and says hi to the kids. They say hi back. I turn and smile and he goes upstairs to go to the bathroom. I look at the clock and it says 5:40 pm. He never comes back through. I go outside and notice his stuff isn't at the table where he throws it after work. Whatever. So, I go upstairs and go to look at the bathroom door.

The light is off and the door open, it's empty. I go check the bedroom, nothing. Ask the kids, they said he was probably in the bathroom, I said that I had checked and he wasn't there. The kids can see every door leading outside from the dinner table. I go back upstairs and check the rooms. He's not there. I look out a window to the driveway, and his truck isn't out front.

So I ask the kids if they saw him leave, but they didn't. I said he's not here anymore and all the kids looked confused, and start exchanging weird looks. At 5:50 pm, the dogs start barking and I hear his door. I hear his keys hit the table outside and he walks in and says, "Hi!" Then he goes to the bathroom. My kids and I look at each other weird but don't say anything.

When he gets out of the bathroom I asked where he went. He had a confused face and asked what I meant. I tell him and he looks at the kids and said he was just getting home. The kids said they saw him and talked to him and so did I. He made a face and all the kids just looked disturbed. It was so weird, because we all witnessed it together.

AverageThunderGod

This is a story that haunts me daily. This happened in 1992. I had just graduated high school and was working in a warehouse. I kinda enjoyed it and settled, thinking I will probably retire here. Yup...I had zero ambition. I was a sad, lazy, cringe-inducing idiot. Then, a new guy started. It’s a warehouse with high turnover, so nothing unusual about new guys.

Everyone asked if we were related, because we looked alike. He was probably late 30s/early 40s. I was 18 at the time, and he was larger. He seemed to carry himself like me, and the way he walked and spoke was similar. On his second day, we worked together on a wrapping station. The first thing he said to me was: "You still have that Penthouse magazine under your mattress".

I DID. Weird, but totally normal for teen boys I suppose. He then said: "I know everything about you". "You’re worried about never getting a girlfriend". I was floored, but I again thought it was a usual teenage thing. I mean I wasn't the best-looking guy, so it wasn't a stretch to guess. I asked him why he was saying all this stuff and he looked at me.

His expression is seared into my mind and it left an image I see daily. He said "I am you". He then went on to tell me EVERYTHING about myself. I mean my deepest, darkest secrets. That no one knows. Then he kept telling me more about myself. I asked him to be serious and how he knew all this stuff. He said, "I already told you," and used this nickname only one person ever called me.

A busted Jetta pulled into the parking lot and he said, “That's our girl. She is a demon who is horrible to us". I asked him why he is with her and he said: "She is the best we could do". When she got out, I was super grossed out. She said: "Let’s go". Before he left, he stared right into my soul and said: "We deserve better. Please go to college and stop being lazy and make something out of yourself".

The girl just kinda laughed, like yeah right. He left with her and I never saw him again. I think I ran into a younger version of her at a friend’s house years later. He introduced me and said we should hook up. I said NO. I went to college and stopped being a pathetic, lazy cringefest. I accomplished everything I set out to do, as I always felt the need to not let him down.

I know none of this makes sense. How can I explain something that I can barely understand myself? None of it makes sense whatsoever. Why would a future me get a job with me? He had to fill out a job application and have his references checked, right? Yes, I asked my manager who was a jerk. He just told me to mind my own business and focus on my job and to try to be less of a screw up. Well…

permalink

This has been playing in my mind for years now. I had a very realistic dream about a friend of mine when we were both 19. In that dream, he passed, and we were sitting against a brick wall talking. He was telling me that sometimes our time is up and to make the most of it. I woke up the next morning and was freaked out.

I called him and told him about it. He laughed and said, "That would suck," but reassured me that he was fine and not going anywhere. Two days later, I had a call from his parents to say he had suddenly passed in his sleep. The last time I spoke to him was when I called him after my dream.

sixdogsofmine

Three days ago, I was having conversation with my father and he was telling me about his university life. Basically my dad came from nothing, he had a very difficult upbringing and went to the worst school and high school in our city. When it was time for him to go to university, disaster struck. My grandfather passed, leaving my dad to take care of the rest of the family as he was the oldest son.

He ended up in the wrong major because of some bad advice, and he regrets it to this day. The courses were taught in English, which is his second language. My dad told me that it was the darkest time in his life, and he just wanted to run away. He was even thinking of taking his own life. Now, very recently he got his masters in English literature.

He was telling me that he didn't think that would be ever possible. My dad just recently finished this degree at the age of 55. The next morning, my dad had to drive to this town because his distant relatives live there. They are struggling financially, and my dad is very a kind soul so he wanted to help them. The town is a three hour drive away.

He usually takes public transport, but didn't this time. He drove there and my mom was worried, so we decided we will keep calling him every hour to check. Well, I decided to call him. Where we live, the network signals are very weak on the highway. He told me to wait and parked at a nearby restaurant. It was like a check point for trucks.

I don't know what came over me, but I started crying and went on to tell him how proud I was of him, I just babbled and kept saying that he shouldn't think he is lacking, because he is not. He is an amazing father and a great person to look up to. My dad started crying, and he told me that he will talk to me when he returns. Well, he returned and he just hugged me.

He told me that 30 years ago he was visiting the same town and it was the time when he was at his lowest. He was visiting the same relatives and he had taken a bus that stopped at a petrol station. He went to call his mother and when he picked up the phone, without even dialing, he heard a voice. It told him the exact same thing that I had just said to him, about being proud of him and whatnot.

It was my voice—years before I was born. After that, he didn't even call my grandmother, he just stood there and cried. It gave him strength to keep fighting. He said he just now realized it was me whose voice he heard. My parents are now taking this as sign from God, who helped my dad when he thought no one was there for him.

iselenaii

I was 17 at the time. Me and my dad had just finished our fishing trip and it was almost midnight, mid-autumn. When I was about to get in the car, he told me that he did not want me to sit in the front seat on the ride home. We argued about it for about five minutes. He did not give any good reason as to why he did not want me to.

I gave up and got in the back seat. It was pitch black outside, and we had been driving on the main road for about two minutes when we saw a car driving in our lane. Right as we were about to collide, my dad swerved into the other lane—and so did the car in front of us. That’s when I heard my dad say something that still haunts me.

He muttered, “I knew it” at the very last second, and then I blacked out. I woke up when the ambulance showed up at the scene, and the EMTs helped me out of the car. I was barely conscious and don’t remember much after that—but there’s one thing that’s still crystal clear. I saw my dad, sitting in the car waving at me with tears in his eyes.

Later, when I asked where my dad was, they told me that he had flown out of the car window and landed a few feet from the car. Then, he died in the ambulance. They also told me that the man we crashed into lost his life—but that’s not all. He was driving with his 17-year-old daughter, and she only survived because she’d been sitting in the backseat like me.

I still can’t believe that this really happened. This was six years ago.

fjellfille

One night, I got a phone call from my next-door neighbor late in the evening, asking if I can help him move a mattress into one of his upstairs bedrooms. His mom is ill and has a big heavy sleep number bed. I, of course, ran over to help, because they're great neighbors. I get over there and his friend, who is also a priest, was there to help.

I helped them figure out how to separate the mattress from the bed so we could fit it upstairs. We get it all moved up and back in place when my neighbor asks if I can help them move an armoire upstairs too. I think nothing of it and we pull it out of his travel trailer and start bringing it up the front stairs of his house. This is where I died.

The front stairs are 11 steps. I was on the lower end of the armoire about six steps up when my neighbor and his friend lose a handle on the armoire and it comes crashing down on me, and I fall backward towards the pavement. At that moment, I wake up in my dining room to my phone ringing and my wife asking me if I'm going to answer the phone. This is where it really gets freaky.

It's my neighbor asking me if I can help move a bed upstairs for his mom. I go over there and meet his priest friend again, as this is supposed to be the first time I met him. I say I can help with the bed, but I cannot help with the armoire. My neighbor was like "How'd you know about the armoire?" I then proceeded to tell them about what had just happened.

I spent the next hour talking with the priest. He was blown away, and he had so many questions. My neighbor didn't believe it until I described the upstairs bedroom in perfect detail down to the metal mattress frame on the floor and the intricate headboard leaning against the wall. I had never been upstairs in their house before.

The priest asked me what I saw after it happened. I told him I never actually passed, and that before it happened I woke up at my dining room table.

liquidgold83

My boyfriend and I were taking a walk through a long park trail on the outskirts of Seattle, and we just happened to go down the "life is simulation" and "Mandela effect" rabbit hole. We had an ongoing joke about it since we have so many strange experiences. We'll casually be like, "Well, the simulation is messed up today". We do this semi-regularly.

We just happened to be talking about everything, and how life has been so strange ever since we started paying attention to it like that. The park wasn't very crowded at all that day, so we were walking behind a single family with two women and a few kids running around probably more than 50 yards ahead of us. My boyfriend jokingly pointed to the birds and said, "Yup, it's all fake".

So, I jokingly pointed to the family ahead and said, "That family is fake too, someone is probably watching us watch them". That was the exact moment it happened. The two women completely freeze in their tracks and stop talking. They then turn around and stare in our direction, completely in sync. I thought maybe they heard me, but I repeated to him that even with strong echo, that's it’s impossible because I pretty much whispered and they were so far ahead.

They continued to stare, without moving a muscle. We both looked behind us like, "Are they looking at us?" but no one was in sight. They just froze, no movement. The kids were just standing around silently too. It lasted for such a long time that even though we were far away, we ended up having to walk right by where they were standing.

As we passed by, they continued to stare into nothing. It was so uncomfortable, but it didn't feel right to say anything. We truly just didn't understand. It took us the rest of the walk to try to digest what happened, and we weren't even in a joking mood anymore, just weirded out. They didn't talk, no emotion, they weren't looking for anyone, they just froze.

As soon as we were about 20 feet past them, they just resumed walking and talking like nothing had happened and the kids were playing again. It still gives me chills.

LunaSophie29

I was 12 and my brother was eight. We were living with our dad after he and mom separated. Dad ruled with an iron fist when it came to school attendance; he wouldn't let us stay home unless we were bleeding or hospitalized. Nevertheless, I still tried to stay home from school at times. One day, I tried faking a headache so I could stay home. His reaction was bizarre.

He immediately said yes, but that I would have to stay with him all day. I asked why, and he said: "Because I need you here". Fast forward to lunchtime and we're sitting at the table eating. I look at him and see he's looking at me with a look I had never seen before. Then before I could process it, he collapses onto the floor.

He had a massive heart attack that took his life almost instantly. If my dad didn't let me stay home, my little brother would have found his body after school, and he would have been there for hours. I don't think my brother would have recovered from that. It took me over 10 years to recover from it myself, quite honestly.

But then, another thing happened that I can't explain. I used to go to sleep with the radio on, and for the three nights before my dad had the heart attack, I would wake up during the night to a particular song playing. Same song, every night for three nights…until he passed. Later, they played that song at his funeral. I hadn't told anyone what happened.

femalediction5

Source: 1

This idiot who harasses me because I’m a bit of an outcast in my high school said something awful me today: "The only reason why you're here is because your grandma was an idiot who gave birth to an idiot mother!" Well, my grandmother passed yesterday. But I got my revenge. The principal overheard her, and now she can’t walk on graduation.

Permalink

I was stopped at a red light waiting to turn right. I couldn't see if there was any traffic coming because of how the intersection was set up and there was a bus in the left-turn lane, so I was just waiting for a green. The person behind me clearly wanted me to turn because she was honking, yelling, and giving me the finger. After a couple of seconds, she decided to drive around me...and was immediately T-boned.

As the low man on the totem pole at work, I got to do all of the grunt labor and random tasks that required working on weekends and such. I was a master engineer working in a 9-5 job, but being paid less than a pizza delivery driver. Then it got even worse. My boss decided that I no longer got compensation time, so basically I was working overtime all the time.

The reason behind this was that I was salaried and "it was part of the job". Well, I found a brutal way to get back at them. When I quit to go get my PhD, they realized that I hadn't used any vacation time at all. This ultra-penny pincher had to write me a check for two extra months' worth of pay as I walked out the door. Never have I tasted a sweeter payday.

Pizzadude

I used to be a zookeeper. This idiot was making fun of our llama for looking ugly. The llama was a rescue who had corrective jaw surgery. She was not ugly, she was adorable. Yet the rude woman pointed and laughed at our llama. In return, the llama spat right in her mouth. I gave the llama a treat and told her that she was a good girl.

MyNameIsNotRyn

My stepdad is a driving instructor. I went to get my license pretty late in the game, when I was 22 years old. One day, he was giving me a lesson and we were going over one of the possible courses that the test takes. While we're driving down a street in the suburbs, a guy is tailgating the life out of me, and he's a really scary looking dude.

Every time I come to a stop sign, I do a full stop, obviously. When I do, he throws his hands in the air and yells. It's starting to stress me out, but my stepdad comes up with an ingenious plan. He says, "Don't worry about it, watch this". As we're going down the street, he says, "Okay, now in about 50 feet I want you to start slowing down a little bit and right when you are in front of that school zone, pull over to the right".

So I do it. Right after I pull over, the scary-looking, furious guy takes off from behind me. Aaaannd about five seconds later, a patrol car pulls out from behind a tree and waves him over for going probably double the speed limit in a school zone. We laughed. Hard. Don’t tussle with the driving instructor.

ZombiGrinder

My friend Collin and I were playing Mario Kart once and I kart-slammed him in the last corner and won. He pulls his arm back and punches me as hard as he can in the arm. The karma part: His hand bounced off my arm and made him hit himself in the eye with full force. Just about knocked himself unconscious, the idiot.

Permalink

One time I saw a truck swerve to purposefully hit a cat. It was the type of truck that you see where the dude is clearly compensating for something—huge tires, lifted, with the balls on the back hitch. Well, he successfully hit the cat, and it splattered all over his truck. Only it wasn't a cat, it was a skunk.

Lematoad

My ex-wife screwed around and got pregnant. I took my son and moved out, and the new dude moved in with her. Without doing anything vindictive at all, I got to watch as the two of them wrecked each others' lives. They were so thorough about it, I wound up feeling bad for them. Turns out the best punishment for a man who wants to take your wife is to let him have her.

Permalink

My dad told me this story. He was driving back from the shore when traffic got really bad. About a mile ahead, there was an accident that had brought traffic to a crawl. Stuff happens, and my dad decides to be patient about it. Others...weren’t so patient. People even began driving on the shoulder in order to get ahead of the traffic.

This ticks my dad off. We all know how this goes. We do the right thing and are punished for it, whereas these jerks are skipping in front of traffic and will probably get away with it. He thought about following this stream of cars onto the shoulder, but he decided he’d do the right thing and wait. Then suddenly, karma came along.

As he got closer, he saw two uniformed officers waiting around in a parking lot. One officer was directing all of the shoulder drivers into the parking lot, while the other wrote all of those drivers tickets. My dad describes it as one of the most satisfying things he’s ever seen. Definitely a great call by my dad.

DrDudeManJones

This dumb kid in middle school kept trying to take my cellphone. Our school had a rule that you couldn't have your phone out in class, and when the teacher left the classroom for a second to have a brief word with an administrator, the jerk kid grabbed my phone. Except the teacher came back in a second later and caught him red-handed. She wouldn't believe it wasn't his phone. He got detention.

Grey_Gryphon

My little sister's friend was being a real jerk to me. Following me around, mocking everything I said, making rude commentary on everything I did. I told her she shouldn't do things like that to someone older than her, because it could have dire consequences. Some time later, they convinced me to play hide-and-seek with them, and the rules were to STAY IN THE HOUSE.

I searched high and low for that little brat and couldn't find her anywhere. My sister had no clue either, and neither of us heard the doors open, so we didn't think she could be outside. Well, we were wrong. Turns out, the kid decided to say screw the rules and go outside. She hid in the back of my mom's truck, which has a camper shell that can be locked from the outside.

I guess someone saw that it was open, closed it, and locked it while the kid was hiding inside. Oops. She ended up peeing in her pants because she was so scared. I volunteered to unlock it, but I took my sweet time doing so, staring at her with this smug-as-anything grin. It was a truly great moment of instant karma.

andianopolis

I was 17. I went to a party where there were kids from two different high schools. When I went inside, I took off my brand new Nike Air Mada shoes that I had just bought for $140. Hours later, when I went to leave, my new shoes were gone. We had an idea of who took them, a guy from the other school, but didn’t have proof.

I was so sad and so embarrassed. I had to drive home in my socks. But a week later, the girl who threw the party shows up on my doorstep holding something behind her back...turns out she went to a party and saw the guy who took my shoes wearing them! When he took them off after a smoke break, she snagged them. She told me the best part was watching him look for them (just like I had) and then leave in his socks.

cruisefromottawa

I worked for Goodwill quite a few years back as a supervisor because my mother and I had really fond memories of treasure hunting there and I wanted to try and build up some management experience with a reputable company. I thought it would be my dream gig for a while even though I knew it would be hard work. Except it was a total nightmare.

The manager was an all-right lady, but her assistant manager was a tyrant. Every day, she would threaten to fire the employees if they didn't do their work right. I took offense to this because as a supervisor, I wanted my team to be in good spirits and wanted them to love coming in to work and doing good things for the mission.

Yet because every single day they were being told they could be fired, morale was rock bottom. People were afraid for their jobs every day. It got so bad, I had a meeting with the manager and I said, "I don't want to step on any toes, but I would appreciate it if you could ask the assistant manager to tone down the firing threats".

She said she understood and I felt good about the conversation. The next day, she called me into her office where her and the assistant manager were both waiting for me. They asked me to lock the door. As soon as I did, I got the most hate-filled verbal lashing of my entire life. I truly wasn't prepared for what they said.

“You think you can turn us against each other? You are worthless. You just do your freaking job and don't tell us how to do ours. Who do you think you are??” This went on for about 20 minutes. I'm a grown man and I nearly started bawling right then and there. Finally, I told them to take this terrible job and shove it. Well, they got their comeuppance.

I was the only supervisor they had on a team that required at least two. The manager and assistant manager were already working 60-hour weeks to make things work on a skeleton crew, and when I quit they were going to be working 80 hours each with no weekends until they had at least a month to find someone else. I wasn't really concerned about it at that point.

Lucavious

Back in high school, I was kind of being a jerk to a girl I was friends with. Nothing too bad, just some friendly teasing, but still not a great move. Then I turned around and fell down a big flight of stairs immediately after. Even mid-fall, the karma and the justice did not escape me, trust me. We both found it pretty hilarious.

Hellchron

I was working with this complete jerk at the sandwich shop where I work. She was 17, I was 18. I was telling a coworker about how my boyfriend had proposed to me, and she comes up behind me and says, "I bet he only proposed because the you-know-what broke". It caused me to burst into tears—because she didn't know the dark truth. 

I'd actually just recently found out that there was only a 2% chance that I could have kids, and I was still very sensitive about it. After coming out of the supply room (I went in there to cry) I asked her to come out the back door with me so I could have a word with her. I didn't want customers to hear us, because we likely would have ended up yelling.

I told her to keep her nose in her own business. She then decided to slap me. Pretty hard, too. I didn't hit her back...because we were directly in front of a camera. So, I went inside and called my boss. He had seen it on the live feed at home and had recorded it. He was already on his way. He came in and dragged her out the back again and fired her.

Permalink

I was in the eighth grade. I was standing on a bench when I watched some girl fall over in the yard. I started laughing and pointing, and then went to lean back onto the fence that was behind the bench. Turns out it had broken off where I was standing, and I fell straight through and into the mud. Yep, I had that one coming.

VariousHandSoaps

When I was a teenager, I was in a van with a bunch of my friends. We stopped for gas at a place on a busy intersection. One of my friends points out some action happening in a car parked next to the street and says, "He's beating the tar out of her!" Sure enough, some horrible guy is bouncing his girlfriend's head off the dashboard.

Now, we were no innocent teenagers, and this van was our mailbox-baseball-mobile. We grabbed our bats and prepared to intervene. But just as we were getting out, the girl grabs the keys out of the guy's ignition and throws them into the street. I can see the rest in slow motion, clear as day, even though it happened more than 20 years ago.

The guy races out of the car in a huff, runs into the street, bends to pick up his keys. He gets back up, points at the car, and starts to yell something, his face red with rage. Just then, a little sports sedan turns the corner at speed, and hits him straight on in the legs. Dude does a flip over the car and falls into a limp pile. Girlfriend runs to him, crying in remorse...

At the time, we were in no way prepared to stick around and talk to the authorities, so this was the last I knew of things...that is, until a few years later. One night, back from college on winter break, I was telling this story at a party. A girl looks at me funny, and starts asking me some date and location questions.

She was really freaking out. Turns out, she was the driver who hit the dude, only she didn't know he was a jerk. No one at the scene, including the girlfriend, said anything about the incident. The driver had felt guilty for years about running down some innocent guy, crippling him for life. My chance retelling of the story took a huge burden off her.

Permalink

I was targeted to be fired from work. It had nothing to do with my performance, and everything to do with my manager who took a disliking to me. I walked the line of perfection for about a month until I found another job, then I handed in my two weeks' notice. That was victory number one. But I had even more wins up my sleeve.

I then took about a half-dozen of their employees and got them hired into my new company. That was victory number two. I'd like to think that victory number three was the 30 or 40 employees they lost in the following year, but I can’t claim direct responsibility for that. Thing is, when you have employees with high-demand skills like software engineering, you'd best treat them right.

magicmuds

I worked for a small lottery chain for the better part of a year back around 2008. It was a single employee operation, so I worked a 10-hour shift with no breaks or a lunch. All in all, it wasn't a bad job and had good tips. Then one day, out of the blue, the regional manager calls me into the store and tells me that I'm suspended.

I was given no warning whatsoever. I asked her why. Her reply made my blood run cold. She flat-out tells me that I'm frightening away the patrons because I’m gay. The next day, she calls me to say that I'm no longer needed. I tried for a lawsuit, but it was a he-said-she-said kind of thing. Not really that much that I could do about it, unfortunately.

Flash forward to last month. I get a call from a lawyer asking me if I want to take part in a class-action lawsuit against this company for discrimination and unfair wage compensation practices. I told them my story, and now I'm a class representative for the case. I'm so ready for this court case, you don’t even know.

SiberianTora

When I was a kid, I was the youngest of all the kids on my block. The other kids, including my sister, would have fun tormenting me. They would try and exclude me from things on the basis of my age. The worst of them was Marcus, who would always be a complete jerk. One day Marcus and I, along with some of the other kids, went to a nearby school to ride around on our scooters.

Marcus convinced me that to be "cool" I had to jump down a flight of five stairs. I succeeded, but broke my scooter in the process. As the kids rode off, laughing at me for not being able to join them, Marcus' front wheel caught in a crack in the concrete. He FLEW over the handlebars, straight into a flagpole. I nearly keeled over laughing. I broke my scooter; he broke his face.

Permalink

My boyfriend has a big truck, and one winter it was really snowy and a bunch of cars had gone into the ditch, as you do. Because he's a nice guy, he was spending his day off pulling people out for free. At one point, while he was helping someone, some jerk FLEW by him, wailing on the horn and flipping him off out of the window.

He got done pulling the car out and headed up the road in the direction that idiot had gone. That's when he witnessed an incredible sight. A mile up the road, they found the jerk standing outside of his car, which was now plowed into a giant freaking tree. Boyfriend honked his horn, waved, and kept driving. Dude just hung his head like a scolded dog. Truly beautiful.

Carryoncrow

I go to New York City about once a year to visit family. While there, I always crave the "Grandma's Sicilian" pizza, and the best slice in the city is served near my cousin's place. Well, it's New York, and naturally the joint is crowded as anything. Across from the register you can grab drinks, and paying for them basically comes down to the honor system.

I've never really taken anything before, but my cousin just nonchalantly took a drink and nobody said a word! I do love me some Peach Snapple so I got greedy and took two of them. I paid for the food and we were on our way out. By then, I was on an adrenaline rush. Did I mention my craving for the pizza was so large that I also got an entire pizza instead of just one or two slices?

Yep, an entire pie for myself. So, as we are walking back to the subway station, I trip on the curb and fall. I land on the pizza with my stomach, covering my clothes in sauce. Both Snapples shatter and the glass lodges itself in my knuckles, palms, and legs. The brand new $60 jeans I purchased the day before got ripped and stained. Yeah, karma came for me hard.

alexisaacs

I was trying to sell my apple-seed biodiesel processor. One guy came by who seemed genuinely interested. He said he would pay me $100 to give a demonstration of the whole process. Apparently, he was some big shot with a garage and a fleet of heavy equipment. I demoed the first 90% of the process and explained the rest.

A few weeks go by and I haven't seen my $100 or the guy who wanted to buy the processor. That's when I found out he had tried to make his own processor and failed miserably. He ruined two very expensive dump trucks in the process. They are still sitting behind his house. Yeah, thank you, karma. I may not get my $100, but at least I get some satisfaction.

Permalink

I worked for a tech company that moved out over a weekend, because the landlords were locking us out that Monday. I'd told my boss we'd want to get the internet set up before the move, since we were, you know, a tech company and it was important the internet worked. He didn't listen. We tried to get someone out on a weekend from the phone company instead.

Got everything hooked up, and gosh, no internet. So, my boss called me in on Sunday to talk to tech support. I'm a family man, and we had a very nice dinner planned. But no, work was more important to my boss. Told him okay, but he'd need to meet me at the office. I did the tech support call, and still no boss. Called him again and told him I really needed him in the office.

When he got there, I handed him my key, the list of passwords to the server, and wrapped them in my resignation letter. Told him I had a family, and being pulled away from Easter Sunday dinner to talk to tech support was the last straw. Told him that I was sure he could find tech administrator on short notice, or he could figure it out himself.

Llyran

My girlfriend (now fiancée) and I moved into an apartment together. Things were going great until a buddy of hers needed a place to stay as he was going through a divorce with his wife. I had never met "Saul" before but we got along fine. I worked at a PC repair shop that had a LAN Center in it that we'd have LAN parties at all the time, and apparently he had seen me there.

So, we talk about gaming, beer, etc. He tells me he's looking for work as he was working at his father-in-law’s shop and got canned because of the divorce. No problem, just help out around the house and pay us rent when you can. Two months later nothing, and this was before the economic downturn. There were companies hiring right and left, besides Taco Bell and McDonald's.

Somehow, he scrapes together $200 bucks. He immediately goes out and blows it on finishing up a demonic sleeve tattoo. Fantastic, that's gonna help him getting a job. He uses the kitchen and leaves dirty dishes everywhere. We are washing his clothes and he's using my toiletries...which is where sweet karma comes in.

I inform him at the end of month three that we were sorry, but he needed to either pay the back-rent owed and have a job by the end of the week or he would have to leave. Astonishingly, he asked, "How can you kick me out after all I've done for you?" I was so flabbergasted. Like really dude, what have you actually done except mooch off our generosity?

"Fine! Screw you! I'll get my junk out of your apartment by the end of the day" he finally says. I go to work, come back home, and my significant other tells me that Saul was furious and had packed his stuff. I hear him in the bathroom. He's finally showering after about four weeks of taking a break from hygiene, and I hear my electric razor.

He comes out clean shaven, flips me off, grabs his stuff, and splits. As soon as the door shuts, I'm in tears from laughter. My SO is ticked since she feels like she lost a friend over the deal. I then inform her that he'll get over it. She then goes in to see the wreck he left in the bathroom and sees the razor on the sink. "Saul shaved didn't he?" "Yup". "Isn't that the...?" "Shaver I use to trim 'down there'? Yep".

Both of us are in freaking tears by this point. We find out later he moved to Arkansas, where he was promptly detained for assault. Served time, released, and immediately got hung up on another charge, but was released due to lack of evidence. Saw him the other day, kicking a scraggly beard. I wanted to offer him that shaver.

Hitokiri818

I'm in the New York City subway. A guy elbows me out of the way to get into the turnstile, first yelling vaguely that he "has a train to catch". No way, really?. He goes through the turnstile, turns the corner, and there are a few uniformed officers set up near a folding table. The dude gets pulled to have his bag searched. I think he missed that train.

TheFire_Eagle

This idiot I knew in high school was trying to get a mentally handicapped kid to do stuff for a video in a very nasty cruel way behind the gym. Meanwhile, I’m sitting behind a car in the parking lot. Special kid is not dumb enough to play this game, so the idiot decides to get him to hold the camera for him instead.

People are heckling and calling out suggestions, nothing interesting happens, then someone comes out with a basketball, puts it on the concrete sidewalk, then hands idiot an aluminum baseball bat and mimes hitting the basketball, like splitting a log with an ax. Idiot winds up, brings it down, and I hear blaWHANK.

His head shoots back, blood everywhere. Honestly, from where I was I even thought he smashed his skull. Bat clatters like 20 feet behind him and he goes down backward. The bat bounced, nailed him in the eyebrow, split it open, and knocked him straight out. He was okay but had a scar and a wild black eye for a few weeks. But that's not even the best part.

The best part is that the whole time, the mentally handicapped kid he'd been trying to humiliate on camera is filming him and laughing so freaking hard that he's crying. You could tell he was so happy. Security didn’t believe no-one hit the idiot until he showed them the video. Yep, he was just that dumb, security found out.

throwawaybreaks

This kid used to mess with me while we all waited for class to start in middle school. He'd grab at my stuff, particularly the trumpet I played for this class, make fun of me, all the usual idiocy. We were all bored, so it must've been to fill time. Anyway, this one day I decided I’d had enough of his antics. It was time to act.

So, I swung the case for my trumpet right at his head. I didn't think I hit him that hard, but I heard later he went into his class crying. They made us go into some kind of mediation thing but it was too late. I got my revenge, and he didn't want to live it down. So, we basically never talked to each other again. I was absolutely okay with that.

SWEGEN4LYFE

In the UK, kids wear blazers and ties to school and a common teasing tactic that jerks used was to run up to kids and pull their ties so they get really tightly knotted. On the bus ride home, the bus was really full, and I was standing in front of one such harasser. He grabbed my tie JUST as the bus had to brake sharply.

He lost his footing and the only thing keeping him upright was the fact that he was holding onto my tie. Except he had grabbed the wrong bit, and it wasn't knotted. I simply untied it and he fell on his bum in front of everyone on the bus. That was the last time I was knotted, and it was absolutely glorious. What a victory.

dead-ced-dead

When I was fresh out of high school and living with my buddy Brett, we wound up living month-to-month without a lease at a low-middle end apartment complex. The rent wasn't too bad, but me and Brett were 19 and had many more priorities other than rent and bills. So, we got a co-worker of Brett's to move in with us as well. We soon found out how bad an idea this was.

Long story short, the guy turned out to be a total idiot and a bit dangerous. After a couple of months of putting up with his garbage, we had a huge fight where he punched a hole in the wall and broke my computer. So, the next morning, as soon as the apartment complex office opened, me and my buddy Brett went down.

We signed a lease for the apartment, becoming the only two occupants. No more idiot friend, we just couldn’t deal. Then we called the authorities and had them kick the jerk out for trespassing. Authorities woke the jerk and his trashy girlfriend up out of a sound sleep to tell them they had to leave. I was so satisfied.

volstedgridban

One time in middle school, this guy who was relatively new at our school was making fun of a girl in our class who fell in the hallway in-between classes. Coincidentally, this was a girl I had a crush on. The guy was a little bit of a class clown, and was mocking her, making her look stupid and clumsy. This did not bode well for him.

Apparently, he misjudged his footing, and while attempting to jokingly ape the way she had fallen, actually fell for real, and landed squarely on his back in front of everybody. He broke his arm in the process. Passing him by in the hallway, I saw him just lying there, surrounded by adults and staring up at the ceiling, face completely expressionless. Pretty sure he moved after that. I would have too.

CaptainCruiser

I was walking down a busy street and a guy shoulder-barged me as he walked past. Unbeknownst to him, though, I had a lit smoke in my hand and it burnt him pretty badly on the way by. I was about 10 feet away when I heard him scream out, but there was too many people and I never saw him again. Oh well, serves him right.

mrbumnus

I worked at a coffee chain as my first job during high school. I worked a metric ton, and the customers loved me. The place was run by this super jerk of a General Manager who let her two daughters work there. One was a normal employee who got treated like an angel and always got the shifts she wanted, while the other was an incompetent shift leader who got the same treatment.

Well, one week this normal employee girl looks at her schedule then asks if she can trade two of her shifts with two of mine because she forgot about her mom's birthday. I said sure, no problem, because I was just trying to be nice. So, the next week when I get my schedule, I am only working one shift. I'm like, why the heck?

The General Manager only told me, "If you don't like the shifts I give you, then you won't get any". She didn't even care why I traded the shifts in the first place—for HER BIRTHDAY—so I immediately put my two weeks in. The last day I was supposed to work was a Saturday morning, which is always PACKED and if one person doesn't show up, it makes the whole morning awful.

Well, I forgot I had to work, and I was out super late that previous night. The next morning, I just kind of said "screw it" and just skipped work altogether. They called and texted me several times, begging to know where I was. I did not even begin to consider letting them know. It felt very, very good. I continue to chase that high.

Robbie7up

A couple of years ago, a friend and I were going to a concert and the traffic was beyond snarled. There was only one entrance into the location and it was mucking up the traffic as you had to turn across a busy intersection. My friend thought that she could make it across, but someone coming from the other direction cut her off and made it so she was stopped in the intersection.

Cue some amazing jerk going from the light and screaming up to about an inch from the passenger side door. I really thought that he was going to hit us. He was screaming and flashing the finger and looked like he was going to get out of his car. Meanwhile, my friend is freaking out and trying to inch her way into the stadium parking lot.

Luckily, a uniformed officer had just wheeled up in time to see the jerk pull his stunt. He flashed his lights and angrily got out of his car and started yelling at the guy. As we finally got out of the intersection, he was writing him a ticket that included something to the effect of reckless driving, just for going about ten feet. It made the night for us.

CowTownRebel

In elementary school, all the kids went to the bus stop together. As we walked, one of the second-graders ran into a lamp post. One of my classmates couldn’t stop laughing. We crossed the street and he was still laughing his butt off and didn’t look where he was going. You know what’s coming—he ran into a lamp post as well and instantly got laughed at.

xKarmanah

I was walking to the store with a friend when we were 13. We heard someone yelling at us and turned around to see some kid about 50 feet away. He was yelling and calling us every word you know at that age. As we started to walk over to confront him, he did a 180 to start running. Well, he spun around and ran face-first into a tree and hit it hard enough that he fell to the ground from the impact.

We couldn't stop laughing and hopefully, that was enough embarrassment for him to learn a lesson.

Sk8erguysk8er

I was dating this awful girl for awhile, because you know, I was stupid. She had a temper and was always flying off the handle. One of those people who is never happy and complains about everything. We had a fight that morning about her irrational temper. Later that day, I called her to tell her I had to work late.

She freaked out and punched the wall as soon as our conversation ended. Turns out, though, she punched a part of the wall that was solid behind the drywall and shattered her hand. She was promptly dumped.

Almostcomatose

I was working in a supermarket when a panicked customer came up to me and said he'd accidentally left his cash in the ATM. They wondered if anyone handed it in. I was about to say no when another customer appeared behind him and said he'd been trying to catch up to him. He'd been queuing behind him at the ATM and saw what happened.

He’d got the money for him. It was £200, so a decent amount. The original customer was super grateful and offered him some of the money, but the man wouldn't take it under any circumstances. The good samaritan then bought a scratch card, scratched it, and found he'd won £5. It was some nice instant karma for a change.

thewerepuppygrr

I was working 60-hour weeks, including being on-call 24/7 on weekends, for 12k/year. One night, I was at work alone until about 11:00 PM, and finally decided, "screw it". I locked up, threw my keys through the mail slot, wrote a resignation email, and turned my phone off. I woke up late the next morning to like 10 calls, texts, and emails from my (now-ex) boss begging me to come back.

So, I leisurely went back to pack up my stuff and give him a list of everything he still owed me. A couple of months later, after my remaining co-workers had full-on nervous breakdowns from sharing my workload and left the state for other jobs, he was down to one employee and had to move from his office in an awesome location to one of those sketchy office parks.

kranzmonkey

I was a lifeguard at a well-known chain of indoor waterpark hotels in the US, and a woman was letting her less-than-two-year-old daughter play in the shallow end all by herself while she sat in a chair and read a magazine. I walked up to her to let her know that it was not safe for a child that young to be by herself.

The mom started yelling at me, telling me that it was not my business how she parented and to leave her alone. At this point, everyone around her is staring. Then, as soon as she finishes her rant, her daughter loses her balance and falls face-first into the water, and is too young to know how to stand back up to get her face out of the water and breathe.

I run in, grab her daughter, and bring her back to her. Everyone around who was staring began to clap.

phoenix25

Three days ago, I went into a store to buy a bag of ice. I put the bag on the checkout counter and waited while the woman in front of me completed her purchase. This reminded her that she also needed a bag of ice. "Here, take this one," I said, and grabbed another bag. "Is that all you're buying?" she asked me. "Yes". She looked at me and said, "You're done…bye-bye". Before I could figure out what she meant, she turned to the clerk and said, "Put his ice on my bill". Nice karma!

agreeswithfishpal

At my last job, I had a new senior manager hired to run my division and our sister division. After working with him for six months, I had reached my breaking point. He would call at 5:01 to see if I was still there; he would email me at 1:00 a.m. (I had a company Blackberry) asking for amendments to his morning meeting’s presentations regarding my division.

He would ask my receptionist to take notes regarding the goings-on in my office, even though just three of us shared an office and he was down the hall. He was the worst boss I've ever worked for, but the job market was tight and this paid the bills. The final straw came, though, when I returned from a week off. He approached me and asked why I was quitting.

I hadn't submitted notice, nor notified anyone I was leaving. I told him I wasn't and that he'd be the first to know if I did. He called me a liar and walked away. I sent him an email that afternoon tendering my resignation with three weeks’ notice. In my exit interview, I told the HR team EVERYTHING, and I mean everything, about the junk he pulled. Four weeks later he was fired, along with my receptionist.

Basque17

I worked selling shoes for two years on a weekend-only basis during school at a nationally-recognized chain. Never offered a raise, never offered to open the store, never given any recognition. When I asked for some more responsibilities, I was told I was unimportant, as two new outside managers were coming in.

One of these guys managed a section of PetSmart, and the other had no prior experience whatsoever. I put in my two weeks notice. Both people came in on my last day, so I showed them everything I learned and all the small quirks of the inventory that we had there. Both quit within a week, and the store closed within four months.

VulturE

I was working for Krispy Kreme when it first came to my state. I was their primary "producer," meaning my eight-hour shift every night made about 80% of the product for the stores the next day, and it was usually just me who was making the product and sending it down the other end for a team to decorate and pack.

I was the one person who would take whatever shift they gave me, and always did the shift that had all the work, the "no time to chat" shift. The shift before me, without fail, screwed around and made my shift a nightmare. I called management out on it, saying it wasn't fair and. that if I left a shift without making yeast brews and such, I'd be sent packing.

The shift manager just laughed at me and tried to blame me for the yeast brews, which were meant to be running for four hours before my shift started, but I had to make myself straight away. I refused to take the guff. So she gave me a cruel punishment. She decided that what I really wanted was a week or two without shifts, effective the next night.

I went home, typed up my notice of resignation and addressed it to the full manager, saying I couldn't work for such an incompetent shift manager and that I need to work for a place that was willing to give me the commitment to shifts and pay that I was originally promised there. Less than two weeks later, I get a call".

Our production line has completely halted. You're the only one who knows how to fix it. Can't pay you cash, but can give you a few dozen of the product for it". I enjoyed those few dozen donuts very nicely. A couple of months later, I see they've gone into administration. All stores closed, and now only selling out of gas stations. I know I didn't directly have a part in that, but it felt good.

anacche

I was working a job where I was doing 90 hours a week but only getting paid for 40-45. My boss blew up at me over the phone, so I quit right then and there, effective end of day. I finished up all of my work and he tried to sweet talk me into staying, but I held strong. Turns out he had to work 18 hours a day for the next two weeks trying to find a replacement.

Ihmhi

I'm an IT consultant, and have a reputation of being really competent with Microsoft Exchange Server. A couple of years ago, I bid on but did not get a project. Multiple servers, multiple sites, and right up my alley. The firm that won the bid did so by pricing it extremely low, about 40% below my price, which was on the low end to begin with.

Totally unrealistic pricing, but they thought they could pull it off with their people. Their people were good generalists but did not have a handle on Exchange 2010. I told the customer—who I'd done work for before and who I'd had a good relationship with—that it was not going to end well for them. They took it as sour grapes on my part. I was so quickly proven right.

I had plenty of other things to do anyway, so I just moved on. Two weeks after they started the implementation phase of the job, the other consulting firm messed up big time. The entire email system stopped working. No mail coming in or out, no mail flowing between any of the Exchange servers, everything just still in the water.

I find this out when I get a call late one evening at my home from the other consulting company, begging me to pull them out of the fire. I told them "no thanks". An hour later, the owner of the other firm is at my front door trying to convince me to help them "for the sake of the customer". This is well after business hours. Then the conversation took a dark turn.

He ends up screaming at me and I slam the door, then call the authorities because I'm tired and afraid that I'll do something stupid if I continue to interact with the guy. Authorities come, he loses it, they detain him for disorderly conduct and I have his freaking car blocking mine in my driveway. I have it towed off, even though I had to pay for the privilege.

He spends the next 24 hours in the slammer. The customer called me the following day and I again declined to fix the mess. By this time, I'd decided I didn't want any of that junk on me, period. The customer then sues the other consulting firm, which promptly files for bankruptcy and closes its doors rather than dealing with it.

DallasITGuy

I was flying cross-country on a space-available ticket and ended up having a layover in Chicago. I was walking around trying to find a restaurant close to my hotel and I passed this dude on the street, begging for some money to buy something to eat. Now, I'm used to seeing people with a cardboard sign or whatnot, but actually approaching people was pretty new to me.

I thought to myself, "Man, this guy is probably just looking for booze money and I'm going to call his bluff". So, I walk up to him and say, "Tell you what: I won't give you any money, but I'm on my way to get a bite to eat and if you want, you can come along with me and I'll get you whatever you want". I did not expect his response.

I was feeling pretty cocky, and figured he would turn me down with some excuse. "Absolutely!" was what he said. So, he picks up his stuff and starts walking with me. We settle on some Ruby Tuesday or Applebee's-ish place. He says he can't decide between a big steak or ribs, and I wave him off with my hand and tell him I have no problem buying him both. But this is when things got truly weird.

As we eat, he pulls out the biggest knife I've ever seen in person. He puts it on the table and says to me, "I can't tell you how freaking hungry I was. Everybody was passing me on the street, some of them would glare or ignore me, some would talk smack. I told myself the next idiot who had something clever to say to me was getting cut".

I was freaking frozen. Conversation eventually moved on and we both finished our dinners, and I talked him into dessert. In the process, I told him I was extremely interested in his knife and was in the market for one, and I offered him 250 bucks for his. He was ecstatic and sold it to me. I just figured that dude really didn't need a knife on him like that.

I figured he could use the money more than the knife. I gave it to a uniformed officer and said I found it lying around on the street. Maybe someone’s life was saved that day, who knows. Life taught me a few lessons that night, though: Don't judge, because people aren't always who you think they are, and be nice.

Permalink

My first job out of high school was working for a rather famous and nation-wide guitar store chain. At first, I thought it would be fun, getting to be around guitars all day and talking music with fellow musicians. Turns out I was wrong. 10-hour shifts five to six days a week while listening to too-loud overhead music over and over again wasn't actually all that great.

But I stuck it out. I needed money and I have one of those "don't quit ever" attitudes. When I got hired, the store was in serious trouble. They had recently fired a huge chunk of the staff for skimming profits and selling substances out of the warehouse. Their numbers were really low, and corporate was breathing down their necks.

But, as it turns out, I have a penchant for selling stuff that I know about. I was the accessories guy and got really, really good at it. I was routinely rolling $30k or better a month out the door, and the most expensive thing I had in my department was only $500. I also had a file with several letters from happy customers saying how much help I had been.

Eventually, the store's numbers improved, especially my department. Suddenly, we were #1 for our district, and #3 on the West coast, behind Hollywood and San Francisco. However, NONE of that mattered to the General Manager or anyone from corporate. All they wanted was more from me. My numbers had to be better every month, or I'd get yelled at.

I was written up for having a low sales month one January because I went on vacation. I would get daily emails and phone calls from the district and regional managers, demanding to know why I hadn't hit $xxx in sales yet. My hours got bumped up to the point where my days consisted of sleeping, showering, eating, and working.

I had zero social life. My girlfriend at the time would go weeks without seeing me. Eventually, because of the stress, I developed an ulcer. So, I decided to quit. I threw myself into my last month, which just happened to be December, the month all retail workers hate. I worked extra hours, sold as much as I could, contacted old customers, you name it.

Blew everyone out of the water, rolling just shy of $80,000 in gear. My boss called me in to his office and said I was doing a good (not great, good) job, and to keep it up. I pointed to the sales numbers screen, pointed out how well I had been doing and how well-liked I was by the customers, and asked for a raise. His response chilled me to the bone. 

He laughed and said no. That was it. So I handed him my resignation letter. Two weeks later, I was done and starting classes in college, something I'd had put off since work wouldn't allow me to cut hours for school. I came back to the store a couple of months later, as someone who had worked with me called and said they'd found a jacket of mine in the warehouse.

When I showed up, the General Manager wasn't there. I asked and finally found out the truth. Corporate HAD noticed me, and when my General Manager had failed to retain me, they'd fired him. Also, that department went from #1 to #9 in the district, out of 11 stores, when I left. The district managers were scrambling to recover. I laughed the laugh of the vindicated.

Osiris32

I worked at a Kmart in high school. It was a small store, so I worked everything: electronics, stocking, cashier—you name it, I did it. One day, I asked a woman and her son, who was about 12 or 13, if they needed help finding anything as I was out on the floor. For some reason, the kid immediately calls me out for annoying him. I ignore it and go about my business, but I think he's a little jerk.

Right after that, I get called to checkout. As I'm working there, here comes the pair. The kid has gone all out back in the electronics area, with some EA sports titles and a GTA game. I'm checking them out when the age prompt comes up for the M-rated game. I decide to take a chance and show the jerk a little karma.

I flip the game over and inform the mother that "This game has been rated M for the following reasons" and read the list off the back of the case. There is a long, awkward silence, and then she angrily informs me that the son said it was only a "little violent," and he must have lied to her. Kid wasn't able to get anything that day.

AMathmagician

I worked as a database administrator for a community center one summer in university. Basically, I created a database for them to track who was donating to them and how much they were donating, as well a who was volunteering, and for how many hours. Very simple work and despite being the youngest person on staff, I got along well with my co-workers.

Well, except for my immediate boss, who was a total piece of work. The next spring, I was applying for jobs and e-mailed my old boss to ask for a letter of recommendation. Much to my surprise, she told me that she didn't write recommendation letters "out of principle". I was pretty ticked off about it because I was finding it very difficult to find a position.

Not being able to count on my most recent employer for a reference was a definite blemish on my resume. However, in spite of this, I managed to land a decent job. Lo and behold, I got to get revenge on day one of my new job. That day, my boss happened to email me about a problem at my old work with the database I had worked on.

She had moved some files around, rendering it impossible for her to access the database. She asked if I would come in. I had the perfect reply. I e-mailed her back and told her I already had a job and couldn't do it "out of principle". From the center's perspective, it effectively made my entire summer a waste of time. Hey, what can you do?

ItsOppositeDayHere

Sources: 1, 2

It seemed like a miracle that Mary lived as long as she did. Her mother Queen Catherine of Aragon had an absolutely brutal time when it came to childbirth. Over the course of nine pregnancies, she suffered multiple miscarriages, had stillborn births, or watched her babies perish before their first birthdays. Because of all her pain, Catherine was thrilled when Mary survived into adulthood—but then again, she never saw her daughter's brutal reign.

Catherine was happy to finally have a child survive for longer than a year, but her husband, King Henry VIII? Not so much. He needed a male heir and when he heard that Mary had been born, his response was utterly disturbing. He "consoled" Catherine by saying that since this one was a girl, it meant a better chance for a boy the next time. Thanks, dad.

Despite Mary's deranged childhood, she still managed to blossom into a precocious young beauty. She was cunning and clever, with a curvaceous figure, alabaster skin, light blue eyes, and vibrant red hair. As an attractive princess, she was always going to have men competing for her hand—but even she couldn't have predicted just how many...or how dark their intentions would be.

As Mary's dear old dad sat around waiting for a son, he figured he might as well use his daughter as way to forge alliances. At just two years old, he pledged Mary to the prince of France. Then when she was six, Mary was set to tie the knot with her own cousin. By the time she was a teenager, Mary already had been engaged to three different men.

"Messy" doesn't begin to cover the rollercoaster relationship between Mary's mom and dad. Her father King Henry VIII needed a male heir and Catherine just couldn't give one to him. It also didn't help that Henry cheated on Catherine constantly—but even Henry's multiple affairs didn't hold a candle to the one betrayal that left Catherine and little Mary reeling.

Watching your parents split up is hard—but for Mary, her parents' break-up literally made history. When Henry fell in love with coy Anne Boleyn, he moved heaven and earth to be with her. At the time, divorce was a big no no, but Henry just couldn't wait to shack up with his new mistress. While he pressured the church to let him dump Mary's mom, Henry banished Catherine to a faraway fort.

As a princess, Mary received an extensive education. She learned to play the harpsichord and as early as age nine, Mary could read and write in Latin. But nothing Mary did could win over her dad. During his messy split from Mary's mom, Henry lashed out with a brutal act. He cruelly refused to let Mary see or even talk to her mother.

Growing pains have nothing on Mary's brutal adolescence. Even though she frequently suffered from painful illnesses and begged her dad to let her visit her mom, Henry coldly refused. Between her physical and emotional anguish, Mary quickly fell into a deep depression. And then, things got even worse.

In 1533, Mary's parents officially broke up—and oh, what a break-up it was. A mere five days after getting the church to let him dump Catherine, Henry walked down the aisle with his side-piece Anne Boleyn. With his new bride by his side, Henry then twisted the knife: He declared Mary illegitimate and demoted her from a princess to a lady. Ouch.

Mary was no longer in line for the throne—instead, that honor went to her dad's new favorite daughter: little Princess Elizabeth, Henry's baby with Anne Boleyn. To say that Mary was ticked would be a huge understatement: She was furious. Mary refused to treat her new step-mom and step-sister like they were her superiors. In retaliation, Henry made his daughter's life a waking nightmare.

Mary was constantly sick, but instead of, I don't know, letting her talk to her mom, Henry forced her to stay home and tough it out. Surprise, surprise: That approach didn't work. Instead, it just made Mary even angrier with her dad. In fact, for three full years, Mary did not speak to her own father.

For King Henry, it seems that even this level of father-daughter drama wasn't enough. He couldn't tolerate Mary's cold treatment of his new wife and baby, so he did what any deranged dad would do. First he tried to manipulate Mary, then he attempted to bribe her. Even under pressure, Mary stood up to the king and refused to bend to his will.

This time of Mary's life was deeply unhappy. Henry was trying to break his daughter's disobedient streak by depriving her of, well, everything. He took away her jewels, disbanded her household, and wouldn't even let her go on walks. There was one bright spot in Mary's misery: Her mother. The two secretly corresponded through letters. Sadly, even this consolation wouldn't last for long.

Through all of this turmoil, Mary did her best to roll with the punches—until one event changed everything. In 1536, Mary's beloved mother breathed her last. With this loss, Mary became absolutely "inconsolable." She shut herself away in a remote estate so that she could grieve in private.

1536 was a dramatic year, even for Mary. After saying goodbye to her mother, Mary also bid adieu to her step-mom. It turned out that Anne Boleyn couldn't give Henry a male heir either, so he dispatched of her in a way that made Catherine's banishment look like a happy ending: Henry had his second wife beheaded and declared baby Elizabeth to be illegitimate. Luckily for Mary, this meant that she was back in the royal game.

Mary's dad didn't seem to believe in taking a breath between relationships, so soon enough, he tied the knot with his third wife Jane Seymour. Thankfully, she and Mary got along much better than Henry's last bride. Jane and Mary were fast friends, and Jane even made Mary the god-mother of her newborn son. It looked like Mary's patchwork family was finally gelling—only for disaster to strike.

Shortly after Mary's new step-mom gave birth to her baby boy, everything went terribly wrong. Jane's labor had been utterly horrible and after clinging to life for two weeks, she breathed her last. Mary had just found a mother-figure—only to lose her. As a sign of Mary's devotion, she held the role of "chief mourner" at her step-mother's funeral.

To be honest, though, dying of complications from childbirth was a much better fate than most people suffered in King Henry's court. When Henry got mad at Mary's beloved godmother and old teacher, he had her executed. Even worse, the person wielding the axe was an inexperienced young man who, and I quote, "literally hacked her head and shoulders to pieces." Poor Mary had to watch as her old friend and mentor suffered an utterly brutal fate.

With Anne Boleyn out of the picture, Mary's relationship with her father was finally on the mend—but there was still one problem. Mary refused to say that her parents' marriage was invalid or admit that Henry was right to leave her mother. Furious at Mary's defiance, Henry locked his daughter in a room and kept her there until she finally gave in. Talk about father/daughter issues...

Even as Mary watched her maternal figures drop like flies and dealt with, y'know, being held captive by her dad, she still had to fulfill her royal duties—and when you were a woman that meant one thing: Marrying a rich guy. Bavaria's handsome Duke Philip made advances, as did Germany's Duke of Cleves, but both flirtations came to nothing. After all, Mary had her eye on something bigger: She wanted the crown.

Over the next few years, Mary's experiences only confirmed that power was fickle and her father was not a man to be messed with. She watched as Henry cruelly annulled his fourth marriage, then looked on as he put his fifth wife to death. By the time Mary met her final step-mom, Catherine Parr, she had very low expectations for any of her father's brides. Parr would prove her wrong, but the pleasant surprise would come at a heartbreakingly high cost.

Mary's final step-mother turned out to be her favorite. She became very close with Parr, bonding with her new step-mom over games of cards and matches of chess. Finally, Mary's home life was stable, but the peace wouldn't last long. In 1547, her father took his last breaths. With this loss, Mary, along with the rest of England, entered an era of profound uncertainty.

With Henry out of the picture, his nine-year-old son became King Edward VI took the throne. Spoiler: Making a pre-teen king was not a good call. Edward's rule was a bloody mess, full of riots, rebellions, and revolts, both in and out of the court. At home, Edward and Mary feuded constantly over their different beliefs. She was a Catholic, he was a Protestant—and both of them refused to back down.

Another princess would have given in and converted to the court's religion, but not Mary. She insisted on attending Catholic services in her own private chapel and then made it her personal mini-mission to get other courtiers to see the light. She invited people to hear Mass with her and, lo and behold, the illicit services became popular. The young king watched, furious, as his half-sister defied him—and then he lashed out.

Edward ordered Mary to stop her masses and even banned her from holding private services. The siblings' feud hit fever pitch when Mary got into a shouting match with the king...in front of the entire court. It was a huge scandal, and things only got more dramatic when courtiers discovered Mary in the midst of a forbidden act.

By this point, Mary was at her wits' end. She'd literally rather run away than give in and become a Protestant—and so she did just that. Courtiers caught the princess as she tried to escape from the castle, which now felt more like a prison cell. After forcing Mary back into her chambers, it looked like the feud between the princess and the king was finally at its breaking point—and then suddenly, everything changed.

On July 6, 1553, after feeling ill for a few months, King Edward VI passed on. He was just 15 years old when he breathed his last. With Edward's demise, England plunged into another period of uncertainty. A series of combatants fought for his throne, with Mary leading the pack. She was ready to reign—but if she wanted the crown, she'd have to fight for it.

Even though Mary was the rightful heir, a complex plot kept her from taking power. An ambitious duke saw Edward's demise as a way to put his relative Lady Jane Grey on the throne. As Edward declined, he convinced the king to change his successor to Lady Grey—and keep Mary on the sidelines. This was, to put it lightly, a very bad idea.

Lady Jane infamously held the title of Queen for a mere nine days. She lost the crown on July 12, 1553, when Mary gathered her forces and stormed the castle to seize power from her rival. Mary handily defeated Lady Jane Grey and locked her up in the infamous Tower of London. Then she, along with her half-sister Elizabeth, took a victory lap. It was a rare moment of joy in Mary's incredibly turbulent, dark life.

Here's the thing: Lady Jane wasn't actually interested in power. She was just a political pawn, and Mary knew it. That's why, even when Jane was found guilty of treason, Mary tried to be merciful. She kept her under guard at the Tower to avoid executing her—but as we'll see, when the English people wanted blood, eventually, they'd get it.

Even though Mary and Elizabeth rode through town together after locking up Jane Grey, the sisters were far from BFFs. Mary knew that if Elizabeth could seize power, she would take the chance—and so Mary decided to stop her in her tracks. In 1554, the newly-crowned queen set her eyes on her next coup: Finding a husband. Mary knew that if she could birth a legitimate heir, it would be much harder for Elizabeth to dethrone her.

Mary has a dark reputation as a zealous tyrant, but her years in power weren't all doom and gloom. She successfully restructured the English economy, supported exploration, and rebuilt the navy. So why don't we remember these parts of Mary's rule? Trust a Tudor to have family drama: Mary's sister Elizabeth received a lot of the credit for her sibling's achievements.

Mary knew she had to tie the knot fast, but hey, she was still a queen and queens are allowed to have high standards. Before choosing her suitor, Mary surveyed her options and decided on Philip II of Spain—but before she said "I do" she had one iconic request. She needed to see a portrait of Philip so that she could decide if he was attractive enough for England's first female ruler.

Apparently, Philip's painting did the trick. At the ripe old age of 37, Mary finally walked down the aisle with her mail-order beau. However, there was one very, shall we say, 'royal-family-problems' issue at the wedding. Remember how Mary's dad kept arranging for her to marry random nobles when she was a kid? Well, in a dicey twist, one of her ex-fiancés was her new husband's dad. Talk about awkward family reunions.

Mary was happy with her choice, but the people of England? They didn't agree. When Mary and Philip tied the knot, rebellions broke out across the kingdom. The most famous was Wyatt's Rebellion, which was led by some of Lady Jane Grey's understandably ticked relatives. They took up arms to defend Jane but sadly, their actions would have the exact opposite effect.

Mary quickly squashed the Wyatt Rebellion and immediately went on a revenge rampage against everyone who defied her. She put the rebellion's leaders to death and, even though Lady Jane Grey had very little do with the revolt, Mary gave her a brutal end. After seeing her dad execute so many people, Mary got her first taste of bloodshed. She had the innocent Jane Grey publicly beheaded. It was a sign of terrible things to come.

Lady Jane Grey and her associates weren't the only ones to face blowback from Wyatt's disastrous rebellion. Young Princess Elizabeth did too. Even though Elizabeth insisted that she had nothing to do with the revolt, Mary didn't believe her half-sister. To show Elizabeth not to mess with her, she locked her up in the Tower of London for two long months and even considered executing her own half-sibling.

Mary and Philip's marriage had a rocky start, but over time, the queen came to love her husband dearly. She was so besotted that she often felt hurt when he went away to look after his other territories. Philip, for his part, did not seem to feel the love. He didn't gush the same way Mary did—and often didn't stay in England for long periods of time. Ouch.

Why didn't Philip love Mary the way she loved him? One reason might have been his wounded ego. When Mary and Philip walked down the aisle, the people of England felt nervous that, if the staunchly Catholic princess married a guy related to the also-very-Catholic Spanish prince, Mary's husband might force England to convert back to Catholicism. Obviously, Mary wanted to do exactly this, but she also wanted to hold onto her power—so she made Philip sign a humiliating agreement.

"Queen Mary's Marriage Act" basically said that even though Philip could call himself the “King of England,” he had to get Mary's permission to do anything. The two shared “co-authority,” but the terms were pretty clear. This was Mary’s house and Philip was not the one in charge.

Another reason for Philip's cool feelings towards Mary? The royal couple didn't exactly have chemistry. Philip couldn't speak English, so he and Mary talked to each other in a hodge podge of three other languages. But there was a worse reason than mere communication issues: Philip just didn't find Mary attractive. She was ten years older than him and in a brutal letter about Philip's wedding, one of his courtiers wrote that the marriage wasn't for any "fleshly consideration." Ouch.

In the summer of 1554, the English court braced for news of Mary’s first child. Mary had started to show signs of a pregnancy months earlier, and everyone was getting ready to welcome the next heir to the throne. Well, almost everyone. Mary's husband Philip was busy looking out for himself. He tried to get Parliament to say that if Mary didn't survive childbirth, he could be King of England. When they said no, he did something far worse.

While Mary was busy dealing with a brutal pregnancy, Philip was getting ready to deal his wife a cold-hearted betrayal. Determined to hold onto power, Philip started romancing his wife's younger sister Princess Elizabeth. In case Mary kicked the bucket giving birth to their child, Elizabeth would take the crown. If Philip was married to her, he'd get to stay king. Yeah, he was a real stand-up guy.

Philip's, um, questionable courtship practices aside, though, there was a much bigger problem with Mary's pregnancy. In the beginning of May, Mary enclosed herself in a private room and waited to give birth. When the baby didn’t arrive by the end of the month, her advisors explained the delay by saying they must have calculated the wrong due date. But as the weeks passed and no baby appeared, they started to think that something much worse was at play.

With each passing day, Mary became more devastated. She refused to speak and would lie in bed, seemingly numb. On other days, she would wail on the floor and curl into the fetal position. By August, Mary had been waiting to give birth for four torturous months. When her baby bump began to mysteriously decrease, she finally gave up.

It turned out that even though Mary had morning sickness and a protruding belly, the queen had actually never been pregnant at all. Perhaps for psychological reasons, Mary had a rare case of false pregnancy. The whole experience shook Mary to her core, but unfortunately, it wouldn't be her only bizarre experience when it came to childbirth.

After it became clear that Mary was not going to give birth, to a child, the rumor mill went into overdrive. Across England, stories sprung up to explain Mary's unusual "pregnancy." Some claimed she had a miscarriage and was trying to keep her loss a secret. Others believed that the pregnancy was always fake and that Mary was going to sneak in a baby to pose as her own. Saddest of all, some people thought Mary was terribly ill. Instead of admitting that she needed help, she convinced herself that she was pregnant.

Here's the saddest possible reason behind Mary's false pregnancy. The queen wanted a child so desperately that she managed to manifest symptoms, despite not with child. In fact, Mary was so convinced that she was pregnant that she had letters drafted announcing the birth of her heir, the next ruler of England. Sadly, the letters would never be needed.

When Mary's belly abruptly shrank back to its normal size, the queen felt heartbroken. As she spiralled into a horrific depression, she desperately needed her husband Philip by her side. Shocker, Philip felt different about that. With his wife in the middle of a breakdown, he skipped town to to fight in Flanders. Alone and deeply hurt, Mary lashed out.

Mary became convinced that her false pregnancy was a punishment from God. Clearly, she had displeased the Lord by tolerating Protestants in her country. As a way to make good with the Big Guy upstairs, Mary decided that the time had come to take a hard line on religion in England. She locked up prominent Protestants in the realm, but soon, even that wasn't enough to satisfy her need for vengeance.

In 1554, Mary instituted the controversial "Heresy Acts" and officially began the darkest part of her legacy. These acts allowed Mary to punish Protestants for their religion, often by burning them at the stake. Unsurprisingly, almost 1000 Protestants chose exile over getting barbequed. In retrospect, these people made the right choice. England was about to become a terrifying place.

Even though Mary had a dark side, no one can say that she wasn't clever. As part of her plan to "cleanse" England, she brought back old laws to make heresy a treasonable offence. Why? Well, Mary couldn't execute someone for not being Catholic. But if heresy counted as treason, she could slash her way through the kingdom. With the old laws back in action, she began her brutal mission.

Despite her persecutions of Protestants, Mary’s idea of rebuilding to a Catholic Britain wasn't that extreme. In England, Protestantism was still a new religion and a lot of people actually wanted the country to go back to Catholicism. Even so, Mary's tactics were, shall we say, extreme...

In just three years, Mary's actions earned her the now-infamous nickname "Bloody Mary" and transformed her reign into "The Marian Persecutions." Of her many terrifying acts, one in particular has gone down in history: Queen Mary burned an astonishing 280 people at the stake. In comparison, her violent father burned 81 people. When it comes to bloodshed, it's hard to outdo King Henry VIII—but clearly, Mary managed.

There is one particularly terrifying story about Mary’s bloodlust. Apparently, Mary ordered that a woman named Perotine Massey be burned at the stake…even though she was pregnant. The story goes that Perotine actually gave birth in the flames—only for the executioner to grab the newborn infant and throw it into the fire with its mother. That's dark, even for Bloody Mary.

Bloodlust wasn't the only thing motivating Mary's quest to wipe out Protestants. She felt her Catholic faith very deeply and remained devout for her entire life. When she and her little brother Edward were fighting about their different religions, Edward once demanded that she convert. Mary replied that she would rather be executed. However, there is another, less noble reason for Mary's hatred of Protestants.

When Mary was a young girl, she watched as her father used Protestantism to cruelly divorce and then lock up her beloved mother, Queen Catherine of Aragon. Decades later, it's clear that she hadn't forgiven her dad. Historians believe that Henry's actions fuelled his daughter's staunch devotion to Catholicism...and her red-hot hatred for Protestants.

Mary executed a lot of Protestants. Most of them were strangers, but for some of her victims, Mary had a personal axe to grind. She spear-headed the now-infamous arrest and execution of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer. Why did she have it in for this guy? It's simple: He's the one who pronounced the marriage between Mary's mom and dad to be invalid. Clearly, Mary never let that one go.

There's another dark detail involved with Cranmer's untimely demise. When he was locked up and awaiting his punishment, Cranmer actually went back on his faith and said he'd become a Catholic. That should have satisfied Mary and saved him from the bonfire, but Mary had other plans. She coldly executed him anyway.

As Mary set fire to her kingdom's "heretics" her actions (justifiably!) caused England to quake in their boots. Mary's popularity plummeted with each execution. And then she made another huge fumble: England had a single stronghold left in France—and it was Mary who lost it forever. This failure, combined with her resentful subjects, left Mary in despair. Unfortunately, things would not get better.

In 1557, after Philip had been in continental Europe fighting various battles, he finally made it back to England and performed his royal duty. Soon after, Mary believed she was pregnant. Philip, on the other hand, felt certain that his wife was imagining things. Sadly, he was right.

This time around, Mary wasn't undergoing a phantom pregnancy. Instead, the reason for her mysterious symptoms was much worse. Mary was now in her 40s and the fact that her periods stopped didn't mean she was with child. It meant she was undergoing menopause. At that moment, Mary admitted that she would never have a baby. Heartbroken, she did what she had to do.

Mary had never much liked her half-sister Elizabeth. After all, it was Elizabeth’s mother who broke up Mary's parents. Making her the heir to Mary's throne was a tough pill to swallow, but Mary still did it, egged on by her husband Philip. He convinced his wife that it was the right decision...presumably without mentioning that he was planning to marry Elizabeth after Mary died.

Beginning in May of 1558, Mary began to feel unwell. She complained of pains in her abdomen and over the next few months, declined further and further. On November 17, 1558, the queen breathed her last. She died, childless, during an influenza epidemic. To this day, the reasons for her demise are not clear.

Some accounts suggest that the queen succumbed to a severe case of influenza. Modern scholars think that she may have had uterine cancer or ovarian cysts, and that her false pregnancies were caused by a malignant tumor. Either way, we know that Mary's demise was painful. And somehow, that's not even the worst part.

Where was Mary's beloved husband Philip when she took her last breaths? By her bedside? Wiping the royal brow? Nope, he was in a fully different country. Philip was in Brussels when his wife passed on. To add insult to injury, when Philip wrote about Mary's demise, he simply said that he felt "a reasonable regret" over the whole thing. Romantic!

When Mary realized that the end was coming, she drafted up her will, which had three specific requests. First, she wanted the crown to pay off the remaining debts of her father and half-brother. Second, she wanted her remaining money to go towards religious buildings. But the third request was by far the strangest. Mary wanted to be reunited with her mother. She requested that Catherine of Aragon's body be exhumed and buried next to Mary's grave. Sadly, all three of Mary's final wishes were ignored after her death.

Even from beyond the grave, Mary caused drama. At her funeral, John White, the Bishop of Winchester, provided a heartfelt sermon that praised the recently deceased queen. Unfortunately, his warm speech was maybe a little too effusive. When Elizabeth took over the throne, one of the first things she did was imprison her half-sister's supporter. Oh, but it gets so much worse.

Elizabeth I has somewhat overshadowed Mary in the annals of history and unfortunately, in their final resting places too. When Elizabeth passed, her successor actually placed Elizabeth’s coffin on top of Mary’s in Westminster Abbey! He then erected a large monument in praise of Elizabeth’s reign, and it only had a small inscription to Mary. That’s just cold.

Once Mary passed, her widower Philip did what we all expected. Barely a moment after Mary's funeral mass ended, he proposed to Elizabeth. As in his marriage to Mary, Philip wasn't exactly motivated by love. He just wanted to hold onto power. Elizabeth, perhaps seeing how Philip had treated her half-sister, wisely rejected his advances. Grossly, Philip later went on to marry his own niece.

When Elizabeth took the throne, she returned Protestant rule to England. With this shift, the court quickly framed Mary as a Catholic tyrant—but as we've seen, the real story is much more complicated. Not only was Mary's Catholicism quite popular, she was actually far less vindictive than her father. Henry executed somewhere between 57,000 and 72,000 people during his reign, including not one but two of his own wives. Despite this, as the Smithsonian Magazine notes, no one calls him "Bloody Henry."

Mary wasn't just a bloodthirsty monarch. Like anyone else, she had lots of different sides of her personality—and one of them is pretty surprising. Back in her day, Queen Mary was quite the card shark. She loved buying lavish new playing cards and was an avid gambler.

Even after she passed away, one of Mary's stories took on a powerful afterlife. Mary’s false pregnancy spurred rumors that the child of James II and Mary of Modena was actually an impostor, smuggled in to convince the people of a new heir to the throne of England. The rumors specifically cited the events of Bloody Mary’s reign, as Mary of Modena was also a Catholic.

Even though Mary was rather zealous when it came to persecuting Protestants in England, it still can't be said that she was more bloody than her father, Henry VIII. So why is Mary I still referred to as "Bloody Mary"? Part of the answer lies in the figure of John Foxe. An exiled but popular Protestant historian, Foxe wrote extensively on persecuted protestants, and his work, still in print, has kept this dark aspect of Mary's reign alive throughout the centuries.

To this day, Queen Mary is associated with a dark urban legend: “Bloody Mary.” The story goes that if you turn off the lights, look at your reflection, and chant “Bloody Mary” three times, you’ll see a woman, often covered in blood, screaming about how you’ve stolen or hurt her baby.

Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

My mother once gave me a self-help book called “Procrastination: Why You Do It, and What to Do About It Now". Well, obviously, I’m not going to do anything about it now, MUM. I’ll do something about it later.

My sister was overseas for Christmas, but thoughtfully left me the gift of Trinny and Susannah’s “How to Dress for your Body Type” book (for fat people). I regifted it to her the next year. And back and forth we go.

whyareyousolate

My uncle can’t stop talking about his work and shows no interest in other people. He can basically start a conversation with “How are you doing? What have you been up to?” And you can just reply with “Good. I’m-” before he starts talking again about his boring job. So I gave him two books, one about subjects for a conversation and one about how to handle yourself in a conversation.

Clothes that are clearly the wrong size. Not like hideous clothes, normal clothes. My cousin is exhausting and is constantly bragging about how men comment on her beach instagram photos, and how flat-tummy tea has done wonders for her, etc. Last year another cousin got her a dress that was 2 sizes too big and played totally oblivious while the self-absorbed cousin tried to not have a meltdown about someone thinking she’s a size 8. It was passive-aggressive gold.

aqua_rogue

One of the best passive aggressive gifts I’ve ever given was to my aunt, who we will call Elise. She’s known as the diva of the family, and she lives up to it every year. Usually my grandmother makes Christmas brunch/Thanksgiving dinner depending on the occasion, and in my lifetime Elise has thrown tantrums at six of these entirely based on food choices.

A couple years ago at Christmas, she was sitting at breakfast and smelled cinnamon French toast being fried in my grandmother’s skillet, and the theatrics began. She hates cinnamon, and she ended leaving the house and offering to come back in a family group text under the condition that all the windows be opened and an exhaust fan in the kitchen window. Over cinnamon french toast.

Last Christmas, I went to Bath and Body Works to get little gifts for everyone and I found a heavily cinnamon scented hand soap. Perfect gift. The look she gave me when she opened it was priceless.

aub00

Instead of cash, my grandparents are giving their extremely financially irresponsible step-grand daughter one single gram of gold for Christmas. For those who don’t know, 1 gram of gold is about the size of half of a child’s baby tooth. I am seriously impressed by that shade.

knittingcatmafia

My girlfriend has a cousin who has one of the most stuck-up, self-important food blogs I’ve ever read. I’m talking paragraphs and paragraphs before the actual recipe where she talks about her day like anyone actually cares. The kicker is that she’s actually pretty bad at cooking, which makes it even worse. Every year my girlfriend gives her cookbook for beginners. I don’t think she’s gotten the joke yet.

Schrodingers_Nachos

My sister once got me a nice hoodie, which was at least two sizes too small. “Oh, it looked like it would fit when I bought it". Joke’s on her as I lost 50lbs this year and now it fits. So I never wear it.

Slonchman

I always get my Aunt’s badly behaved kids those giant four-foot-long gummy worms. She always insisted that we get her kids gifts even when nobody on that side of the family was doing gift exchanges, and I thought loading her kids up with straight sticky sugar would prove the point pretty effectively while making her life just a bit more difficult through the holidays.

crazyladyscientist

My mum’s stepmother bought my mum a cheap carving knife one year. My mum had to sit there with her knife while her half sisters unwrapped new phones and expensive jewellery. I don’t even know if it was passive it was kinda just aggressive.

orangepuffajacket

My advice to those with a terrible family: don’t get a bad gift card because it will reflect more poorly on you in front of your family. Get a tacky large painting or vase and then when you see them next, ask to see where they displayed it. With tacky home décor, you can talk about how you thought of them when you saw it and how good the quality is. That way you come across as being thoughtful and they can’t really complain to the rest of the family about how bad it is without seeming ungrateful.

Philofelinist

My brother-in-law would always give the most obnoxious noise making toy to our kids. He would laugh and laugh when they opened it. Well, he got married and became a parent…guess what their kid got? My brother-in-law was NOT amused.

HIHWUDN

My co-worker was playing Christmas music on his computer speakers which was really annoying me. I went and bought a pair of headphones and put them on his desk, with a note that just had the boss’s initials on it. It worked and no one ever said anything about it.

DeFex

My cousin is a big fan of the Titanic, so I got her a piece of coal that they claimed was from the Titanic itself! She’s foolish enough to believe that it’s real, and plus I got to have the fun of giving her coal for Christmas. She’s really not that bad a person, she is just really condescending.

swolf8100

I had a proud Daughter of the Confederacy for a step-grandmother for quite some time. Every Christmas, she’d give my step-brothers and step-sisters gifts worth many hundreds of dollars each: dirtbikes, ball gowns, belaying equipment for rock climbing. And each Christmas, she’d give me a card with $5 inside. Every year, I donated her $5 to the NAACP in her name.

Every year, they sent her a little thank you card.

treerabbit23

Self help books. I had a roommate years ago who was a gigantic slob and a little off socially. I don’t remember the title but it was something like “a young man’s guide to being a gentleman”. The following year we got one about hygiene. It was funny but admittedly kind of a jerk move.

thechaddster

I like to print and frame a picture of us together where I look good and they look stupid, to remind them just how ugly they really are. Because that’s what I see. But I act super nice so they are guilted into putting it up in their house so it becomes a year round reminder. Also giving gifts to others I like of family photos but cropping out the family members I hate and making sure they see the other people open the cropped photo. Usually in a really nice frame so it has to be put up. That’s just with my in-laws because I have to deal with them, I don’t even talk to my own family I don’t like

TiredForDays

My uncle is horrible and has IBS. My aunt hates him, is too religious to divorce him, and loves to cook. I got her a cook book of spicy middle eastern cuisine.

Animated_Astronaut

I had gotten a gift for my stepdad I thought he would like. Then he basically told my mom that he doesn’t consider me and my brothers his kids, despite having been there our whole lives. So I’m giving his gift to my brothers to share (it’s a Hickory Farms gift set with summer sausage, cheese, crackers, etc) and I plan on doing it in full view of him. This is honestly the last straw of a lifetime of putting up with this miserable loser and I’m so done.

BricksInTheWall1991

My sister is a “hacker". She chain smokes and claims she has oversized tonsils. She gets up at 3am for her job, and has this phlegmy, gross cough and wakes up everyone in the house with how loud it is. She spits a lot too to get rid of the phlegm. Anyways, she loves Pokémon. I found these cute Pokémon socks that look like the one named Koffing (sounds like coughing) and here’s hoping she gets the hint.

Parkstreet2north

Not a family member, but a coworker. They harassed people in various ways and took credit for my work despite being one of the lowest performing people in the building. They screwed around all day talking to other people, injecting themselves into conversations that didn’t involve them, generally starting drama. Because we were a two person department, I did their work and mine.

I got the aromatherapy lotions from Bath and Body Works for some coworkers. Happy, Comfort, Stress Relief, those things. Because I knew she would complain to HR if I didn’t get her one too, I simply got her one that said “Focus".

berryfence

Walmart has gift sets of bath stuff by gender. Usually around $10. It’s the most generic gift ever. Pair it with a cheap gift bag and one piece of white tissue paper half heartedly crumpled and stuffed down beside the gift ( not covering the gift, just beside it) Screams of no thought and no effort. This is my go to “I’m socially obligated to get you something”. For full effect, all the women get the same thing and all the guys get the same thing in identical cheap bags, with no name tags.

If you do something like getting a cheese and sausage set for your vegan cousin or a planned parent hood donation in your conservative uncle’s name they get the satisfaction of knowing you put a lot of thought into being spiteful.

mostlyamess

I think a good passive aggressive gift has to come from the heart. I had a friend whose girlfriend didn’t like the rest of us in his circle. We kept warning him that she was telling everyone she was going to get him to move away from everyone in his life to go to Indiana with her. He kept saying he was in charge of his own life and even though she may want him to move to Indiana, he was still closely connected with everyone in his life and wouldn’t be going to Indiana any time soon.

I got him a guidebook to Indiana for the last Christmas we had together before she made him cut ties with our group all together. It seemed fitting. He knew the meaning, I knew the meaning, it was kinda perfect.

My uncle is a misogynist but thinks he’s just being objectively fair about women being more prone to hysterics then men. He also taught science for 30 years which is a horror I try to never think of. So…. I sent him a book about the history of women in science.

sarelai

When my wife spent the entire month of December at her Dad’s house helping clear it for sale/move the Stepmonster gave her $20 and told her to buy herself a present and wrap it and put in under the tree. I assume this qualifies, or she’s just a horrible person. I’m not assuming, I know.

wengelite

A couple years ago I got my father a very expensive gift that I thought he’d love. I had to save up a lot for it because I wasn’t working at the time, but it seemed worth it. He basically said “oh neat” and then never used it. He now has a $15 gift limit (I’ve spent about $200 on my mom for comparison). I make him a bag of snacks, most of which I buy from the store I work at so I get a discount, and just shove some tissue paper on top. I just reuse the same bag every year.

I got him some candy, a bag of off-brand Cheetos, and a bag of the same type of jerky I got him last year. He was more grateful for that stupid jerky than he was for the big gift I got him. Anyway, ridiculously low gift limit and some snacks from the corner market. But it looks like you tried, which is impressive in the age of gift cards, so no one even knows.

shiguywhy

My older brother and I have very different personalities. This resulted in battles being constantly fought at our home. Things have slightly improved since we both grew up but… He made the mistake making me godmother of his kid. Naturally I gave her a kid-sized drumset when she became 3…

animavivere

One Christmas for a joke, I took some malformed rutabegas and turnips, put each one in a box and wrapped it nicely, put them under the tree like normal. The looks on my kid’s/family’s faces when they opened the gift to find a turnip or rutabega was just wonderful! That was a fun joke but no reason not to give someone you don’t like a single, nicely wrapped root vegetable.

EugeneStargazer

My sister is a self absorbed brat. I swear she came to my daughter’s birthday party just to brag to everyone how awesome she is at her new job at Buffalo Wild Wings. So for Christmas that year I bought her a $5 gift card to Buffalo Wild Wings and put it inside a Get Well Soon card.

laughingbitterly

My grandfather just cut some trees my deceased brother and I planted 20 years ago (to be fair they were on his property, long story but I share a property line with him). I asked him not to cut them down, he did anyways. I’m making picture frames out of the trees. I’m planning to give him the smallest frame. With some passive aggressive picture or something glued into it.

Eulielee

For my family members going through puberty, I get them deodorant. It’s not exactly subtle, but it gets the point across. For my brother specifically, I get him gift cards, every year, for every event. Now you may be asking, “What’s passive aggressive about that?” Well I used to get him thoughtful gifts, but he would always cry and whine about them.

Well one year I got him Halo 4 (this was the year it came out) because we like to play Halo with our friends, and even just together. He spends 30 minutes literally bawling and yelling how I “Just got it for me” so now he gets Steam gift cards. I literally told him the first year I did it, “See, now you can only complain to yourself when you don’t like the game you get".

It’s been 6 years and I’m still mad about it.

Doofalicous

I was in a fight with my cousin. I was the passive aggressive one in this situation. Every year at Christmas we do a secret santa swap and it just so happens that I had my cousin that year. I proceeded to buy her a $15.00 gift card to a restaurant she does not like and put it in a “thinking of you get better greeting card” with the saying crossed out and “merry Christmas” scribbled inside. I then put this card in a brown paper bag I got from a purchase in the grocery store and ran over the bag a few times with my car. There were tire tracks and a pebble lodged in the card. Not one of my proudest moments.

My mother-in-law came over last Thanksgiving and made a big deal about how my serving dishes didn’t match. For Christmas, I got an entire serving set from her with a note that said “A lady’s table is her greatest masterpiece for her husband, so don’t sit him down to a kindergarten drawing".

Kandakandero

My stepmom has been married to my dad for about a decade now. About a month ago, she decided to stop talking to me and my mom, whom she’s always been friendly with (my mom took her to the gynecologist once at her request, for god’s sake). But I have to go over there for Christmas because my sister’s flying in and I want to see her.

She’s very materialistic and wants designer everything. I’m thinking about getting her one of those Heifer International things – a donation in her name to a poor family. You can’t even really complain about that without looking greedy, so there.

chinchillazilla54

My ex-girlfriend got me an alarm clock. She said I was always late for work. We didn’t live together, or even in the same area code. I only saw her on days I didn’t work. I wasn’t always late to work. I had a working alarm clock. She gave me that “If you don’t like it, I can take it back for something you do like” line that you are not supposed to take people up on. In the spirit of how things were going, I DID take her up on it.

She was pretty mad. I maybe had her get me some records? I don’t know. That doesn’t stand out nearly as much as the trash gift did.

explodedsun

When I was about 10 my sister was 18, she always spoke about how much she wanted a car – a pink Mini especially. So on Christmas morning my mother and I tell her to put a blindfold on and go out to the driveway. There stood a mini toy car that I had specially painted pink for her. She didn’t think it was funny.

Kiddler

Forever ago my mom bought me this shirt, I can’t remember exactly what it said but it was something along the lines of “I get upset for no reason just to hurt people". I actually have an anxiety disorder that she refused to let me see a doctor about for a long time because I was “faking it for attention". Oh, did I mention she’s a nurse?

sweetcatbutt

When my best friend and I moved in together we got a Christmas present of cleaning supplies from a friend who figured we wouldn’t have thought of buying them and whose mother passed on the message that she doesn’t want us going to her to get our laundry done. We’d both been living away from our own families for years and were able to wash our clothes and clean our house. I’m still offended but thankfully no longer friends with that girl.

her-vagesty

I was once given a Poo Pourri gift set (a whole arsenal of sprays and creams, came in a toilet shaped box!) by someone at work as part of a secret santa exchange. It was a bit embarrassing since I had only worked there for about 6 months at the time so I was still a little unsure about how people were perceiving me. In my mind, the gift was either someone’s way of jokingly telling me “you think your poop don’t stink” or someone’s serious way of telling me that my poop really really stinks.

Anyways, no one I talked to at the party admitted to being my secret santa. The next day I asked the office manager if she could tell me who it was and she said she could, but only if the other person gave their consent. She IM’d me back a minute later: “they said no”. I don’t use the products they gave me, in protest. But I have become a bit more self-conscious about my… well, you know.

ironarchist

In my first year high school math was one of my worst subjects so over the holiday break I was just glad to not have to think about for a couple of weeks until Christmas rolled around and the first gift I opened was… Math flash cards, a couple gifts later a book of ‘fun’ math games. Sigh.

The-Lying-Tree

My senior year of college one of my best friends and I had a falling out. Well a falling out that I wasn’t aware of. She was supposed to come to my Christmas party but never showed up. I moved to a different state the next day after graduation. She then decided to text my boyfriend and ask him what our new address was because she needed to send me my belated Christmas “present”. A couple weeks later I received a thick envelope from her filled with about 35 pictures of us and some of our other friends and a hand written friendship breakup letter. Still to this day she won’t talk to me and I have no clue why.

ajstraw

My aunt (Dad’s sister), who I see maybe once or twice a year, sat down next to me at the annual Christmas party in 2013 with a small gift. She said something to me about wanting to be invited to my son’s birthday party next year (he had turned one in May). I hadn’t invited my dad’s side of the family because my parents had gone through a divorce in May of 2011 and my mom is still bitter about it.

I normally get along with these people but just don’t see them much. But anyway I opened the gift and it was a tiny Ravens football helmet, some small thing I can’t remember and then a small bottle of a liquid concoction called “poo pourri”. You know, that spray that you spray into the toilet after you poop to take the smell away. That….was it. I was dumbfounded as to why she would even give me something like that, speculated that it was regifted from a junk drawer, and still have a good laugh about it with my mom all this time later. Man, what a terrible gift!

Dingobingaling

My family was doing this weight loss bet thing. We all chipped in $20 and whoever lost the most weight(as percent of body weight) got all the money. My cousin had lost the most legitimate weight but my grandma insisted she lost the most weight, it was just undocumented. This turned into a huge thing between her and my mom and eventually my mom just gave her the money since she was being really petty about it. About two months later it was Christmas and my grandma sent my mom some of her old flowery shirts and a pair of stretch pants since they no longer fit.

004forever

Me and my ex were breaking up around Christmas so she got me a gift. It was one of those as seen on TV magnifiers for phone cameras. Wasn’t even made to fit my phone. I thought it was worth a chuckle and I still think about it from time to time. Makes me wish I hadn’t gotten her that expensive necklace though.

EpicGuard

This relative of mine is from a wealthier family than mine and likes to show off a lot. We don’t really get gifts for other people very often unless it’s a special occasion and she likes to sort of put people down for their lack of money (whole other story). She got me a bunch of things the last time she went abroad which was generous of her and I appreciate that.

But she ripped the sale price off the tag which is very evident and left the “real” price of the stuff right there. She also kept telling us how expensive our gifts were. “It is rude to leave the price tags on gifts. But here, let me show you how expensive your gift was before I bought it on sale".

When I was a kid there was always a battle going on every Christmas between my dad and his brothers. He was the first to have kids, and each year a box would arrive for us containing an unreasonably noisy or messy gift, like toy megaphones or a marble set with extra marbles that they knew would get everywhere. Eventually we grew up and my uncles had kids of their own. It was so satisfying to go to the store as a teenager and pick out revenge gifts, such as a splatter paint set.

HansDelbrook

My girlfriend’s brother is pretty right-wing, whereas I’m about as left as they come. We’ve had some spirited discussions through the years, believe me. At the time, I was commuting 2 1/2 hours daily, and I had gotten into audiobooks pretty heavily. I was pretty stoked when he got me a book I’d never read before, Atlas Shrugged. All I really knew about it was that it was a highly regarded classic. Little did I know that it was the conservative manifesto. I think I made it about 15 minutes into listening to it before I started thinking he was a sneaky piece of work!

FlyTaggart

My younger cousin, I love her to pieces, cannot hold a conversation. I have never heard anything intelligent or thought-provoking come out of her mouth, other than superficial compliments (You look so tan) or complaints. If you attempt to talk to her about something intelligent, she’ll respond, “Oh, that’s deep,” because apparently, it’s far too intellectual for her to be seen talking about.

For her college graduation gift, I bought her a book about “How to hold a conversation".

cheechsfeist

I really don’t celebrate Christmas. It was just sucky growing up so as an adult I just don’t participate. I do things for my child, it’s not his fault. My mother knows very well I don’t want gifts and we have talked about alternatives like donating to charity or whatever. So one year I go to her house so my son can open his presents and she pulls out this little poorly wrapped gift and hands it to me.

It’s a plastic container of knock off q-tips from the dollar store. Really? What was that supposed to mean? It wasn’t a money issue, she’s loaded (and knows I don’t want any of it) but she told me she just couldn’t bear to have nothing under the tree for me. This woman is a professional button pusher.

ODB247

This wasn’t gifted to me, but to my younger sister. My parents had her late in life, when I was 10 and my brother was 16. For some reason, no one in my father’s family liked her much. For her first Christmas my grandmother gave her squeaky dog toys, a frog and a hamburger. There was no oops there either, they were still in the cellophane wrapper with the cardboard tag on them saying that they were squeaky dog toys.

My mom refused to acknowledge that they were dog toys, gave them to her anyways and just played along.

nightbloom_

My stepmom always hated me. She told my dad not to take me on family trips when I was younger because I wasn’t part of “their family". Etc etc. Anyway, during his marriage to this woman, I went through a phase when I loved the Transiberian Orchestra. For my birthday (in May) one year I asked for tickets come Christmas time. Come November, I reiterated that I really wanted TSO tickets, maybe for Christmas. No luck.

The band came and went and I did not get to go. Fast forward to Christmas Day, I unwrap a shirt. A transiberian orchestra shirt. It was two sizes too big. Clearly purchased for my dad. As I held it up, my stepmom explained that she’d gotten it for me when she took my dad to the concert for his birthday because “I know you said you liked them". I was 15. They’re divorced now, thank goodness.

mellovino

Years ago, my stepmother disapproved of my (then) boyfriend. Leading up to Christmas that year my father kept asking me for a family picture of me, my boyfriend and our infant daughter. I ended up sending him the picture we took with Santa, where I was knealing on one side of Santa with our daughter on my knee and my boyfriend on the other side of him. Come Christmas Day, my stepmother gifts me a giant threadbare blanket (the kind you buy at the Walmart photo counter) with the Santa picture splashed across it in all it’s cross-stiched splendor, except that she had cropped the photo to just have me, my daughter and rando Santa Claus in it, no boyfriend.

The way she had cropped the picture onto the blanket made it so that our depictions on it were easily 5 times the size of us which made it obvious that she could have fit the entire picture. My daughter’s nostrils were easily the size of my fists. As I was trying to hide my incredulity after opening it she said, “It would look nicer but you didn’t really give us a good picture,” which was really the cherry on top. This blanket has been known ever since as “The Passive Aggressive Blanket.

opalesense

My Grandma has always favored my older brother over me and every Christmas for years I would receive awful, cheap gifts while having to watch my brother unwrap expensive brand name clothes, video games, money etc. I still remember some of those gifts. Things like an off brand Barbie doll that was missing half her hair. A piano-shaped jewelry box that was supposed to play music but didn’t. The hat/visor that was covered in pink and blue Spandex like material which I’m pretty sure she took from Richard Simmons. And the flesh coloured boob-tube top that was 2 sizes too small.

But the Christmas that I was 12 was probably my favorite. After watching my brother open numerous awesome and expensive gifts, she handed me a badly wrapped package. Inside was a bright red hat…. with a green marijuana leaf embroidered on it. I was speechless. I looked at my Grandma and she smiled and asked me if I liked my “nice Christmas hat".

I was trying so hard not to crack up laughing and you could tell that the rest of my family was struggling not to laugh too which made it that much worse. I managed to say that I loved it and then had to wear that freaking hat for the rest of the day until Grandma went home. I have no idea what happened to the hat because I never saw it again after that Christmas day. But every year when Christmas rolls around, I can’t help but think of my “nice Christmas hat” and have a good chuckle. Thanks for the laughs Grandma.

beverley_1987

When my bratty cousin demanded I get her an iPad, I put a bunch of feminine pads in an iPad box and drew I’s on all of them. I told her mom about it but she’s very not into disciplining her daughter in any way, she found it funny but had the nerve to say “Did you get her a real iPad for after?” Uh, no. My cousin was throwing herself on the floor demanding I buy an iPad in front of her so she knew I was getting it for Christmas for her, she threatened me that she would get herself kidnapped if I didn’t.

Like she already apologized to me for it and doesn’t normally behave like that with me (which is why I pick her up and hang out with her sometimes), when I threatened to never to pick her up again she was super apologetic and crying on the phone so I forgave her. Ruined Christmas for herself though and I hope she learns a small lesson never to act like that with me again.

My Aunt’s parenting skills are so subpar and it’s so sad that I actually had to say, “I am not your mom and I will not for a second put up with that type of behavior".

ReanimatorLove

So my sister in law is a piece of work. She’s constantly setting up Go Fund Me campaigns for house projects, vacations, sperm to start a family, etc. She’s just…. exhausting. So one year she gives me a rock for Christmas. And I open it and I’m like, “Oh….cooooool…". And she goes on this ten minute speech about how she slept with the darn rock to give it her energy and “help guide me” and tells me I’m supposed to sleep with the rock, too, so we can become “closer".

So the next year, here comes another Go Fund Me, this time she wants to hike a portion of the Appalachian Trail. Now, I’m broke: I’m finishing a Master’s degree, I have a new baby, etc. I’m not giving her money for her “finding herself” vacations. But I do decide I want to give her something. So at her vacation kick off party that she threw herself (not joking), I brought her a gift that I put a lot of thought into. I told her I wanted her to take it with her, for safe keeping, to remind her of her family waiting for her safe return from the great state of New Hampshire.

And I passed her a 15 lb slab of granite from my back yard. And deadfaced told her I wanted her to carry it in her pack for her trip because it had good energy in it. The look: priceless.

HappyGiraffe

So when she inevitably wound up knocked up at fourteen because “she didn’t want to use birth control and said she didn’t need it” (their actual words) and god forbid anyone parents, their response was it was like Romeo and Juliet (to which my sister got smacked by my mom for pointing out that it was too quick and they die horribly because of selfishness, though she agreed) and they’ll live happily ever after. So when that doesn’t happen because teenagers are impulsive little brats, my grandparents are raising their great grandkid and are loving it.

I love my baby cousin, and because none of this is her fault and you can’t get mad at someone for existing and being born into a toxic environment, I’ve decided to show my disdain for her irresponsible mother by getting her the most irritating toys in existence. For her first Christmas, she got a load of books and a leap frog doggie that talks all the time that she loved. For her second when she needed a helmet due to being in her car seat too much. And it was obvious she didn’t really pay any attention to her kid, I made her a mommy and me blanket with some books for storytime with the cutest little pattern of a mommy elephant and a baby elephant.

The best part is the baby LOVES me since I spoil her and teach her new things, so I know she’s going to love the ball pit with a bag of extra balls I’m getting her for Christmas this year.

CrackersTheBigDuck

A schizophrenic lady told us someone was trying to kill her. Then it turned out someone shot up her house in a drive-by while she was in the psych unit…

TrustMeIAmADocter

A few weeks ago, I got dispatched to our local casino for a 30-year-old “having a stroke". Yeah, right, I thought, as I approach the guy, who was obviously a fit and athletic dude pacing up and down a hallway. He reeked from drinking and had apparently spent the whole morning on the slots before coming up to security and announcing that he was having a stroke.

I did my assessment, and besides the typical mumbled speech of an intoxicated person and some lethargy, nothing was especially worrisome. Still, we transported him anyway because he was insistent and started to make a scene, and you don’t really mess around with strokes. But there was no way in my mind that this healthy-looking athletic young dude with completely normal vital signs and very little medical history was having a stroke.

But golly gosh, he was having a stroke. Never before in my career have I been so dramatically proven wrong.

Permalink

A guy had oesophageal cancer, and we scheduled him for an operation. His cancer had not spread, and we expected him to get better after resection and a gastric pull-through. While doing his pre-op checkup, he said to me that he had a feeling something would definitely go wrong and he wouldn’t survive the surgery. I assured him that nothing would happen and he would get better after the surgery—I was so wrong.

The surgery went smoothly, and we shifted him to the ICU. On the second day, he showed good signs of recovery, so we planned to take him off the ventilator the next morning. But that night, he developed an anastomotic leak. Though everyone tried their best, he passed on the fifth day.

Ex2bate

I’m a medical student. During my mental health placement, I saw a guy on a home visit who tried to convince us that his neighbor was trying to kill him. This guy had a history of mental health problems, and the doctors were sure he was psychotic and that all of this was in his head. However, a few days later, the doctor came around for another home visit and found his patient’s neighbor trying to climb through the window with an AXE.

The poor man wasn’t psychotic at all, his neighbor was actually trying to murder him, and everyone thought he was just mad.

official_watermelon

My grandfather had schizophrenia, and for years he told us that someone was tampering with his water. We all ignored him until one day when one of my uncles tested the water, and it turned out it was actually unsafe to drink. Everyone felt really bad for ignoring his complaints for years. However, it probably wasn’t the Soviets who did it as he claimed...

baby_chalupa

I worked on the ambulances for a stint when I was fresh out of university. One day, I transferred an elderly patient to another county with such severe dementia that he didn’t remember his wife or even his own name. He happily chatted away the whole ride there, telling me that he was an ex-international footballer, about his big victories and how he owned a business with David Beckham, mixed in with other psychedelic nonsense.

I just kept asking him questions to keep him occupied and chatting, but in my head, I thought it was just a funny side effect of his dementia. So we arrived at the new hospital, and his lovely wife was waiting there. My crewmate and I transferred him to his hospital bed, and his wife shook our hands and thanked us profusely for being so kind to him.

She asked, “I know he’s a bit of a handful. Did he say much on the way?” I said, “Yes, he was telling us about being an international footballer and that he owned a business with David Beckham". She scoffed and said to her husband, “You told these nice people you were David’s business partner?! You only met him a couple of times!” What she said next floored me.

When I asked how he knew him, she explained that he had indeed been an international football player and was well known for “heading” the ball. In fact, the doctors thought that was why he developed dementia. I was so shocked. I’ll never forget him.

BigHairyStallion_69

When I was a medical student, I worked in an inpatient psych ward. We admitted a guy who was having psychotic delusions. He lived in a “holler,” or a small valley between two mountains. For weeks, this idea that the mountain was going to fall on his house was absolutely preoccupying his every thought. He would spend days at a time without sleep finding rocks, branches, and other junk and piling them up behind his house because “the mountain’s gonna fall down on my house".

I guess this wasn’t the first time this happened because the family brought him in, saying he was off his meds and was working himself to the bone to build a pile of junk behind his house. We admitted him for a week or two; he went to group therapy, had his meds adjusted, and was doing well. We decided he’s all tuned up and ready to be discharged.

But when his family came to pick him up, they had grim looks on their faces. “We’re bringing him back to the hotel. Yesterday there was a landslide. It destroyed the house".

7-and-a-switch

I work in neuro rehab. I saw a patient who had a history of excessive drinking and attempting to end her life. The last attempt left her with brain damage, hence my involvement. She had a five-second memory. She asked if her mother was still alive, then asked if she came to visit her, then asked again if her mother was alive.

Anyway, I’m going through basic orientation questions with a calendar, asking if she knew her name, where we were, and what she did for a living. Her name was correct, but as to her occupation, she replied, “I’m a spy, but I’m not supposed to say that". I tried to cue her to the correct answer, asking questions like, “Do you work in an office? Are you in finance?” But she wouldn’t change her answer.

After the session, I went to look in her personal file to check her occupation—I couldn't believe what I saw. It read, “Classified". I checked with the family, and they told me that they’ve never known what she does, but she works for the national intelligence agency... I tried to convince my patient she wasn’t a spy. She was.

vicki_with_an_I

I tore the ligaments in my knee when I was twelve, and the doctor had a difficult time getting the stitches out. One broke, and he decided to leave it under my skin, telling my parents it would dissolve. When I was 16, I banged my knee against something and out popped the end of the stitch. I went to the doctor to get it removed. You could see a long curly blue thing under my skin.

I insisted this was the remaining stitch, but my doctor just thought it was a vein. She froze a small area around the protruding stitch and pulled on it. She pulled out two or three inches of curly stitching. She held it up, looking shocked, and said, “I have to go show the other doctors this,” and left the room.

oxfay

My daughter had a bad fall on the trampoline when she was three. She let out this really weird scream, then went pale, quiet, and sweaty, and she wouldn’t let us touch her arm. We only live five minutes from the hospital, so I put her in the car and drove her there. She slept in the car. We get to the hospital and check-in, and she’s found her second wind.

The triage nurse rolled her eyes at me when I asked for an X-ray but ordered one anyway. At this point, my daughter was literally pirouetting around the waiting room. I was starting to doubt myself. Even the X-ray technician was laughing at us—but she wasn't laughing when we got the results. About five minutes after doing the X-ray, a very red-faced triage nurse runs out to the waiting room and firmly tells me to stop my daughter from dancing; she’s broken her arm, and they don’t know if she will need surgery or not.

She didn’t need surgery in the end, but she spent six weeks in a plaster cast. It turns out she’s tough and has a great pain threshold. I love her.

victhemaddestwife

I have my own story about doctors not believing me. I had my appendix out six years ago. Doctors also discovered that I have a chronic pain condition called endometriosis as well. For the last six years, I’ve been in the ER with extreme pain (similar to when I needed to have my appendix taken out). During this time, I had three more abdominal surgeries for endometriosis and tons of scans.

However, the pain still persisted, and I kept going back to the hospital. Eventually, I got labeled as “drug-seeking,” which was completely not the case. Finally, in August of last year, I went back to the hospital and kicked up a fuss about how much pain I was in. They got a surgeon to look over my latest CAT scan and noticed that the doctor who did my appendix surgery left in a part of my appendix; I had to have a second appendectomy!

It turned out that most of the pain I was experiencing was from the leftover appendix. I still have pain, but not nearly as bad now. I don’t know why no one found it before August, as I had a ton of scans done and other abdominal surgeries. But I’m so thankful that the surgeon finally did find it; if the remaining appendix had burst, I could have lost my life.

frizzybritt

I had a bone replacement surgery (upper third of the tibia), and the surgeons fixed it in place to heal with a titanium plaque and screws. One day the plaque broke, and I went to the ER and told the doctor that I had broken a piece of titanium, but he called it a bunch of bull. After seeing the X-ray with the plaque separated into two pieces, the look on his face was priceless.

solymoscas

My mom was in the hospital with sepsis due to a surgery she had on her ankle. She kept telling everyone she was there because she broke her hip. The sepsis had made her mind a bit “screwy". Then one day, while they had her in therapy, she fell—and broke her hip. We were all pretty much in shock. After they did surgery on THAT, she came out SMILING and said, “I told you so".

She’s gone now, but we still laugh at her dang broken hip.

piglet110419

I was the patient. While I was in labor with my son, the midwife checked me and said I was five centimeters dilated. She took me to the delivery suite and went off to get some equipment. I asked her not to leave me because I needed to push, but she shrugged it off and told me I shouldn’t need to push because I was still only five centimeters.

I insisted to my mum that I was pushing now; I couldn’t stop. She ran to get the midwife, who looked a little annoyed and told me she’d check again, but that it was impossible I was pushing. Lo and behold, I was not only 10 centimeters dilated, but my son was already halfway out! I believe the midwife’s words were something like, “Oh my God, you’ve gone another five centimeters in 10 minutes,” and she rang the alarm for a second midwife to help her deliver.

They were both shocked at how fast I’d progressed, and my poor son was born with a bruised forehead and black eyes from slamming into my cervix so hard and fast. He was desperate to get out!

josephinemachine28

I’m an occupational therapist. I was gathering the social history of an elderly patient, and I asked her who she lived with. She told me she lived with her six dogs and 200,000 bees. I was like, “Yup, this lady has postoperative delirium". I called her son to get the real social history, and he was like, “Yeah, she’s a beekeeper, and she adopts old dogs".

lexie162

This is a case where the doctor called bull on what I had. I broke my arm once. There was a huge waiting time at my local hospital, so I decided to go to another hospital the next morning. I slept really badly but managed to get like three or four hours of sleep (instead of spending the whole night awake in a waiting room). When I explained what happened to the doctor, she said that I couldn’t have broken it because I would never have been able to sleep if it was.

So I get used to the idea that I did not break my arm. I stayed there for some scans because my arm swelled, and then I waited. The doctor eventually came back with two pills of morphine and said that I had incredible pain tolerance because my arm broke in three places. She then explained I needed surgery the same day, and they were making a place for it on the agenda. I can still remember her face as she explained the procedures of the surgery to me, knowing she told me earlier it was not possible.

Frasteras

I’m an OB nurse who assisted a doctor in performing a "down there" ultrasound on a patient with a long psych history. The doctor looked at the ultrasound screen (which was facing away from me) with a slightly puzzled expression, then removed the probe. Polite and pleasant as can be, the patient asked a question that left me stunned: “Are you going to check my other one now?”

The doc’s eyes widened, but she recovered quickly as the odd images from the ultrasound started to make more sense. Sure enough, the patient had uterus didelphys: two cervixes, and two uteruses.

whataprettypony

I am a medical provider, and this happened to me while I was still in training. I had a sore throat; nothing miserable, but it was mildly annoying. I figured it would go away. It didn’t—one week turned into two, and two weeks turned into an entire clinical rotation. After about eight weeks, I’d convinced myself this low simmering sore throat was probably thyroid cancer.

Except, I didn’t have any thyroid cancer symptoms at all. No constipation or diarrhea, hot or cold intolerance, weight changes, fatigue, heart palpitations, skin, hair, or nail changes. Just a sore throat. Soon I started palpating what I was convinced was a lump when I swallowed. I had my attendings feel it as well. They all told me I was a stupid student who thought he had all the ailments he was learning and reading about in textbooks.

Another couple of weeks went by before I scheduled my own ENT appointment. I told the ENT my hypothesis of thyroid cancer. He put a scope down my nose into my throat, and then he tried to convince me that my problem was GERD. I challenged this and told him I could eat a bowl of habaneros and wash it all down with a pot of coffee and orange juice, without thinking twice. He wrote me a script for omeprazole and told me to follow up in three to four weeks to see how well the PPI took care of my GERD.

I flat out told him I didn’t have GERD and that if he wasn’t going to do an ultrasound on my neck, I’d find another ENT who would. He was clearly upset with me for dumping on his well-manicured morning schedule, and he wheeled in the ultrasound begrudgingly. He gooped up my neck and started looking. All it took was 30 seconds, then his face went white. He said, “Huh... looks like you are right. Your thyroid is chock full of microcalcifications. This is a telltale sign of papillary thyroid cancer. I need you to have a biopsy tomorrow".

I did the biopsy, and the results came back malignant. I had that hitchhiker removed the day after Christmas eight years ago. The surgeon said it was the size of a golf ball and my collarbone almost completely hid it. That’s why I was the only one who could feel it; it would hit the clavicle when I swallowed, but nobody could palpate the mass below the clavicle.

I went back to school three days later for the first day of my surgical rotation. The first case I ever scrubbed in on was a thyroidectomy for cancer; I had to flip a coin with some other jerk student who was going to stiff me on this opportunity, despite the fresh sutures in my neck. It was wild to see what had just happened to me 72 hours prior.

Smokeybearvii

I work as an emergency doctor. I once had a woman come in after visiting her psychic. She went because she had been feeling just generally ill, nothing specific. The psychic used some tarot cards and then told her that her late grandmother was trying to warn her that she had Lyme disease. I totally doubted it, but you’d better believe I ordered the test just in case.

The next day, the test came back, and she had it.

dogomai

I was the patient. I broke the same rib 11 times over the course of three years, but the doctor often wouldn’t bother ordering an X-ray to check it out; she just said it wasn’t healing right and to give it time. I told her that I thought something else was going on, but she dismissed me. Finally, after it broke for the 11th time, she said, “FINE, we’ll X-ray".

The X-ray showed a mass. The mass got biopsied, and it turned out that I had a tumor. The tumor was weakening my rib to the point that the bone would break when I reached into an upper cabinet for the sugar. I had that bad boy (I named him Adam) removed in 2018. The procedure involved a week-long hospital stay, and it was the worst surgery I could imagine, but now I’m doing great.

teddyinBK

I was the patient in this situation. I was riding scooters with my little brother in grade seven, and I fell off when I hit a pothole (dang Michigan). When I fell, I put my arms out in front of me, and I felt the worst pain in my right arm radiating from my funny bone. I have never screamed so loud, and I still had to walk home. My brother freaked out, and I kept telling him, “I broke my funny bone, I broke my funny bone".

We finally got home, and I told my mom the same thing—she’s a nurse, by the way. She didn’t believe me and didn’t even check my arm. I sat on our sofa for about four hours, crying and saying I was in pain before she finally brought me to the doctor. They took an X-ray, and sure enough, I broke my ulna. My mom never even said sorry for not believing me, and I had to wear a cast and everything. Plus, I had to go through months of “Well, it wasn’t very funny, was it?”

SpookyKnees

I work in healthcare, and I once had a patient who claimed to be a former member of a very famous sports team. I googled it, and it was true. The poor guy was kind of unknown. He made the team and then quit due to various illnesses very soon afterward.

drbarnowl

A patient complained of movement and itching in his lower-left edentulous mandible. While in my chair, he reached up and scratched a hole through his gingiva and was bleeding profusely, trying to "show me the wriggling things". I’m sad to say that I suggested a psych evaluation. But to be fair, I did refer him to an oral surgeon just in case. I even made a personal phone call to ensure a “warm hand-off” and a rapid response.

When I discovered what they found, I almost lost my lunch. They uncovered some kind of parasitic insects. He healed, and now I listen to patients no matter how bizarre-sounding they are. They feel something.

Tasty_Cicada

I’m a nurse. I had a patient in her late 70s talk about how her mom was upstairs and how she passed last night. I used to work neuro, so confused older people was our gig. So I just listened like, “Hmm, wow, okay,” and did my job. I told another staff member about how she wouldn’t stop talking about her mom being upstairs and dying last night, and they said, “It’s true, her 98-year-old mom passed in our ICU last night".

I checked the roll in the morgue, and lo and behold, her mom’s name was on it. Well, okay then.

buttercreamandrum

I complained for YEARS about being tired, achy, dizzy, always cold, stomach pains, etc. My local GP assumed I was a stressy teen and refused to treat me. Eventually, I managed to convince him to run just one test (a simple one to check the circulation in my feet), and he was SHOCKED at how bad it was. Slowly, he ran all the other tests I needed.

Blood tests showed my thyroid was out of whack. Inflammation tests showed I had arthritis at 14 years old. I also had kidney stones, which my doctor said shouldn’t happen at my age, but the ultrasound showed them loud and clear. Slowly, I got to know myself pretty well, and when I went in for what felt like really light or skipped heartbeats when I was 16, he again didn’t believe me; but on the off-chance I was right, he gave me a beta-blocker. That turned out to be a horrible mistake.

I took it the next morning, and two hours later, my heart stopped. The beta-blocker triggered an autonomic collapse. A classmate got my heart going again, and I was blue-lit to hospital with a blood pressure of 24/13. It turns out I have 24 different conditions and may have a genetic disorder causing all of them. If my doctor had taken me seriously the first time, I likely wouldn’t have needed to be hospitalized so freaking much, and I wouldn’t now be so completely messed up.

I’m 22 now, and I’m mostly coping well, but I’m in a lot of pain and need some help around the house. I FINALLY got the rheumatology referral I needed. I’m certain I’ll be diagnosed with the condition I’ve been told I have by three different specialists but was never officially assessed for because my GP didn’t believe me. At least he finally listens now.

Hazie144

When I was a tech in the ER, a young-ish guy (maybe mid-30s or early 40s) came in. He had felt weird driving to work and decided to drive himself to the ER instead. Based on his symptoms, they did some early tests for a stroke, mostly as a precaution because what 30-year-old has a stroke and catches it that early?

Lo and behold, he was probably within the first 10 minutes of a stroke. The doctor that the patient got transferred to said he’d never before had a conversation with a patient prior to their receiving treatment. The average time between admitting to transfer is usually 40 minutes to an hour; this guy was in and out in 20 minutes max, and he was completely lucid the entire time.

GiraffeMother

When I was 11, my brothers were harassing me, so I rode away on my bike really fast and went head over turkey over a log. I decided that to teach my brothers a lesson, I’d go all in, so I cried and cried. When my mum got home, she said my arm was probably broken and did all the first aid stuff: Rest, ice compression, elevation, and she put me in a triangle bandage.

She took me to the doctor, with me thinking, “Wow, she’s going to be super mad when she realizes nothing’s wrong". Nope—it was fractured. I got a cast and everything. It never even hurt. So, I guess I’m glad someone bought my BS story because, despite the lack of pain, I was the one who was wrong.

xenchik

I work as a nurse. My confused patient told me, “My heart’s on the opposite side". I didn’t think anything of it until his chest X-ray confirmed it.

McGoober66

I’m a paramedic. This was not my patient, but I heard the story from another ambulance yesterday. It was a boy—I think about 12 years old—who believed he broke his arm by throwing a ball. He heard something in his arm while throwing, and then it hurt. However, he just sat in his school’s gym without being in any great deal of pain, and then he jumped into the ambulance by himself. Even the trauma check was allegedly unsuspicious.

The ambulance team put his arm in a SAM splint and brought him to the accident clinic. Later, they asked in the hospital whether or not the kid actually broke his arm because they didn’t really believe him. It turned out that he did.

Horizon317

I was the patient in this scenario. My boyfriend came home to find me unconscious and covered in vomit; the only words I could get out were, “I’ve had a stroke,” on repeat. The doctors dismissed it for nearly 48 hours before someone with common sense finally gave me a scan and discovered that I had a bleed on both sides of my brain. They didn’t believe me because I was 22 and “looked fine".

eziekle-19

This wasn’t my patient, but it’s a crazy story nevertheless. A patient got asked what his job was, and he said that he was a chainsaw juggler who just came back from performing for Kim Jong-il. It was indeed true, but unbelievably enough, he was thought to be psychotic and was committed for a time until someone actually checked his story out.

Vedenhenki

I dislocated my knee for the second time when I was about 18; I merely slid into a booth at a bar. I screamed at the sudden pain, and one of my friends called an ambulance. The only problem was that my knee had popped back in by the time the ambulance got there. They decided that I couldn’t possibly have dislocated it. It would take a while, but I would eventually pay for that mistake.

Fast forward about nine years, when—after many more dislocations of my knees, shoulders, and wrists, and finally a cancer scare because my boob suddenly changed shape—they discovered that my ligaments just weren’t holding me together properly. It was my physiotherapist who advised me to ask for a referral for an Ehlers-Danlos diagnosis.

When I did ask, I was told, “You can’t possibly have that; your skin springs back straight away". I insisted, and about six months later, I finally got referred to a rheumatologist. Spoiler alert: I have Ehlers-Danlos.

Toffbags

My appendix had burst, and I waited until the next morning to go to the hospital. They dismissed me pretty much right away because I was laughing and joking around. After a couple of hours of waiting, I had an ultrasound. The lady said she couldn’t find my appendix so that it couldn’t be the issue (makes sense, right?).

So she tried another type of ultrasound and found that my appendix had dropped below my ovary before it burst, so they quickly gowned me and started pumping pain meds into me. Then they rushed to get the OR ready. As I was put on the gurney and got wheeled in, I was still happy and joking around because I was ready to get it out, and I was nervous about it all.

The doctors had to double-check that I did, in fact, have a burst appendix because I should have been in a lot more pain...

melriddell

My mom used to work as a nurse in intercity Chicago. She told me the story of some guy who came in saying he had injected excrement into his leg. It turned out that he wasn’t lying. He literally injected liquid poop into his leg to get himself sick.

bacondoneright

When I was a teenager, I went to my GP with a sore thumb after a game of softball where I’d caught some other kid out one-handed at close range from an absolute screamer of a hit. It had swollen a little and bruised, but it didn’t hurt too bad. I said, “I think it’s broken,” and started to move my thumb around to see what hurt the most.

But the doctor didn’t believe me. He said, “Son, if it was broken, you couldn’t move it like that". Lo and behold, after an X-ray, we found that my thumb knuckle had shattered into several pieces and the only reason I could move it was that there was nothing really holding it all together. I was in a cast for 12 weeks rather than the usual six.

IHateToSayAtodaso

On a Thursday, my ex-husband sprung on me that he was having a lung biopsy on Friday. He had no ride afterward, so I picked him up and took him home to my house to recover, and the doctors told me that if anything went south to bring him back in right away. He later started “vomiting” a clear liquid that I believed was actually coming out of his lung.

My mind started replaying a bunch of weird things that occurred back when we were still married that got brushed off as tics (such as a cough when he would laugh and repetitive squinting or hard blinking); things that weren’t really acknowledged at all or attributed to other things. Hindsight is so 20/20. I just knew something was terribly wrong. After the flood of things in my head started waving huge red flags, I took him to the ER.

This was the day after his lung biopsy. The ER doc looked so young—I think it was his first year—and he asked me why I brought him in. I said, “I think you need to scan his brain. I think the tumor is lung cancer, and it is in his brain as well". The doctor replied, “Um...we don’t even know if this tumor is lung cancer yet...pathology won’t be back until at least Monday” (the tumor was the size of a medium orange).

I then gave him a 10-minute rundown of the list in my head of all the things that had happened. The ER doc then gave me an emotionless stare for about 10 seconds before he finally acknowledged, “I think you may be right..." They scheduled a brain scan, and within a few hours, we knew instantly that the lung tumor was indeed cancerous before we even had results.

He had multiple tumors that were too innumerable to count; the scan looked like someone had thrown dime-sized confetti inside his brain. It had metastasized throughout his whole body: bones, joints, everywhere. It was in Stage Four. The ER doctor said he almost didn’t listen to me but was glad he did. The doctor made a bunch of calls, and whole-brain radiation was scheduled and started the very next week.

It was like a movie...I still wonder how the doctor felt during that whole thing. It was surreal.

ArtByMisty

I was once at the doctor for a routine checkup, and he asked me whether I’d had any previous serious illnesses or surgeries. I told him I’d contracted the avian flu in 2008 while overseas on deployment with the US Army. He kind of scoffed in disbelief, as the avian flu was pretty rare worldwide back then. He later came back into the room and told me that he’d verified my claim. He said, “Do you realize only 44 people worldwide caught that in 2008?” I said, “Yep, I’m one of 11 survivors".

I’d fought that flu off with only Nyquil and Dayquil. I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy!

Mstarfse

After doctors investigated why my uncle had liver damage for no obvious reason, he got diagnosed with genetic hemochromatosis. I also needed to get checked, along with all other close genetic relatives. When I asked my doctor about it, she made a face and wrote me up a referral to a geneticist. We joked about maybe needing to do some good old-fashioned bloodletting (this is seriously the treatment for hemochromatosis because the cause is an abundance of iron in the blood, so draining the blood once a month or so treats it effectively).

I went to the geneticist and told him what I was there for. He, too, made a skeptical face and went over my family history with me. He told me how extremely unlikely it was, how he’d never seen it before, yadda yadda. It took him forever to find a test kit for it. The test came back, and it turns out I don’t have it—by pure luck.

However, I am a genetic carrier, as I only have one of the two required genes. The geneticist looked at me when he got my results and just shook his head. “You were right to be worried. I’m amazed".

KitsuneLeo

When I was 19, I had symptoms of a uterine fibroid. I went to the doctor, and she proceeded to tell me it was more likely that I had two vaginal canals causing the symptoms (I swear to GOD). She then pulled out an anatomy book and tried to explain menstruation to me. I was almost in tears with frustration. I finally convinced her to do ANYTHING to investigate what I was saying.

She ordered an ultrasound, which revealed that I have a grape-sized fibroid in my uterus. Looking back, I am sad at how I let her treat me. I was young and dumb, I guess.

gooeyslap

My dad was the patient in this story. He fell backward, broke a rib, and was lying in bed that night recovering. He called me over and said, “Something is wrong with my heartbeat". He was right. I could hear it clear as day; it sounded like it was coming from his mouth. I’ve never heard anything like it, and it was actually terrifying.

We go to the ER, and I told the doctors about his heartbeat and how it sounded like it was resonating...but the only air in the chest is in the lungs. The doctor looked at me like I had two heads and sent us home to “monitor” the problem. The next day we went to the primary doctor since my dad now also had shortness of breath.

They did an X-ray, and it turned out the rib had punctured a lung, which had subsequently filled with quite a bit of liquid. The beating I heard was, in fact, his heartbeat resonating from his lungs.

zaxscdvfbgbgnhmjj

I was at a festival a couple of months ago when I got knocked about in a mosh; I went down hard before someone yanked me out. I went to the med tent three different times because something in my knee didn’t feel right, but I was turned away every single time and told I just had a bruised knee and that all they could do was give me ibuprofen and an ace bandage.

After about six hours of walking on it (and having it repeatedly collapse out on me), I finally called it and went home. I convinced a mate to drive me to the emergency department the next morning (it was a free hospital visit because my country isn’t stupid), and I walked in by myself. I sat there waiting for a couple of hours before I could see someone, and then when I did, I had to push to get an X-ray and an MRI, saying I thought I’d torn my ACL.

The doctor dismissed this and told me I wouldn’t have been able to walk from the car into the emergency department if that were the case, let alone the six hours the day before. The scan results come in, and it turns out I’ve done the terrible triad: ACL, MCL, and PCL. So that’s major surgery and a six to nine-month recovery time. So yeah, screw you ED doctor and ambo volunteers.

ConArtist12

I have a long history of getting hurt in stupid ways, and after I moved to Europe, I dislocated my shoulder for the millionth time. I told the doctor that I’d dislocated it. He said I would not be talking to him in that calm a manner if I had. He then moved my big jacket aside—and his eyes went wide. Lo and behold; it was right out of the socket.

I have a ridiculously high pain tolerance, and I’m used to it.

TobiahScott

Upon going to the ER with viral meningitis for the sixth time, my wife told the doctor why she was there. He asked her why she thought she had that. She said this is how it feels every time. He scoffed and replied, “You can’t get viral meningitis more than once". Four hours and a lumbar-puncture-she-can’t-remember-but-I-can’t-forget later, the doctor admitted her with viral meningitis.

JerkfaceBob

I’m a doctor. I had a teenaged patient who convinced her mom to bring her to the ER because she felt like her skin was yellow—that was her only complaint. Her skin didn’t look yellow to me, but she had pallor (a sign of anemia) and a new heart murmur, which prompted us to get some lab work. She ended up having profound autoimmune hemolytic anemia causing her bilirubin to be mildly elevated (which would make her skin yellow if the level got high enough).

She was surprisingly sick but ended up doing fine.

Jargan606

Several years ago, I told my therapist how much stress my fiancé was under and how it affected me. My therapist asked me to elaborate, so I did. I ended up with a psychiatrist referral because my story sounded like I might be having a manic episode with delusions of grandeur. About three years later, my husband was outed in the media as a whistleblower in a major federal case against a huge corporation, which most importantly also revealed corruption within the federal agency responsible for certifying their products.

After my husband’s name was printed in major newspapers and talked about on news programs worldwide, we suddenly got followed everywhere. We had news vans parked outside our house on our quiet cul-de-sac, and investment firms hired reporters and private investigators pretending to be reporters to try to befriend our closest friends and acquaintances to find out what my husband had given the FBI.

I wish I could go back to rub it in my therapist’s face. Still, considering that I got followed while my husband was across the country in DC testifying to congress in a closed-door meeting, I haven’t really felt like being seen or getting mental health services lest my husband’s evil employer try to use that information to further retaliate against him somehow.

stinhilc

I was sitting with a confused patient. He looked up and asked what was wrong with the clock. I brushed it off and told him the early morning time off my digital watch. Eventually, I looked at the clock, and couldn't believe what I saw. It was spinning super fast. I cracked up laughing. I was like, “Nooo, this is NOT helping my confused patient".

two-thirds

I had this patient who was a really nice guy but had a pretty severe untreated mental illness. He was always telling me stories about his celebrity friends, how he was producing a Broadway show, and other really grandiose stuff that there was no way could be true. He was barely scraping by; he always dressed very neatly, but his clothes were very worn, and he was on Medicaid and lived with an alcoholic roommate.

Anyway, at one point, he needed a colonoscopy, and I tried to send him to a clinic where I knew they would take Medicaid, but he said that he had been in a medical research study with a fancy gastroenterologist, and the guy told him he would do free colonoscopies for life. Right, I thought and resigned myself to having this conversation again in three months.

Three weeks later, a colonoscopy report from a very upscale GI practice arrived on my desk. I’ve always wondered how much of the rest of it was true.

terracottatilefish

I work in palliative care/hospice, where delirium is extremely common. It presents itself differently in different people, but delusions and hallucinations aren’t uncommon. We had a clearly delirious guy—agitated, disoriented, and unfocused. That said, many delirious patients have clear patches. But one day, he told me that he was waiting for a visit from a past prime minister of Canada.

We sort of chuckled to ourselves and played along since it’s dickish to be mean to patients. It got put in the notes that he’d started having delusions. Until, of course, a security detail showed up with a previous prime minister of Canada, and they spent a few hours visiting. It turned out this guy was a staffer for multiple past PMs but was especially close with this particular one. Egg on my face, for sure.

Punderstruck

I had an odd 74-year-old patient keep telling me that her mom passed upstairs last night and that her mom’s lover, “a 51-year-old Mexican man,” would be down to bother her, and we were not to let him into her room. I deal with a lot of dementia patients and loopy older people coming down from anesthesia and pain meds, so I treated all her comments like I would any other patient making odd claims.

It turned out my patient’s 94-year-old mother really did die in the unit above us the night before, and she really did have a 51-year-old Mexican caretaker/alleged lover who got turned away from the daughter’s room the next shift.

Permalink

I’m an OB-GYN resident. This one still freaks me out. As a medical student, I had a superbly kind and funny patient with mild hypertension and an IVF twin pregnancy conceived overseas; she was a little older than usual, slightly overweight, and had a previous C-section. There was nothing really remarkable about her condition, just a few small risk factors altogether.

She came into the high-risk clinic, and the fetal heart tracing was a bit too quiet; not scary, just not great. The maternal-fetal medicine subspecialist doctor said she should go for delivery. The lady and I were chatting, and she was from the same city as my then-girlfriend. She had a great sense of humor, and she took the delivery news like a champ.

She jokingly said, “Okay, but don’t let me die. I want to meet your girlfriend after all this". We said goodbye, the nurse and I smiled, and we wished her well. The attending then said, “I don’t like this. This is the kind of patient that smiles, looks good, then dies". The nurse and I both thought he was crazy. She had a textbook, uncomplicated C-section, and we moved her to recovery.

One hour later, she suddenly lost her pulse with essentially no warning and passed from an amniotic fluid embolism. Amniotic fluid embolisms are unpredictable and unpreventable. It occurs in one out of every 20,000–50,000 births. I can still remember how she looked, waving goodbye to us. I’ve seen a lot of people in a lot of different fields die, but this one still hurts my heart today.

Dr_D-R-E

Sources: 1, 2

I was the lead for a fast food restaurant and I moved to another town. I transferred to a restaurant in this town but only went in as a cook since all the lead positions were full. Had this other cook come in for his shift wearing basketball shorts and was literally inside them gripping himself with both hands. He jumped right on line with me. I was like "Bro, shouldn't wash your hands first?" He just smiled and said, "Nah man, we don't do that here". I walked out immediately.

I started work in a bar in town and was told to be at work at 7 pm for my first shift with the manager providing me with a typed timesheet showing my new working hours. I went home and had a cat nap. At 5 pm, my new manager calls me asking where the heck I am and telling me I need to come in now. I referred him to my timesheet which stated I was to be in at 7 pm to which he told me, "the timesheet doesn't matter, you do what I tell you".

Hearing this, I politely told him that I would not be in tonight or ever, good night, and went back to my cat nap.

newo_ikkin_

I quit this really horrible desk job at a bank, and I did it in an amazing way. We had really low cubicle walls. You could basically see the entire room from your seat. So, one day, I came in with a six-pack and sat it on top of my cubicle wall and proceeded to drink. I also offered any who walked by a can. I managed to comfortably drink four cans while doing some work before two supervisors and a manager started walking towards my desk. Needless to say, I was asked to leave.

justincase1021

I worked at Spencer’s Gifts for a bit during university. I was working and saw that I was scheduled for an evening shift the day before a morning exam, so I asked the manager if I could switch. She said no, the schedule is already made up. We went back and forth trying to negotiate. She ended with, “You’re going to have to decide what’s more important, the shift or your exam”.

I worked for a computer company that had me train my replacements but told me I was eventually getting my own sales team to train. I was one of their top salespeople for the year way back in 1999-2000. Halfway through the two-week training, I found out they laid off my entire team and that I was going to be laid off after training.

I told my manager he could go screw himself and quit that day, but not before I told all the new hires and many of them quit too.

Raspberries-Are-Evil

The commute was over an hour, but I really enjoyed my job. I interviewed at two closer stores. I was told one store didn't want me. But the other store offered me a promotion and raise right there. I was ecstatic. A week goes by with no calls and no notice of transfer from my General Manager. I finally mentioned it and was told they turned me down. When I found out why I couldn’t believe it.

I found out my General Manager didn't want to lose me so she went above the other stores' management and to corporate to shut down my transfers. I spend 50 hours a month in traffic and it wasn't worth it to stay at that location. I really, really loved the company but when I found out the General Manager went above and beyond to have me turned down for a raise and closer commute, I lost it.

I hopped on the store radio and calmly announced what the General Manager had done to me and walked out in front of everyone.

aussiaesop

I fractured my orbital socket in an industrial accident. Another employee lost focus at the wrong time was supposed to wait for a hand signal and didn't. We had been working over 90 days straight of 13-14 hour shifts and living in a dingy motel a 45-minute drive from our worksite. We were supposed to be on a rotation where we didn't work more than three weeks at a time.

It was a close call and could have been a lot worse. I'm glad I "saw it coming" and had time to at least try and get out of the way. I got sent away after a night in the ER while the rest of that crew continued to work. After spending two or three days at home, the boss called to say that he "needed me in Alaska" in two days and that my flight was already booked. I told him I quit right on the spot.

I worked as a painter for a franchisee of a student painting company and he kept telling me that "he would pay me next week". This went on for about six weeks and the final straw was when I had finished several large projects that would give him ample money to pay me but he decided to hire on another person instead of paying me for all the stuff I had already done, which was like $1,300 worth of work.

Then he tried negotiating down what he thought he should be paying me despite already having agreed in writing what I would be getting paid right from the get-go. I was so mad that I didn't give him notice or even show up for the next day of work because I had bills to pay and needed to make as much money as possible during the summer.

I wrote him off as a lost cause and took him to small claims court for what he owed me and eventually got my money through the court. It was still a pain though, and as far as I know, he still works there full time.

dog_under_water

I worked at a restaurant and was treated like garbage with bad shifts, terrible sections, mistreatment by managers, the whole lot. I worked hard to win the monthly sales contest to get better shifts and a bonus table on my section. Managers said I must have cheated, which wasn’t possible, and gave the reward to the regular guy who had previously won most months.

That Friday night at 8:30, I rang in 20 well-done filet mignon and sent them to the kitchen from several different waiter's numbers. I waited five minutes, walked to my jerk of a manager with my jacket on, and said to him, “I quit, see ya". I never even bothered with my last check or asked what happened with the kitchen. The place has since closed down.

LateralusNYC

Back in college, I delivered food. I worked all the time, picked up shifts, and was highly valued. Corporate wanted to have a front staff meeting and the managers didn’t communicate it to the employees, so literally no one showed. I was working at the time of the meeting so I saw the managers get reamed by corporate. They rescheduled the meeting for the following Saturday morning, which happened to be the day after my birthday and one of the few days I requested off.

I told them I wasn’t going to make the meeting and they got all huffy puffy about how they would have to “do something” if I didn’t come. This happened at the end of my lunch shift and I just said screw it, called a local pizza shop, set up an interview, and didn’t show up for my evening shift. They called and were all, “we can figure something out,” and I said, “nah, I’m good". I probably could’ve just toughed it out because the managers typically only lasted four months or so, but I had enough of this dude by then.

-BEEF-SUPREME-

I worked for a boss who micromanaged everything and was just a jerk about everything in general. I came into work at 6:56 AM and the clock in time was at 7:00 AM. Instead of clocking in then going to the bathroom, I went to the bathroom first instead of using company time. I clocked in at 7:01 AM and he went off on me for being one minute late. He saw me sit my stuff down and go to the restroom so he knew I wasn’t truly late.

This wasn’t the first time he yelled about something so small, but that day was the last. I didn’t say, “Screw this, I quit!” I said, “Screw you, I quit!” I reported him to Human Resources two days later for the ridiculous behavior. I come to find out this was not the first time he had been reported for creating a toxic work environment. My friend in that department told me he was fired that next week. It was a happy ending to my “Screw this, I quit!” story.

I worked at a call center on the same team as my girlfriend. She was fired, but it was for good reason. Rather than have the angry boyfriend on the team, they fired me too without cause. In the evening, they pulled my brother who was a manager there into a room and said they were putting him on a "Performance Improvement Plan," but they had no reason behind it.

He said, "You just fired my brother and his girlfriend, and you're building a paper trail to fire me too. Screw this, I quit". The office was super clique-ish. My brother's girlfriend who was also a manager there made it about three months before they started giving her written warnings for petty things and she quit too. About three months after that the whole place imploded and about 900 people were out of jobs.

shaidyn

After one year at my old job, I asked for a small raise of $1 more per hour to add to my current $20 per hour. I was underpaid and we all knew it. When they came back with the counteroffer, I was stunned. They offered me 50 cents. I showed them I was saving them $70-100k/year, they wouldn’t budge. I gave my notice right there.

I got my last check with no yearly bonus. I was owed $1,000. They told me they didn’t have to pay me since I quit. I said that’s cool, I’ll call OSHA later today and cited five big violations they hadn’t addressed. Suddenly I got my bonus.

The building where my job was closed down at 9 PM. Everybody except security had to get out so they could shut everything down. One of my supervisors, I had eight of them, kept scheduling me until 9:30 PM. I repeatedly brought this up at the end of the night and was always told, "No, that's just a mistake, you need to leave".

Fast forward three months, I get called into a disciplinary meeting. The reason? I kept "leaving early". I had like eight attendance points from "leaving early" because one of my idiot bosses who worked in the SAME BUILDING and definitely should have known when it closes couldn't figure out how to schedule. I explain my side, which was pretty obvious, and they say they'll hold off on any disciplinary action while they look into it.

A couple of days later they told me they weren't going to remove those attendance points. I told them to shove it, walked out, and went to a concert with some of my now former coworkers.

RitterJekyll

I was working as an ice cream vendor at an amusement park. It was the kind of ice cream that comes in tiny little flash-frozen pellets. One time I was selling my tiny overpriced cups of frozen ice cream balls and had a line of a half dozen people. A manager came over and said he saw someone walk by with a cup that hadn't been leveled off. I acknowledge his comment and then continue preparing the ice cream cup for the next customer.

After filling the cup, I use the scoop to scrape across the top of the cup and level off the excess pellets because God forbid people almost get their money's worth. The manager said I didn't level it off well enough and snatched it from my hand, dumped it back into the bin, and made me do it again while standing over me. The customer and I were both now silent and uncomfortable. I filled the cup and leveled it off again the same way because that's the only way to do it. This time he apparently approved and said, "That's how you should have been doing it the whole time. It isn't hard!" Then he stormed away.

Well, the previous day I had worked my entire shift without a break because the manager forgot to send relief to cover my stall while I took lunch, so I was already annoyed at the company. But being yelled at and belittled in front of customers was over the line in my book. So, I hand the customer back his money and then similarly handed out free ice cream to the other people in line.

Then I simply left. I didn't lock the ice cream freezer or empty/power down the register, I didn't let anyone know I was leaving, I didn't stop to turn in my nametag or polo shirt, I just left. And I've never regretted that for a second.

I was working as General Manager in a struggling restaurant—struggling despite excellent business because the owners would do stupid stuff like take trips to Italy to source the “perfect” panini press. They also wouldn't staff properly, I was the only FOH staff open to close, six days a week, on top of ordering, inventory, other managerial duties. I was wildly overworked, but I sucked it up because the base pay was good, plus tips.

However, to fund their lavish “business” trips, costs had to be cut at the store. They decided to do this by bumping me down to minimum wage for tipped employees—effectively cutting my salary to 1/10 of its previous level. They were also too chicken to tell me until I got my new teeny paycheck and questioned the mistake. Their response was to play dumb and said, “Oh yeah haha, forgot to mention that blah blah cost-cutting blah valued team member please work with us through this difficult time". I had worked for two weeks at this new lower rate without my knowledge. Pretty sure that's against the law, but hey, a lot of bad things go on in the restaurant industry. That's not when I rage quit, though...

A couple of hours later, I'm fuming and have decided I can't work for the lower rate just waiting for the chance to give my notice. They called in a delivery guy who was fired a few weeks before and start talking about hiring him to do our Facebook posts and handing out flyers around town. Whatever. Then they offer him close to my old salary as “Promotions Manager". What!? I was running the place for $2.13 an hour and you're offering this dude almost $20 an hour to walk up and down the street saying “Eat at (Name)?” And yet, it gets worse.

They bring up our negative Yelp reviews and the flyer guy suggests asking friends to post positive ones. Then jerk boss starts laughing and says, “Hurdur better not ask her (me) to post one, it'll be boohoo don't eat there, I can't pay my rent this month because they cut my pay without telling wahhhh". I wasn't supposed to hear it I think, but I was five feet away, of course, I did. I RAGED at them, quit, and wished them good luck keeping the place open without me.

They quickly realized I was right, neither of them knew how to do more than pick up the takings once a week, and begged me not to quit. They were so desperate that they allowed me to tell them exactly what giant idiots they were for the half-hour my rage burned and just listened nodding and apologizing. Once I had cursed myself back into calmness, I walked out 30 minutes before dinner rush leaving them with an unstaffed floor and no clue how to even open the register. The store closed down about 18 months later, surprised it made it that long.

KnickersUpKettleOn

I worked for a daycare center for a whole three weeks. I was great with the kids and it was a fun job, but I just couldn't stand my boss. She was awful all the time. She’d make me get her coffee on my lunch break and then get mad when I'm late from said lunch break. Or she would give me a bunch of tasks right after I clocked out then wouldn't let me leave until they were finished without paying me overtime. Against the law, I know.

She was always threatening to fire me because I didn't show up for work on a day that I took off that she approved weeks earlier. Anyway, just got fed up one day and told her calmly and politely, "I will not be coming back from my lunch break. I am clocking out and leaving". She says if I'm going to quit, it needs to be in writing.

I lost it, grabbed a giant Crayola marker out of one of the drawing bins and a sheet of construction paper, wrote "I QUIT" on it, and signed my name then threw it at her.

THR0W1T4W4Y

We had just gotten a new boss who for some reason hated the friendships that we made. She said I had been stealing time from the company and "caught" me on video outside on breaks I wasn't supposed to have. She pulled me into the HR office and berated me for taking breaks. She had been cutting my hours slowly but scheduled me long enough to force me to take a 30-minute breaks.

The HR girl tried to correct her several times, telling her I was entitled to my breaks, but my boss wasn't having it. She said she had proof of me leaving, but never showed it to me. So, the next time I was scheduled, I clocked in, waited 30 minutes, and just clocked out without saying anything. Nobody ever called me for a no-call no-show.

About a week later, I went back to the store with my friend who was also an ex-coworker and quit the day before and they threatened to call security on us.

bluefrostie

I used to work for Regal Cinemas throughout high school. Having been one of the most reliable employees for a while, a management position opened up and I figured that I would apply for it because it would be more pay. Unfortunately, I didn't get it because I was planning to go to college and wouldn't be there during the semester and only be around for holidays and whatnot. I understood their decision, but the person they hired instead was incompetent.

Fast forward about a month, I'm in charge of our theater cleaning team responsible for 22 theaters on a busy as heck weekend. We pretty much have a set schedule of when theaters are supposed to let out, and thinking that everyone should be responsible enough, I would help out one team do one wing because we had several large kid movies, which always get really dirty, finishing at the same time.

After cleaning all of those kid movies, I find out that one of the male restrooms is flooded. I, being the only one over 18 at the time, don some rubber gloves, plunger, and a mop and go to battle with a poop-filled flooding toilet. Having successfully defeated the poop monster, I am greeted with the woman that was hired as a manager instead of me.

She starts going off on me because the other team I had set up to clean the other half of the theater apparently didn't do anything and couldn't be found. She also yelled at me for not being where I was supposed to be even though I was still doing my job and wrote me up for "being insubordinate" when I defended myself in a reasonable matter.

I later found those kids by the trash compacter stoned as heck and gave them a piece of my mind. I finished my shift, went to the head manager on staff, told him everything, and told him that I was giving him my two weeks' notice. He offered me more pay, telling me how much of a valued employee I was, how much I was respected among the management for putting up with all of the garbage I had to do before and always being available. It turns out that the manager who chewed me out still works there several years later, while I have moved onto an actual career.

roseman5285

I needed a summer job while in high school so I applied at a local grocery store to bag/stock/clean. On my first day there, there was some sort of confusion as to what I was supposed to do or to whom I was to report. I was sent to the front counter where the customer service manager gave me a till and told me to open a register. Mind you, I'd had ZERO training on a register. I didn't even know how to put the till in it. I told the lady this and was told to go do my job.

Within about two minutes at the register, there was a line several deep and I'm just standing there with the till in my hands. The customer service lady comes storming over asking why I had such a line and I tried AGAIN to explain to her that I was supposed to be a stocker or whatever and that I knew nothing about operating a register. She called me stupid in front of the customers so I handed her the till and told her what I really thought of her. I walked down the street in my uniform and got a job at another grocery store.

Daxos157

I had a lawyer draw up an intent-to-sue-for-harassment after a new boss required me to work on the Fourth of July. Usually 100-150 people in the office, but that particular day I was the only one in the office. That was the final straw after six months of harassment. I ended up winning a $40,000 settlement. I still smile when I think of it.

alewis14151

I worked as a casual at a gift shop when I was just out of high school. The shop was owned by a lady that I had worked with for three years at a different location, and I had been working at this particular location for almost a year. I had a good relationship with the owner, but when she opened up the new location, she hired another lady to manage the store.

All the staff disliked the new manager because we had been working in the job for years and knew more about the stock and processes than this new lady, but we were teenagers and this manager was in her 50s and treated us like kids, so we felt that we weren't taken seriously by her. Anyway, I was meant to be working the late-night shift but was super sick.

Being casual, I was able to call in sick up to two hours before my shift at no penalty to me. So, I did this. The new manager lady answered the phone and said, "Yeah that's okay. By the way, I've done the roster for the next fortnight and you have no shifts". My reply left her totally speechless. I said: "No worries, don't stress about finding me a shift, I'm bringing my keys in tomorrow once I feel better. I quit".

The passive-aggressiveness from this lady was the final straw after months of being patronized. I'm still on good terms with the owner over four years later, so that's nice.

okff

I worked for a group home. We had a difficult group of residents, but the company policies were so much worse. Every resident was 14-22 years old. They had moderate mental development delays, they all had a psychiatric disorder from severe ADHD to schizophrenia, and they had also all been convicted of violent offenses. I worked the third shift. My normal hours were 10:30 pm to 9 am four days a week.

About six months into working there, they did a massive layoff. They went down to bare minimum staff to student ratio each shift with nobody extra to call in if needed. That meant if someone called out, a person on the previous shift was forced. It got to the point where I was being forced three out of four shifts per week. And not just a few hours. I was working 10:30 pm to around 4:30 pm the next day, and still having to come in for my following shift.

I had an hour commute each way. So, I'd get home at 5:30 pm from a 16-hour shift, and have to leave the house again four hours later. I managed that for about a month. Then one morning I was told last minute I was being forced. I told them I was done and walked out. That month took a huge toll on my mental health. Swear it took me like a year to recover.

After taking a few days off work while my father was having a brain tumor removed and I was still checking emails and attending conference calls from the hospital, my boss gave me a new project. On a Thursday afternoon, she gave me a Monday morning deadline for a project that would take 6-8 days to complete. I worked 16 hours a day to get it done. When we met on Monday, she asked how my weekend was. I looked at her and said, "I worked all weekend".

Then she asked if I got to visit my dad in the hospital and then I told her, "No, I didn't get a chance because I worked all weekend". A couple of weeks later, she pulled me into a meeting and said, "I feel like you were resentful because you had to work and I feel like I was really good when your dad was sick, maybe you're just tired. Are you tired?"

She'd also make comments when I would leave the office on time—not early, on time—like, "it's great that you just get up and go when your day is over. Like I have to go because I have a daughter, but you don't have any kids and you just leave at the end of the day". Um yeah, I don't live here. I don't go home and sit in a dark room counting the hours until I get to come back here.

I'm also not curing cancer. Nothing we do here matters to anyone outside of here. I give you 100% when I'm here, but when my day is done, it's done. I no longer work there.

I was 20 and engaged. My work as a book store manager was not letting me have any time off. I missed my fiancée's prom and other important events. I asked to have part of Christmas off, and I got denied. Then I was told because I didn't take vacation that year, I'd just lose it next year. The final straw came when my boss made a surprise audit of my store on a Saturday evening after I had left to go home.

He did not like my calendar display—and his reaction was truly disturbing. He came to my house to yell at me. He didn't just knock on the door and ask, he came into my house, past my roommates, and into my bedroom where I was in bed, reading. He then proceeded to berate me nonstop for five minutes about my display while I sat in bed. Then he left and told me he'd meet me in the morning and he'd fix it with me there.

I felt that was it. My boss came into my private bedroom to yell at me about a calendar display off hours. I called Amtrak, made tickets to see my fiancée, and the next morning, before I got on the train, I went into my store, met him, handed him the key, and walked out just a few days before Christmas to let him deal with it.

I felt great. I hung out with my fiancée for a week or so at my leisure and got another job a few weeks later. But what’s even better was that the next year, they let me work part-time to train new managers. Weirdest of all? My boss apologized to me and we were friends for many years afterward.

punkwalrus

I was getting screamed at in a meeting by some marketing jerk that was literally demanding my technical group perform magic on a completely unrealistic time schedule with almost no resources. Literally screaming at me in front of about eight of my peers, calling me incompetent, screaming at me to “just do your job” and all of that. I stood up, said I refuse to be talked to like that and left the meeting.

Normally if you just get up and leave these types of meetings, you’re fired. Boss scheduled a meeting with me later in the afternoon after hearing about it. Figured I’d be walked out, but I was told they fired the marketing guy. I was about to just say “Screw this, I quit,” but the company kept me on and fired the other guy. Pretty happy, it’s been a solid place to work ever since.

I'm a bartender and I was working in some terrible Mexican restaurant downtown. The tips were bad because the food was bad so we were barely ever busy. So already I'm living in NYC making barely $400 a week when I'm used to making more than double. At this point, I've been there for two months and I hate it more and more every day.

Around this time my mother gets really bad pneumonia and due to complications, it degraded her heart.  So, she had to have open-heart surgery to repair a valve. It's a risky procedure and my mother is touching 65. When she gives me a date for her surgery I go to my manager and give her a basic breakdown of the situation and tell her I need four days off from X to Y so I can be with my family.

Now, let me state that staff turnover was incredibly high because in addition to us making horrible money the manager was a complete and utter moron, most staff left after a month. But she says no problem, and just to play it safe I send emails and texts to her confirming that I indeed do have these days off. She agrees. I think cool, no problem.

Well, I was wrong. Three days before the surgery the schedule for the week comes out and I'm scheduled throughout the entire week. I immediately go to my manager and ask what is up because I'm not wasting away behind this moldy, rat-infested bar in the West Village while my mom has surgery. No kidding, this woman has the nerve to say I didn't request off at all!

When I show her my paper trail stating that yes, I did put in a request she says "What difference does it make if you're there the surgery is going to have an outcome whether you're there or not". And starts to rattle off how I need to be a team player and I'm messing things up by requesting off and yadda ya. Her voice fades off and I literally see red. I say nothing and go back to work.

This is at 5 PM. Happy hour and our rush starts at 8 PM. I'm the only bartender on. Fast forward to 8:30, my bar is slammed, I have a bunch of drink tickets from the servers and it's a mess. My manager comes behind the bar and instead of offering any assistance she tells me to not bring "home drama to work". I stare at her in disbelief for a moment, truly stunned that such a tone-deaf moron could possibly be in charge of anything.

I laughed in her stupid face and walked right out the door and went to go see my mom.

foppish_aplomb

I used to have a really terrible retail job in a department store. I was making $7 an hour. I worked in the part that sells bedspreads and bathroom items and other boring stuff. One afternoon, some regional managers came for an evaluation. They determined that everything in the department, including floor display furniture, had to be moved all around AT ONCE! Like, this had to be completed within a day or something. Because, you know, sales will just pick up like bang snappity boom if we do this!

The store Assistant Manager who was second in charge orders some guys from receiving to start hauling merchandise to the stockrooms in order to get the displays moved. I'm hanging at the register since my only other duty is to tidy the department up, which I can't do because it's in shambles. Then, she ordered me to get the merchandise back from the stockrooms and put it back on the floor. It was towels and washcloths that the guys had taken into the back not 20 minutes ago.

I do. One of the stock guys comes back and is like, what the heck are you doing? I'm putting this out on the floor as the manager told me to. So, he goes and tells her. She comes back and lays into me for going against the program. I remind her that she asked me to do this specifically with detailed instruction. She gets confused and probably realized it was her mistake.

But instead, she tells me to hash it out with the stock guy. I decided this job wasn't worth the hassle, told her that, as store manager, it was her responsibility to delegate tasks in an efficient manner, and she was the one who ought to have straightened this out. I walked out. It wasn't my most mature moment, but whatever, no regrets.

Permalink

I worked at Best Buy and was a full-time employee in the home theater department. At the time we were four months into a new system that allowed us to see our sales numbers; revenue, services, margin, etc. I was a model employee, all my numbers were best in-store and district, I had a great return customer base and had scored two perfect secret shopper scores in the past three months.

It was time for my yearly review and I was prepared, awesome sales numbers in hand, ready to receive my well-earned raise. In the three busiest retail months of the year, November, December, and January, I had made $389,000 in pure profit for my store, not sales, but actual profit. After requesting a raise, I was informed that I had capped out in my position, at what must have been a bank-breaking 9.75 an hour.

I left that day devastated, after two years of busting my butt for Best Buy I was basically told to go screw myself. I returned to Best Buy the next morning and told them to shove it. My yearly take home after insurance and taxes was 12,900.00, 1/30th of what I made my store in profit in three months.

Verbranding

I worked for a big chain tire store in a very rich part of town for a while. I was overqualified for the job, but it’s what was hiring. One day I get a call saying another tech got fired for failing a urine test. I get in and our lead tech comes in with a torn bicep and has to be gone for a few months. I'm now the most knowledgeable person in the shop, taking on a ton of extra duties and extra hours.

So, working 60+ hours a week as the only tech with ANY diagnostic abilities I ask for a raise/promotion. I’m rejected, but the guy that was hired on a week earlier, amazing tire buster but can't do any mechanical repair past changing an air filter, got a double promotion and a dollar per hour raise. I put in my notice on the spot.

I was working at a sporting goods/automotive store with a fairly large staff with around 35-40 people. One of the guys in automotive was gay, not flamboyantly, but it was pretty obvious. He was middle-aged, portly, but an extremely nice guy who was a genius in terms of cars. He had been with his partner for nearly two decades and they were quite happy. However, our new general manager was awful, and she made comments about his romantic preferences for nearly a month. He tried not to show it, but I could tell it was hurting him.

Then, his partner's company suddenly exploded financially, in a good way, massive bonuses, huge raises, very cool things happening. The two of them decide that they now have the money to move to Vermont, get married for real, and basically retire. So, at a store meeting, my automotive friend says he has an announcement. He tells us that after many years with our company, he's retiring, effective immediately. He thanks us all for being good people to work with and that he enjoyed his time here. He then took off his name tag, walked over to the General Manager, and stood there for a moment.

I held my breath and waited—it was utterly legendary. He then held his arm straight out in front of him, and dropped the name tag on the floor. His hand then rotated, arm still out, and morphed into the most perfectly formed middle finger I have ever seen. He spoke five words, very quietly. "Screw you, you hateful woman". He then turned, and walked out the door, head high, and with a "hater's gonna hate" strut. The rest of us were silent as the General Manager turned bright red and stormed off to her office. Then we laughed and cheered.

Osiris32

I was 19 and working for Pizza Hut as a manager. The store manager left me understaffed and with half a box of cheese in the freezer. We usually went through about 2-3 boxes a night. It was the middle of a busy shift and we're out of cheese and my dining room is full and I'm understaffed and furious having to deal with angry stupid customers.

I walk into the dining room and yelled "We're out of cheese people. Everything is on the house!" I ordered the one waitress to not clean a single table, finish up, and go home, the same for the one prep cook. The place was destroyed. The store manager opened with a nice letter from me. He called me and tried to convince me to come back.

SibLiant

I was a manager at a company where the executives were ineffective. I worked 60 hours a week most of the time and had to do all of my director’s duties because he didn’t understand our systems. The work environment was also pretty hostile and passive-aggressive. People cried on the job daily in other departments, slightly less in mine. Managers and staff would snap at other departments the same way the executives did because of the stress.

I tried to take care of my department and make sure they weren’t being abused or taken advantage of. I had three days' leave for a passing in the family but had to work every day from home and the funeral itself. It was especially vexing because it was to re-do the same thing every day that my boss would just forget to complete and need to be done again the next day. I brought this to his attention, as well as all the other issues, and he said he would try to do better. Months went by and it got worse.

Finally, our team sat down with him and told him things needed to change. I told him that the environment was more hostile and aggressive than ever and the team agreed. He told me that was my perception and we needed an attitude change, then left for a meeting, which I had provided the data for him. I cleared out my desk and left after quitting with HR.

For me, the kicker is that he kept assigning me tasks and insisted that I was still working there for days. Never been more relieved to quit in my life.

I was 21 working with UPS. I worked as a truck loader for the first year and became the fastest loader in the warehouse just because I like working quickly. Only wanted to become a supervisor because my manager was really easy to work with and always wanted to help with solutions to problems. Once they promoted me to a supervisor, they transferred my manager to a different warehouse and didn’t say why.

I worked as a supervisor for a year and once peak season arrived in November to early January, things were getting crazy and my manager was just a yes man to his boss. He never helped solve issues, just said “figure it out” or “just get it done". Well in November, my best friend and I had won a World Series of Beer Pong satellite tourney to get free entry and stay at the Flamingo in Vegas for the Tournament worth $600. The tournament was from January 1st-5th.

Well during peak season, it’s nearly impossible to get time off and I looked at this tournament as a once in a lifetime opportunity with my best friend. Things were just getting so crazy and they weren’t approving any vacation requests. I wasn’t getting assistance from my boss with the workload so I just said whatever I’m out.

Come to find out my manager, his boss, and four other managers got fired for changing time cards to make their production numbers look better, which is why they shipped my cool manager away because he wouldn’t participate in the dirty deeds. My best friend and I placed 46th out of 500 teams. It was one of the best memories I have to this day. No regrets.

Mute_Swan24

About 10 years ago when I was working in retail as an assistant manager, I was transferred to a nearby store to essentially act as manager while the current manager was on leave for stomach cancer. There was no extra pay involved, and I wasn't terribly happy about having to do it, but I wanted to prove myself and played the part. Fast forward nine months, the original manager returns and re-assumes the position of acting manager.

Almost immediately, I didn't care much for the guy. He seemed shallow, petty, and had little regard for the well-being of his employees. Again, I played the part and was civil. Around three months later, my grandfather had passed, and my family was in the process of deciding what to do with my grandmother, as she wouldn't be able to afford their house. Talking to my boss about this, he mentioned that he couldn't wait until his grandparents passed because he would inherit all kinds of awesome stuff.

Especially because of what I was dealing with, but also in general, I was disgusted by him. My family had finally worked out on a somewhat short notice being able to move my grandmother and sort through her belongings because she was moving to a much smaller home and couldn't bring everything. It was expected to be an emotional affair for the entire family as the family had a lot of history and memories in that house. The date of the move was a scheduled working day for me. Things were typically flexible as far as having shifts covered, so I didn't think it would be a problem switching shifts.

When I brought it up to my boss, he showed absolutely no regard for my situation and told me that I couldn't switch shifts. There was no valid reason for this. It was just him being his manipulative self. I lost it. In a store full of customers and other employees, I blew up at him. I'm pretty sure I called him every name in the book as he sat there wide-eyed and mouth agape. When I was finished, I tore my uniform shirt off, threw it on the ground, and walked out.

When I returned from helping my family, my district manager requested we get together and talk. She listened to my story, and after having heard various accounts of what happened, pleaded with me to stay with the company by finding me a position at another store. I didn't expect that in the least. Six months later, my former manager had been fired for theft and I soon was promoted. Later, it was found out that he never actually had cancer, but just wanted to take a paid vacation at the expense of everyone else.

SPQR_Legionnaire

After working for 37 years, I requested leave from work to care for my partner who was dying of cancer. I had eight weeks of PTO time and was denied the request, so I quit to care for him in his last month of life.

korkidog

IT manager here. I was working for a company that didn't consider us a real department. Lots of things leading up to this, but the last straw was an announcement that a satellite office was being shut down and any employees that could, would relocate to our office. We, the IT department, found out about this at the same time as the rest of the company MONTHS after the decision had been made.

Nobody told us anything, and this would involve obscene amounts of extra travel, hours, and stress as we accommodate the moves, the infrastructure, and everything else involved with such a move. I left in the middle of the announcement. My boss, the CFO threatened me to fire me if I don't do the work. Well, you can't fire someone who's already quit.

Then the CEO calls me and asks me back to negotiate. I agree to come back for six months if I get a 25% raise for myself and my entire team. After six months, I left and they laid off everyone else.

dystopianview

I worked at Walmart for a month in the bakery section. I was doing fine and getting along with the other employees, but then we get a new assistant manager. This woman has given other family members of mine problems at different Walmart stores. When she found out who my mom was, she started harassing me and would patronize me in front of customers.

The worst part was that she would have me work the bakery by myself until closing every night when everyone else got to leave at 2 PM while I would stay until 8 PM. She also made me work in the deli section, wouldn't let me take my breaks, and wanted me to clean the bakery every night alone. I had been working alone from 2 pm-8 pm for four days straight.

On the next day I came in, and right before the other bakery employees were about to leave, I tossed my vest, told another employee I quit, and left.

jessigato927957

I quit my first job when I was 15. It was the summer, and I was a lifeguard at a pool where one of the best club swimming teams in the US practiced daily. I was good friends with one of the better swimmers on the team, but it was more of a relationship where I looked up to him in a major way. He was really kind and smart and funny, anyone you asked would have nothing but good things to say about him.

One day I was woken up by my mom who was good friends with the kid's parents and she told me that he had passed on in a car accident the night before. I was extremely distraught because he was one of the best people I had ever met, but I still went to work that day. At work, I couldn't focus, I would randomly break out in tears and start hyperventilating, I lost my faith in God, and it was overall a really terrible day.

About halfway through my shift, I went to my boss and asked him if I could go home because I was really upset. He told me, "No, you can't. Going home isn't going to bring back your friend, and your job should be your primary focus during the day". I replied with something along the lines of, "You can shove it. I quit," and stormed out. I didn't have any regrets after doing that, I felt like it was the right thing to do, and no one thought any less of me for it.

Permalink

A very long time ago, I worked at a Kinko's. Either the manager or the assistant manager was on duty every day of the week, in theory. Both of them were lazy. Neither stayed for more than an hour of their shifts and they trained me to do the daily paperwork. There was a deadline for when it had to be sent to corporate so that often had me leaving the front counter one person short during our busier times of the day. When it got slammed, I'd have to go through the whole procedure to stop what I was doing.

First, I had to wait for the safe to open, put the money in marking how far I had gotten with the counting and trying to resolve any cash vs receipts mismatches, and go up front to help after taking four minutes to pack the money in the safe. Then I'd have to reverse it when I came back. So, eight minutes shot every time I was called up front, and often that was as often as every 10 minutes during busy hours. 18 minutes gone for 10 minutes’ paperwork.

I'm in the middle of my final quarter of school when I get a scathing performance review. I was leaving the front unattended for too long. I pointed out that I shouldn't be doing the paperwork in the first place, but of course, that didn't fly. Apparently, the district manager had just laid into the manager for never being in the store when the DM came by and I was going to be her punching bag.

I don't get angry often, but blaming me for not being at the counter while I was doing her job made me livid. We agreed that I'd take the three-day paid "decision-making leave" where I would decide if I really wanted to continue working there. I would never have to do the paperwork again. I was two weeks from my portfolio review, and I had no time to be looking for a job.

My first day back, the assistant manager comes in for his shift. "Hurry up and go do the paperwork. I've got paintball in an hour!" I said, "Screw you". I rolled up the apron and threw it at him and walked straight out the back door. As satisfying as it was in the moment, I was freaking out about how I would pay rent all that night. I got a job right after my portfolio review, so it ended up working out in the end.

Surullian

My boss didn't do payroll before leaving on a business trip and left it to the poor office manager to tell people they weren't going to get paid on time. I walked out of the staff meeting saying I'd be back when paychecks arrived. By the time I got home, I was mad enough to call my ops manager back and quit. Why didn't the boss do payroll? The stated answer was printer toner cartridge at home was empty. Guess he'd never heard of writing checks with a pen.

wizard10000

At my first job out of college, I was informed that it might involve some "light travel," which was fine. However, about two weeks into working there, this turned out to mean they wanted me to spend 6+ months in a cheap motel room with my slob of a boss in Arkansas. Now, I'm a young guy and can handle most types, but I think it's incredibly unprofessional to have to see your boss in nothing but his tighty-whities as he brings back trashy chicks from the latest dive bar and makes you leave the hotel while he screws them.

I'd have complained but the guy above the two of us was his longtime friend and fraternity brother—I wasn't winning any arguments. I spent three months there before they brought us back to the main office for a one-week stretch and I decided that this just wasn't for me and I couldn't go back. I walked into the main office and just told them it wasn't for me and gave my two weeks. I handled it professionally.

It was them who decided the next day to bring me into the conference room where about 20 co-workers were sitting only to have the boss make me stand while he called me a quitter and let them know that "This is what someone who isn't committed to their job" looks like. The next day I came in and my stuff was in a box and I was told that my two weeks' notice was not needed and they didn't want me to return.

Two weeks later I had an interview for a better paying job which I've been in for four years and haven't looked back.

ZtiWinterfell

I was working at a call center. My shift started at 10. I badged into the building at about 9:55 and logged on, but the decrepit PC I was using took so long to boot up that when I finally logged in, I was 15 seconds late. I told my supervisor and he said there's nothing he can do and since I was late, I was put on probation and wouldn't be eligible for a raise for another month. He then said that I should arrive 15 minutes early so that situation won't happen again. I handed him my headset, walked out, and have never worked in a call center since.

ElToberino

My manager claimed to have called me to change my schedule, but my phone didn't show any missed calls from his number so he was lying. Then the same day, he scheduled me to work a shift that afternoon without confirming that I was free or willing to pick up the extra shift. When I came into my next shift, he asked why I didn't come in for my scheduled shifts showing me my work schedule that he'd printed out.

I told him I hadn't been scheduled for that shift, showed him the screenshot of my original posted schedule from two days after it had been officially posted that showed I hadn't been scheduled for that day. He said it was fine, smiled and nodded, and sent me back to my shift. Next week's schedule comes out, I have no shifts. I ask what's up, and he says that since I missed a shift and didn't call in to say I'd be missing, I had to lose two weeks of hours. I again asked why that would be happening if I had come in for my scheduled hours, reminding him we had talked about it, he had said it was fine.

He pretended that he didn't remember that conversation. He was absolutely shocked when I quit before the two weeks were over. I got a voice mail three days later asking why I didn't show up to my scheduled shifts that week, and when I called him back asking what about "I got a new job and will not be back" was unclear, he claimed that he had never called me or left a voicemail and I must have just been confused!

Yeah, sure, some guy with your voice took your phone, called my number, claimed to be you, and used my name in the voicemail, mentioning my new job and confusion over my new schedule, to benefit who? To accomplish what? That manager got let go a few weeks later. Found out he had been pulling the same thing with other employees. They erased his name from the front of the building and everything.

I worked as a stock boy in the back of Hollister. I never really had any interaction with customers but was still forced to buy their clothes to wear to work. They had all these rules about hairstyles, fingernails, and facial hair. One night I came in to start a shift at 2:30 am to do a floor change, which meant the shift would end around the time the store opened up. I had the slightest bit of stubble on my face, like a day and a half's worth of stubble.

My manager, at 4 am, told me she had a problem with my facial hair and that when the mall opened up, I better go buy a razor and shave before anyone saw me like that, or she would have to send me home for the night. I basically said, "Well lucky for me, I was planning on quitting anyway, good luck with the floor change," and walked out. I left, got a biscuit breakfast, went home, and got in bed.

skyblublu

I worked at Wal-Mart as a "stockman" for about a year. After the summer season was over, a supervisor asked me to move the 80-100+ lb. planks that went around bags of soil from the lawn and garden area in the parking lot back to their storage sheds which were probably a good 500 yards away. She told me to do this all myself and to have it done in an hour.

I went to the planks, and couldn't even pick one up by myself because of how long they were—I'm 6'2" tall and 230 lbs. I got on the walkie talkie and told her that I couldn't lift one by myself and would need help. She basically told me I was just whining and complaining. Anyway, eventually she sent help and after she sent another guy to help me, we were an hour deep in moving these things and only about 1/3 the way done with the job.

The supervisor herself and one more person decided to help us at that point. Anyway, it took six people two hours to move what she originally had told me to do within an hour by myself. At lunchtime when it was time to clock out, she decided to wait for me by the time clock so she could discuss my attitude. I told her there was nothing to discuss and said "Six people, two hours. Screw you, I quit!" and clocked out and left.

A couple of days later they called me to fill out some quittin' papers and for my reason for leaving I wrote "managerial incompetence and poor worker morale". About a month later I ran into a different supervisor who said the supervisor who did this got demoted because of it. Different supervisor begged me to come back but I found a better job working at a grocery store where no one was like the slave drivers at Wal-Mart after that.

sporkyzero

A friend of mine passed nearly a decade ago. When I requested the day off for his funeral, my request was denied. I had to go to work after going to the funeral of my 21-year-old friend. I was an event captain, so I had to be the face of the staff for the contact of the event, I tried my hardest to put on a happy face, but I failed. My mood was terrible and the event contact complained to my boss after the event.

The next week I was scheduled as an event server for my whole schedule with less hourly pay, less tip percentage. When I asked my boss, I was told that I had been demoted because of the complaint from the prior event. I quit on the spot, I should not have been forced to work that day, and I should not have been demoted for being in a bad mood after burying one of my closest friends. Screw that place.

My aunt got me a job as a tech in a chemical plant. As I was young and stupid, I told the guy who was supposed to train me that I got the job through my aunt. He decided to "haze me". After the first shift I already almost decked him as he would handily forget to tell me things and would berate and belittle me all the time. The second shift it continued and while I was working on a pipe, he didn't close it as he was supposed to do.

If I hadn't been aware of the rumbling and rolled away, I would have been blasted by a jet of boiling steam. I went to the team leader, he said I was overreacting but he proposed to move me to another shift. I quit. My aunt was pretty upset with me until she heard, through the rumor mill, that the guy indeed had done what I said he did.

Finniemc

I worked at a restaurant and the hostess was convinced I was sleeping with the owner. I was not. She was convinced the money I was using to take a vacation must have come from him and that I was hooking up with him behind his family’s back. She made things really weird and horrible for a couple of days. She told the new hires I was saying nasty things about them and made up really bad rumors about me.

I walked out of a shift after she confronted me in the storage room demanding I admit I was banging this guy. This guy who I never interacted with outside of the occasional table transfer or inventory update was bald, fat, and married, and had hardly said more than a hundred words to me beyond work instructions. After I left, I found out the dark truth. It turned out they were sleeping together and she was crazy. I'm so glad I quit.

Theodaro

My insufferable manager followed me after work to my second job because she didn't believe I had one and was just using it as an excuse to get out early. My manager at my second job said, "There's some crazy lady banging on the doors yelling your name". So, I grabbed my uniform from my bag, opened the door, threw it in her face, and told her to shove off.

cybermericorp

Sources: 1, 2, 3, , 5, 6, 7

In 1533, Elizabeth was born into the biggest scandal of her time. Her mother, Anne Boleyn, had seduced her way into King Henry VIII’s bedroom and triggered his monumental divorce to Catherine of Aragon—you know, it was the scandal that started the English Reformation. But that was really just the beginning.

Not very many people can say that their own father executed their mother, but that’s exactly what happened to poor Elizabeth. Anne Boleyn fell out of King Henry’s favor, and he beheaded his queen on May 19, 1536, when Elizabeth was just over two years old. If this sounds like a recipe for disaster…well, it kind of was.

Today, Elizabeth is famous as “The Virgin Queen” because she refused to marry. Of course, as we’ll see, this didn’t mean she didn’t get into plenty of bedroom dalliances.

Elizabeth was sharp and clever, but she didn't suffer fools gladly. Once, one of her councillors urged the queen that she must go to bed. An enraged Elizabeth snapped back,“'Must' is not a word to use to princes, little man". And if you think that's the last scathing comment Elizabeth ever made, you don't know the Virgin Queen at all.

As if your dad killing your mom in cold blood wasn’t enough, the baby Elizabeth also had to deal with a new stepmom very soon after Anne Boleyn went to the gallows. Henry’s third queen, Jane Seymour, moved into the palace just 11 days after the execution. Then, there was yet another plot twist.

In 1537, just a year after Seymour married King Henry VIII, Elizabeth had a new baby brother, Edward. But he wasn’t just any baby brother. Though Elizabeth had an older sister, Mary, King Henry still lacked an official male heir to the throne. Well, now he had one, and—if fate hadn’t intervened—Elizabeth might have played second fiddle to him all her life.

Although she kept it on the down-low for political reasons, Elizabeth loved her mother Anne Boleyn very much. She quietly honored her and her family by taking care of their positions at court, and always kept her mother's portrait in a locket on her necklace.

Elizabeth I was always careful to present her best self. This meant wearing heavy makeup—but the cosmetics had a dark side. Elizabethan makeup was made of abrasive and even poisonous products like lead and vinegar, which probably did more damage to Elizabeth's skin than helped it. She also used beeswax and kohl in her beauty regimen.

Like her father King Henry VIII, Elizabeth apparently swore and cursed like nobody's business.

Tragedy and drama seemed to follow Elizabeth wherever she went. When she was still a teenager, her father King Henry finally passed, leaving Elizabeth an orphan in the care of her stepmother, Catherine Parr. Parr almost immediately married a nobleman named Thomas Seymour, integrating the princess into her household. It ended up being a disastrous move.

Almost as soon as Princess Elizabeth moved in with her foster parents, the 40-year-old Seymour started ramping up increasingly disturbing behaviors. First, he would creep into her bedroom in his nightgown and tickle her. He even progressed to slapping her on her rear. Sadly, before it got better, it got a whole lot worse.

According to records from the time, Elizabeth’s stepmother Catherine Parr did nothing to stop these inappropriate romps—in fact, she even participated in them. At least twice, she helped her husband tickle Elizabeth, and in a particularly alarming incident, she held the princess down as Seymour ripped the girl’s dress into pieces. Then, it all reached a frightening crescendo.

Sometime around May 1548, Catherine Parr made a chilling discovery. She stumbled across Seymour and the teenaged Elizabeth locked in an embrace, indicating that the romps were quickly moving into romance. Whether from jealousy or fear for the girl, Parr sent the princess away soon after. If only that were the last Elizabeth saw of Seymour…

Despite her love of fashion, Elizabeth I didn't wear her first pair of high heels until she was 62.

Mere months after discovering her husband and her ward together, Catherine Parr perished in childbirth. Now the exiled Elizabeth was truly alone, and the human garbage fire that was Thomas Seymour wasted no time taking advantage of her vulnerability. With his wife conveniently out of the way, the “mourning” Seymour turned his attentions back to the princess. This time, it would be his downfall.

By this point, even the royal council had had enough of Seymour’s creepy scheming, and they charged him with treason for his plots to marry Elizabeth. The princess’s tormentor was finally executed on March 20, 1549. To put this all in perspective for you, at this point even years later, Elizabeth was still barely into her teen years.

When one of Elizabeth's imperial envoys pushed the "Virgin Queen" about marrying, her response was legendary. Elizabeth reportedly sniped at him, “Beggar-woman and single, far rather than queen and married". In other words, there was no way she was giving up her immense money and power for just any old man.

On July 6, 1553, Elizabeth’s brother Edward, who had become King in Henry’s stead, expired young, throwing the kingdom into chaos. For one, he named the upstart Jane Grey—not his sisters Elizabeth or Mary—as his successor. Suddenly, Mary and Elizabeth found themselves fighting for their birthright, and they joined forces to overthrow the usurping queen.

In the end, Lady Jane Grey was only the “Nine Days Queen”; Elizabeth and Mary proved too powerful for her. The sisters had her summarily executed, and in August 1553, the elder Mary rode into London to officially reclaim her throne. It could have been a triumphant moment of sisterly love, but that’s not quite how it went down.

Elizabeth and Mary were very different people, and not just because they had different mothers. Mary’s mother, Catherine of Aragon, raised her to be a strict Catholic. Meanwhile Elizabeth, born not just at the height of the English Reformation but practically because of it, was Protestant. This caused tension, which all reached a crisis in 1554.

You don’t get the nickname “Bloody Mary” for nothing, and Mary’s reign became quickly unpopular for her persecution of Protestants as well as her infamously gruesome method of burning heretics at the stake. So when a rebellion broke out in 1554, Mary instantly suspected Elizabeth. Then, she kind of overdid it: Mary threw her sister in the notorious Tower of London.

For three terrifying months, Elizabeth’s life hung in the balance at the Tower. Even though there’s no evidence she participated in the rebellion, she was at Mary’s mercy—and Mary wasn’t much for forgiveness. During this time, Mary’s advisors whispered in her ear that while Elizabeth breathed, her throne was never safe. The only thing to do, they said, was to execute her own sister...

In the end, a stroke of luck saved the young Elizabeth. She did have some supporters in Mary’s court, and they eventually convinced the queen to spare her sister’s life. But just because she was alive didn't mean Elizabeth had it easy. On May 22 1554, Mary exiled Elizabeth to the countryside and put her under house arrest.

Elizabeth had a notorious sweet tooth as well as a fear of dentists. This dangerous combination came back to haunt her in a horrifying way. As she grew older, her teeth started to yellow and decay, crumbling in on each other. It was so bad, foreign dignitaries often couldn’t even understand Elizabeth when she spoke to them.

Even as young girls, Mary and Elizabeth had never been friends. When she was a teenager, Mary was horrified that her father King Henry had ousted her mother, and she stubbornly refused to recognize that Anne Boleyn was queen, or even that Elizabeth was a princess.

Mary might have had another big reason for being jealous of Elizabeth. I mean, would you be able to be chill about your husband having a crush on your sister? That’s right, Mary’s husband King Philip reportedly planned to marry Elizabeth should anything have happened to Mary, particularly if she had perished in childbirth. Aw, sisterly love.

Elizabeth’s gross dental hygiene actually started a trend. Since sugar was considered a luxury, some women then blackened their teeth both to emulate their queen and show off their wealth. Meanwhile, to counteract the sunken cheeks she got from her decaying teeth, Elizabeth apparently stuffed her mouth with cloth when she was in public.

In late 1558, the young Elizabeth’s tumultuous life got turned upside-down yet again. Queen Mary, who had been unhealthy for quite some time, finally passed in November of that year without having had any children. From that moment on, the princess turned into Queen Elizabeth I—and what a reign it turned out to be.

Elizabeth I covered all her bases when it came to keeping power, which meant including the astronomer-magician John Dee among her chief advisers. Dee advised Elizabeth I on choosing important dates as well as voyages of discovery, and supposedly removed a death curse from her. Some think Dee was even the former owner of the infamous encrypted Voynich manuscript.

From the moment she became queen, Elizabeth’s advisors assumed she would take a husband, not only to strengthen England’s power, but also to help produce the heir that her late sister had tried and failed to have. Though she considered eligible candidates until she was 50, she never did tie the knot—and historians suggest a disturbing reason for her aversion to marriage. While Elizabeth might have just feared a loss of her power, some experts argue that her dalliances with Thomas Seymour put her off the whole idea of matrimony.

Besides “The Virgin Queen,” Elizabeth’s other nicknames were “Gloriana” and “Good Queen Bess,” “Bess” being the common diminutive of “Elizabeth” at the time.

Elizabeth might have had no husbands, but her bedroom antics became infamous. One of her most notorious dalliances was with her handsome childhood friend Robert Dudley. Though Elizabeth often simply used some men, she was genuinely in love with Dudley, which might have been why the affair ended so dramatically.

There was one big problem when it came to Robert Dudley: He was already married. Lucky for Elizabeth, his wife, Amy Robsart, was suffering from breast cancer, and everyone assumed she was going to kick the bucket very soon. Well, she did…and her end was much more suspicious and violent than anyone could have predicted.

Dudley’s wife Amy passed in September 1560—but not from breast cancer. She met her maker after falling down a flight of stairs. The coroner might have ruled it an accident, but people in the know in the palace assumed Dudley had done the dirty deed to secure his Queen’s affections. Their road to the wedding finally seemed clear...but was it?

Historians agree that Elizabeth was fully prepared to marry Dudley, suspicious deaths or not, only to be left heartbroken. As her childhood friend, Dudley held no political clout, and countries from all over Europe were currently vying for the queen’s hand. According to most interpretations, her councillors told her in no uncertain terms that if she married Dudley, they would revolt. Elizabeth reluctantly backed off the marriage, but that didn’t mean she let go of Dudley.

Exploration flourished under Elizabeth’s reign. One of her favorites, Francis Drake, circumnavigated the globe between 1577 and 1580, earning himself a knighthood from his queen.

Even though she wasn’t going to make Dudley Mr. Elizabeth any time soon, the queen was intensely jealous of his time and affections. So when she discovered his ultimate betrayal, she was enraged. In 1578, Dudley married Elizabeth’s distant relative Lettice Knollys. He tried to keep the nuptials a secret, which made it all the worse when Elizabeth found out.

When Elizabeth got wind of her true love’s wedding, she was so furious that she banished Lettice from her court. She never forgave the woman, and never acknowledged the nuptials for as long as she lived. Even worse, she tracked the couple’s movements, actively resenting them whenever they were in her capital of London.

Some historians believe Elizabeth was what we’d call a polyglot, or someone with an innate skill for learning foreign tongues. She could speak 11 languages, including Latin, Greek, and even Aramaic—and spoke many as if they were her native language.

In 1559, Elizabeth’s creepy ex-brother-in-law Philip of Spain took his whole gross vibe up a notch and formally proposed to her. Elizabeth wisely turned him down, thank God. Philip eventually got a brutal revenge on her…but more on that later.

Elizabeth’s refusal to ever marry and her nickname “The Virgin Queen” skyrocketed her to cult status. Poets wrote about her in bombastic terms, comparing her to figures like goddesses and the Virgin Mary, which is a pretty big flex. What they could never see her as, though, was a human woman. But hey, everybody’s gotta have a gimmick.

In the 1560s, Elizabeth utterly terrified her parliament when she caught smallpox without an heir in sight. Though she recovered, the House was beside itself, and gave one last push to get her to marry. The queen even had to convene parliament and give a public speech to assure them “I will marry as soon as I can conveniently". But did she? Nope. By 1570, even her most anxious advisors had given up all hope of her marrying.

Elizabeth’s most bitter enemy was also one of her closest relatives: her Catholic cousin Mary, Queen of Scots. From the very beginning, Mary posed a threat to Elizabeth’s reign and religion, spurring a game of thrones for the ages.

For a while, Elizabeth and Mary went the “frenemies” route. Despite the fact that Elizabeth supported Scotland’s rebels against Mary, she still bizarrely offered up her favorite Robert Dudley for Mary to wed. This ended disastrously. Neither Mary nor Dudley were smitten with each other, and Elizabeth’s awkward ploy fizzled out.

Eventually, Mary’s forces grew so strong and her decisions became so erratic, Elizabeth had to take drastic action. She tore Mary away from her baby son James VI, imprisoned her in Loch Leven Castle, and then forced her to abdicate. Astonishingly, Mary spent the next nineteen years of her life under Elizabeth’s guard. But Elizabeth’s most chilling act was yet to come.

One day, Queen Elizabeth discovered a dark truth: Mary, Queen of Scots was helping incite a rebellion against the English crown from her jail cell. First of all: respect, Mary. Second of all: very bad idea. Elizabeth responded with a brutal show of force. On February 8, 1587, Mary, Queen of Scots met the axe at Fotheringhay Castle.

Elizabeth may have survived her bout with smallpox, but she didn’t get out unscathed. The illness left her with unsightly facial scars for the rest of her life.

A particularly cunning political mind, one of Elizabeth I's mottos was “video et taceo,” which translates to “I see but say nothing".

After Mary’s death, Elizabeth grew intensely remorseful, and even claimed that she had signed her cousin’s warrant without understanding her advisors would carry it out immediately. While it’s possible Elizabeth’s regret was very real, many historians are suspicious of her backtracking—after all, it’s pretty hard to sign someone’s death warrant flippantly.

One of the most iconic moments in Queen Elizabeth’s already legendary reign was her defeat of the feared Spanish Armada, which put a little thing called “British Sea Power” on the map. After Elizabeth’s envoy Francis Drake raided Spanish ships, King Philip of Spain—yes, Elizabeth’s spurned ex-brother-in-law—decided he had quite enough of England, and took immediate action.

Philip II sent his Spanish Armada to invade England in 1588, bent on destroying Elizabeth and her reign. What happened was the plot twist to end all plot twists. The great naval power of Spain screwed up big time. At the crucial moment, they weren’t ready, and succumbed to the attacks of English fire ships instead. Philip’s great hope had to turn tail and run back to Spain in shambles.

Elizabeth used the crisis of the conflict with Spain to turn herself into a warrior Queen. When she inspected her troops on August 8, 1588, she donned a silver breastplate under a white dress. Her speech has gone down in history. “I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman,” she said, “but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a King of England too". Get it, Liz.

Though many historians note that Elizabeth stayed single in order to hold onto power and play her suitors off of one another, she did get serious with men other than Robert Dudley. When she was courting Francis Duke of Anjou, she often wore a frog-shaped earring the duke had given her as a token of his affection.

Despite exerting control over Mary, Queen of Scots' life and death, Elizabeth never met her cousin in person.

People now see the Spanish Armada as a turning point in Elizabeth’s reign, and it was. But it was a much different victory than people imagine. The triumph was more of propaganda for Elizabeth than anything else, and the English success hinged on Spanish mistakes rather than British power. In fact, there is a tragic coda to the story. The very next year, England sent a 150-ship fleet to Spain, only to have Spain trounce them. Up to 15,000 men lost their lives, and Spain actually held onto its naval dominance in the end.

Just a few years before her death, Elizabeth claimed that though single, she was actually married to her kingdom. In a speech, she referred to “all my husbands, my good people".

Tooth decay wasn’t even the worst thing Elizabeth dealt with in her old age. The once beautiful queen took aging very hard, particularly with her smallpox scars and oncoming baldness; Sir Walter Raleigh once called her “A lady whom time had surprised". To combat the flow of time, Elizabeth slathered her face in even more poisonous cosmetics and insisted on wearing wigs at almost all times.

An older Elizabeth I, sensitive about her looks, felt intruded upon when a courtier entered her chambers before she made herself up for the day. As punishment, she put him under house arrest.

Elizabeth’s courtiers never let on that her beauty was fading, and continued to compliment her as if she was still the 25-year-old queen of her coronation. Sadly, it seems as though Elizabeth started to believe them, and played favorites with whomever could compliment her the most. This had very dire consequences.

One of Elizabeth’s favorites later in life was the lush Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, who took advantage of his good looks to get a great amount of power with very little responsibility. In 1599, he deserted his high military post for the umpteenth time, and Elizabeth finally reprimanded him, putting him under house arrest and taking away his luxuries. Devereux repaid her with betrayal.

In 1601, the Earl of Essex plotted his own very stupid rebellion. His plan was to kidnap the queen and take power for himself, except he didn’t count on the fact that, well, nobody liked him and he had close to zero supporters. Elizabeth caught wind of the meager plot and, finally coming to terms with her misjudgements, had him beheaded.

Betrayal or not, the queen never got over Devereux’s death. In 1602, a good year after her favorite’s plot against her, one courtier remarked that “Her delight is to sit in the dark, and sometimes with shedding tears to bewail Essex".

There was another heartbreaking reason Elizabeth avoided naming a successor. She remembered her own half-sister Queen Mary’s fate once Elizabeth became her official heir. Mary endured plots against her and both Elizabeth once she announced the succession, and Elizabeth said she didn’t want "a second person, as I have been" put through that.

Elizabeth’s last years were full of heartache and tragedy. In the fall of 1602, just months before her end, many of her friends and loved ones passed on, leaving the queen depressed and despondent. According to those close to her, she spent her last days lying motionless on cushions in an “unremovable melancholy".

Just before she passed, Elizabeth finally chose a successor, at least unofficially: James VI, the son of her fallen cousin Mary, Queen of Scots. Her advisors secretly prepped James to be the heir, getting him to butter up Elizabeth with a couple of complimentary letters. Though she never publicly declared James as successor, Elizabeth apparently made her intentions known to her advisors.

On March 24, 1603, The Virgin Queen Elizabeth passed on during the early hours of the morning at Richmond Palace. She was 69 years old, and her reign remains one of the most famous in British history.

After a lifetime of an entire country obsessing over her body and its functions, Elizabeth I left bizarre instructions for her body after she died. Breaking with the royal tradition of embalming, she insisted that people leave her body intact. Many whispered that this was to guard her secrets, but either way, her ever-loyal ladies-in-waiting made sure to protect her wishes even after death.

After Queen Elizabeth II, who has reigned for over 65 years, and Queen Victoria, who reigned for 63, Elizabeth I is the third-longest reigning British queen. She was in power for 44 years. Overall, she has the ninth-longest run of the British monarchs.

Since she had no heir, the House of Tudor, which began in 1485 with Henry VII, ended with Elizabeth.

A suitor once gave Elizabeth I a timepiece on a bracelet. An unusual jewelry style for the period, it may have been the first wristwatch in England.

Elizabeth was one smart cookie. By the age of 12, she translated her stepmother Catherine Parr’s English work Prayers or Mediation into no fewer than three different languages (Italian, Latin, and French) and gave it to her father as a present. In fact, by the time Elizabeth was done her schooling, she was probably one of the best educated women of her time.

Elizabeth’s reign was truly a Golden Age for many. In addition to Francis Drake’s feats at sea, literature blossomed in the Elizabethan era, with heavy-hitters like William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe writing masterworks. But let’s not give too much credit to Good Queen Bess here: She wasn’t really much of a patron to the arts.

Another of the great English poets of the time, Edmund Spenser, also paid homage to the queen in his epic poem The Faerie Queene. Elizabeth I is the character of Belphoebe, a strong virgin huntress who fights off her would-be attackers. Elizabeth must have liked the portrayal: Spenser was one of the only writers she ever patronized.

Before she became the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I lived in penury after her mother’s execution. Her father, Henry VIII, ignored and neglected her so completely that Elizabeth’s guardians had to beg the king for finances to provide Elizabeth with clothes that fit her. Later, when she became queen, Elizabeth collected more than 2,000 dresses for herself, and even that wasn’t enough. She allegedly took a dress from one of her maids of honor out of envy when she saw how good it looked.

It's no wonder, then, that Elizabeth I loved clothes. Not only did she start many fashion trends, but her clothes were routinely tweaked and updated, and carefully chosen based on what look she needed to convey (mostly pure and virginal). She was also generous with her things and passed on hand-me-downs to her ladies in waiting.

Although generous with her servants, Elizabeth I expected total loyalty and was quick to fly into a rage. During one outburst after her maid had angered her, she broke the maid's finger with a hairbrush. Even worse, the guilty queen then told everyone it was an accident involving a fallen candlestick.

Sometimes, Elizabeth trusted her ladies-in-waiting as royal jailers. One of her favorite attendants was Bess of Hardwick, who was likely the most powerful lady-in-waiting in the queen’s court. In 1569, Elizabeth even asked Hardwick and her husband to “hold” Mary, Queen of Scots on behalf of the law. The couple performed this thankless duty for 15 years.

No word of a lie, one of the funniest things to ever happen in history happened to Queen Elizabeth. One day, the 17th Earl of Oxford came into her courtroom, bowed to her—and let out an enormous fart. The man was duly mortified. So mortified, in fact, that he went into self-imposed exile for seven years. When he returned, Elizabeth’s first reply was, “My lord, I had forgot the fart".

After Elizabeth passed, her advisors searched her belongings—and found a letter buried deep in them. Its contents were heartbreaking. It was a letter from her old lover Robert Dudley, who had passed just after the Spanish Armada in 1588. But even more touching than the letter itself was the note Elizabeth had scrawled on it: she marked it as “his last letter” to her.

Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19

It’s difficult to imagine a time when he was anything but a British consort, but believe it or not, Prince Philip was not British at all. He was born to both the Greek and Danish royal families in the Greek Island of Corfu on June 10, 1921. In fact, his road to Queen Elizabeth was filled with tragedy, drama, and unbelievable heartbreak.

Although Philip came from a royal lineage, his childhood was more pauper than prince. His home nation was beset with conflicts, and Philip’s family felt the brunt of the danger. Not only did Philip’s uncle King Constantine I have to abdicate, his own father Prince Andrew found himself behind bars. Then, when Philip was still just a toddler, it came to a disturbing climax.

Fearing for their lives, the Greek royal family fled their country to take refuge in France. But that wasn’t even the worst part. The situation was deteriorating so fast and so violently, Philip’s family had to resort to smuggling their baby heir out inside of a fruit box. From this dramatic beginning, Prince Philip’s life only ramped up more.

As Philip grew up in France, the strapping and strikingly handsome young lad more than happily participated in French, er, liberalism. An old teacher of his described Philip as a "know it all smarty person,” and the young prince used his sharp wit and clever charms to woo women, including the beautiful socialite Olsa Benning. But the good times did not keep rolling.

In the late 1930s, tensions were rising in Europe and would eventually lead to WWII, and Philip’s family made some devastatingly dark choices. Get this: A full four of Philip’s sisters married high-ranking German princes, putting them smack dab in the upper echelons of the Third Reich. And it was about to get even more complicated…

One of Philip’s German-loving older sisters was also his favorite sibling, Princess Cecilie. Yet a horrific kind of karma came for the royal: On November 16, 1937, Cecilie perished in a plane crash alongside her husband, two sons, and mother-in-law. So yeah, pretty much Philip’s entire extended family on that side. But the tragedy doesn't stop there.

During this senseless accident, Philip’s sister Cecilie was pregnant with her fourth child. Indeed, she had started to give birth mid-flight, and it was this chaotic event that likely caused the accident. At the time, Philip was only 16 years old, and he had already seen so much devastation. Is it too early to say this family is cursed? Well…just wait.

Prince Philip was a man of duty and action above all else, and that went double when he was a young, ambitious man. In 1939, he enlisted to fight in WWII. Of course, this also meant he was directly in conflict with no fewer than two of his brothers-in-law, Prince Christophe of Hesse and Berthold, Margrave of Baden. Philip emerged from the fight as a Naval hero—and he was about to meet his destiny.

When Prince Philip met his future wife Elizabeth, he was only 18 years old. Oh, but it gets more scandalous. At the time, Elizabeth was just a bare 13 years old, and she was absolutely head over heels for her Prince Charming. The soon-to-be Queen Elizabeth II swore she would have no one but Philip. Except, well, there were some issues with that.

The British royal family isn’t famous for its wise decisions around marriage (uh, more on that later), and in Philip and Elizabeth’s case, they had to be pulled apart. Elizabeth’s father, King George VI, made Philip promise to wait until her 21st birthday to tie the knot, just in case she wanted to back out. Then again, King George may have had another reason to be wary…

Elizabeth’s father initially did not like Philip one bit. First, there was the optics: George didn’t know how the public would take to the marriage between the female heir and a Greek Prince. Besides that, Philip’s manners were brash and to the point, befitting of a Naval officer, and they rubbed the cultured king the wrong way. Maybe that’s why the royal family made a huge demand of Philip.

In order to join the British royal family, Philip had to be nothing but British himself. So as his relationship with Elizabeth grew more serious, Philip actually gave up all of his Greek and Danish titles and adopted his mother’s family name of “Mountbatten” to become a “naturalized” British subject. Only then did he become formally engaged to Elizabeth.

On November 20, 1947, Prince Philip finally won his princess, and he and Elizabeth married at the stately Westminster Abbey. The BBC broadcast the ceremony through the radio to 200 million listeners worldwide. In the days before the blockbuster TV broadcast of Prince Charles and Diana’s wedding, those were big numbers. But there was also something big missing.

Despite the humongous global audience of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip’s wedding, the groom’s surviving three sisters weren’t there. After all, WWII had just ended, and all three of the sisters had still very much married those German princes. Understandably, guests like that didn’t fly with the palace. In fact, none of Philip’s German relatives were present. Ouch.

In case you get the idea that Prince Philip was nothing but a manly man, think again. For all his brusque manners, Philip truly loved Queen Elizabeth, and this was evident from day one of their marriage. Case in point: On the morning of their wedding, Philip’s “gift” to Elizabeth was to quit smoking. Ah, so sweet, Prince Philip. Okay, but he did have another gift.

Today, perhaps no engagement ring is as famous as Princess Diana’s blue sapphire ring, which now sits on Kate Middleton’s left finger. But Queen Elizabeth’s ring has its own heart-rending back story. Philip constructed the ring with diamonds from his long-estranged mother’s own tiara, plus he made a bracelet with the leftovers.

The early years of Prince Philip and Elizabeth’s marriage were bursting with happiness, and they had the children to prove it. In 1948, Elizabeth gave birth to their son and heir Prince Charles, and then later in 1950 to Princess Anne. Now, the British are infamous for their stiff upper lip, but Prince Philip really outdid them when it came to fatherhood.

To be honest, Philip’s troubles with fatherhood began right out of the gate. While Queen Elizabeth was stuck in a grueling 30 hours of labor to give birth to Prince Charles, Philip…was nowhere to be found. In fact, the royal passed the time by playing squash and swimming with a friend. He was drying himself off when a footman informed him of his first child’s birth.

Nobody is really ready to be a dad, but given Prince Philip’s completely dysfunctional family, it’s not surprising that he ran into some issues when it came to raising his children. In fact, when Prince Charles was first born, Philip dealt the newborn a cold insult. He reportedly looked at the babe and said, “He looks like a plum pudding!” This…did not get better.

Prince Charles and Princess Anne had notoriously chilly childhoods; after all, their parents were rather busy being the figureheads of a country while they were still in diapers. Prince Charles even once confessed that it was "inevitably the nursery staff" who taught him to play and looked after his emotional needs, not his father. Oh, but Philip outdid himself.

Philip had grown up in such a dog-eat-dog environment, he couldn’t help but hand the misery down to his children. Philip wasn’t just an unemotional dad; the strict disciplinarian often took to belittling both Charles and Anne as they were growing up to intentionally “help” them develop a thicker skin. It had surprising consequences.

Although Prince Charles was supposed to be the manly son and heir, his personality was more sensitive—or, as Philip might have called it, weak. Father and son reportedly had a difficult time growing close to each other, and instead, Philip’s favorite was very likely Princess Anne, who was sturdy, rational, and sharp like her dear old dad. This remained even after the birth of his younger sons.

Still, for all his difficulties as a father, Philip was about to be thrown for another loop entirely.

After his royal marriage, Prince Philip’s fast-paced life sped up even more. On February 6, 1951, Philip and Elizabeth were on a commonwealth tour when they received the news that changed their lives forever. Elizabeth’s father King George had passed, and she was now Queen Elizabeth II, while Prince Philip was officially her royal consort.

We only rarely get a peek into the private lives of royals, but we do have a heartbreaking tidbit from this day. When Elizabeth found out that her father was now gone and she was the Queen of England, it was actually Prince Philip who told her the bittersweet tidings and kick-started their immediate return back to England.

Although Philip and Elizabeth had been getting along just fine, trouble started brewing almost as soon as Elizabeth was crowned. In particular, nobody knew what to name her royal house, though the traditional Philip pushed for her to take the "House of Edinburgh" in his honor. It wasn’t to be—no less than Prime Minister Winston Churchill vetoed the idea, and Philip’s response was nothing short of nasty.

It was starting to dawn on the proud Philip that he had married a woman who would always be his superior, and he didn’t take it lying down. Although he always put on a brave face in public, the privacy of his own home was a much different story. Philip reportedly once griped, “I am nothing but a bloody amoeba. I am the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his own children".

All this turmoil likely caused an immense amount of pain behind the scenes inside Buckingham Palace, so much so that many speculate Queen Elizabeth made a huge concession to her husband. See, for the first part of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, Philip was not a “Prince". Instead, he was still “just” the Duke of Edinburgh. Well, that changed soon enough.

In 1957, Elizabeth promoted her husband to official Prince Consort of the United Kingdom. Happy husband, happy life…or so Elizabeth thought.

Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth had an incredibly long marriage—the longest of any British ruler and their consort—but this doesn’t mean it was scandal-free. Indeed, early on in their union, dark rumors started swirling. Sources whispered that Prince Philip had a wandering eye…and his sense of timing couldn’t have been more insulting.

One of the most dogged rumors about Prince Philip was that he had engaged in an affair with actress Pat Kirkwood, who he wrote letters and paid visits to in 1948, while poor Elizabeth was actually pregnant with Prince Charles. Of course, the palace has vehemently denied these rumors as mere gossip…but Kirkwood says differently.

Though Kirkwood claims nothing intimate happened, it doesn't mean Philip didn't want it. As she stated once in an interview, “I would have had a happier and easier life if Prince Philip, instead of coming uninvited to my dressing room, had gone home to his pregnant wife on the night in question". There is, however, another interpretation of Philip’s naughty behavior.

Nearly everyone who knew Philip agrees that he did always notice attractive women—but all he did was look. As one insider noted, “He has always liked window shopping, but he doesn’t buy". Philip himself once addressed the rumors by noting that since he constantly had a security detail, "how...could I get away with anything like that?"

People who admired Prince Philip often noted how down to earth he was; he was a simple military man who wanted to look people straight in the eye. One former White House butler even recalled a visit in 1979 where Philip struck up a conversation with him and a co-worker, and even took the liberty of pouring their drinks. But as with many of Philip’s qualities, this informality was a double-edged sword.

Over the years, Philip became infamous for his "witty" comments, some of which were offensive, while others were simply rude. Thing is, Philip was totally aware of his reputation, and once commented, "Dontopedalogy is the science of opening your mouth and putting your foot in it, a science which I have practiced for a good many years". At least he had a sense of humor about it.

Not one to make waste, Prince Philip once asked his tailor to adjust a pair of pants that he had first worn a full 52 years ago. For the record, this was in 2008, so those royal leggings saw even more things since then. But I mean, what else could we expect from a man who started his life fleeing a country in a fruit box?

For Philip’s wedding back in 1947, Mahatma Gandhi sent the royal couple a wedding gift of cotton lace with the embroidered words “Jai Hind,” which means “Victory for India". Gandhi had spun the piece himself, but this didn’t stop it from causing a scandal. Philip’s mother-in-law thought it was a loincloth and called it an “indelicate” gesture.

Philip is worshipped as a god by a sect of people on the island of Tana, Vanuatu. When knowledge of the “Prince Philip Movement” was brought to the consort himself, it was suggested he send them a signed portrait. Philip agreed, and the grateful villagers sent him a club in return. He sent them another portrait back, featuring the consort himself posing with the club.

Like his grandson Prince Harry, Prince Philip loved flying—indeed, he might have taught Harry everything he knows. Philip was actually the first member of the British royal family to fly a helicopter, and he also loved flying planes. By his 70th birthday,  Philip had amassed over 5,150 pilot hours, and had been flying airplanes since 1952.

Imagine being called a "fat little Canadian" by Prince Philip. Okay, that’s not exactly what happened, but Philip did cause a minor Canadian scandal in 1959 when apparently, he made remarks that inferred Canadian kids were too out of shape. Was it all the Tim Hortons donuts? He later revised his comments to clarify he was simply encouraging a culture of fitness.

Believe it or not, Elizabeth and Philip were just beginning their reign as this new-fangled device called “the television” was making rounds as a common device. As a result, Philip was the first-ever member of the royal family to be interviewed on television in 1961. The hot topic? His take on Commonwealth Technical Training Week, where he advocated for more skilled workers in the labor force. Exciting stuff.

Prince Philip was actually a prolific author, with several books under his name on environmentalism, horses, and other animal subjects. A brief summary of his bibliography follows: Selected Speeches 1948-1955, Birds from Britannia, and Survival or Extinction: A Christian Attitude to the Environment. Whew, Philip. How did you do it all?

Amongst his other royal hobbies, Prince Philip was also an oil painter. The English artist and writer Hugh Casson once described his works as “exactly what you'd expect...totally direct, no hanging about. Strong colors, vigorous brushstrokes". Okay, I have to point out here that this man was CONSISTENT. Talk about a straight shooter.

In Britain’s long history, Prince Philip was just the fifth male consort of a reigning British queen. He follows in the royal footsteps of Philip II of Spain (husband to Mary I), William III (co-sovereign to Mary II, who was closer in the line of succession), Prince George of Denmark (husband to Queen Anne), and Prince Albert, consort to Queen Victoria.

Shockingly for a British consort, Philip was not reportedly fond of tea. Instead, he preferred to go with a black coffee. Can’t blame him.

Throughout his years as consort, Philip got himself into some very hot water, and not just over his own supposed relationships. He also reportedly stuck his nose in the drama of his extended family. Specifically, when Princess Margaret tried to marry and then broke things off with her lover Peter Townsend, many thought that Prince Philip’s disapproval was behind their split.

The whispers grew so loud, the prince had to reply in his characteristically laconic style: "I haven't done anything". But when it came to the even spicier relationship between his son Prince Charles and Princess Diana, he most certainly did do something.

Philip and Queen Elizabeth walked a long road, but everyone agrees they ended their years together still completely and utterly in love. One royal dresser even recalled a touching moment where she was finishing the hem on one of the queen’s gowns. When Prince Philip walked in and commented, “hmh, nice dress,” Elizabeth apparently couldn’t help but blush furiously. Aw, these crazy kids.

Few British subjects would even dream of showing Queen Elizabeth II less than complete respect, but as her husband, Prince Philip got away with being playful. He even had a cheeky pet name for her: “cabbage". See, “mon petit chou” is a popular term of endearment in French. It can mean “my little cabbage” or, more likely, “my little pastry puff".

During his childhood, Philip had almost no contact with his mother, Princess Alice of Battenberg. Why? During the conflict, Alice started to believe she was getting “divine” messages and possessed healing powers. Eventually, doctors diagnosed her with schizophrenia, and she spent Philip’s formative years in sanatorium in Switzerland. Well, that would mess up anyone...and sadly, Alice had more tragedies in store.

The hardships of WWII left Princess Alice impoverished. By the time the occupying forces left Athens in October 1944, she was in “squalid conditions". One of her letters reveals the full, heartbreaking truth. She confessed to her son Philip that she hadn’t eaten meat in several months, and only had bread and butter left for the week before the liberation.

As Prince Charles came of marrying age, both Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth wanted him to marry well, and they had their sights set on the young, naïve, and well-bred Lady Diana Spencer. We know now that this idea was an utter disaster, and that Charles was still very much in love with his ex Camilla Parker Bowles. But few people know about Philip’s role in the matter.

Ever the strong, decisive man, Prince Philip pushed Charles to make up his mind about Diana. In 1981, Philip apparently even wrote to his son, demanding Charles either propose to the poor girl or else break it off forever. Feeling the pressure from dear old dad, Charles and Diana married just six months later. Of course, it ended in tragedy—but Philip did try to make it up to his family.

When Princess Diana passed in that horrific car crash in 1997, just a year after her divorce from Prince Charles went through, the royal family was polarized about how to respond. They were at a loss about what the right path forward was, both in their roles as monarchs and in their roles as family members. Everyone, that is, except Philip.

Philip didn’t often show his vulnerable side, but when he did, you can bet he made the most of it. At Princess Diana’s funeral, Philip’s grandsons William and Harry were so young and apprehensive, Philip swooped in to help them. Philip reportedly told his eldest grandson, "If you don't walk, I think you'll regret it later. If I walk, will you walk with me?"

So at the funeral, Philip, William, Harry, Charles, and Diana’s brother followed the bier.

Before his health troubles, Prince Philip made the news once more after Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s interview on Oprah. Because of Philip’s outspoken nature, many people assumed that he was the infamous family member who tried to predict the color of their son Archie’s skin. However, Meghan and Harry quickly denied this and cleared Philip of wrongdoing.

In his later years, Philip was still one of the hardest-working members of the royal family, even surpassing young bucks like Prince William. For example, when he was 96 years old, Philip logged 110 days of public engagement. In 2016, he was the fifth-busiest member of the entire family. Safe to say, his golden years were strong and long.

On April 9, 2021, Prince Philip passed after months of health complications at the age of 99, just two months before he turned 100 years old. We do have details about the perfect way Philip signed off. In classic Philip fashion, he has demanded that his funeral have no “fuss". Isn't that just like him.

Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14

The daughter of legendary Hollywood director John Huston and prima ballerina Enrica Soma, Anjelica Huston was born into a world of glamour and privilege—but her childhood hardly reflected that. When she was born, her father was deep in Uganda making a film. It took three days and a telegram carrier had to run hundreds of miles to get the happy news to him.

His reaction was nonplussed. Katharine Hepburn, his star, had to pry the news out of him after seeing the telegram arrive. This type of distance—physical or otherwise—would come to define her family dynamic and her relationships.

When Anjelica Huston recalls her childhood, it seems like something out of a Victorian novel. Her father had left his third wife for the then-teenaged Soma, who gave up her career when she got pregnant at 18. Anjelica spent much of her childhood shut away in a country manor in Ireland. She and her older brother Tony had only their mother and a few tutors for company.

She described how Tony turned a cold shoulder to her, and with no other children around, she turned to books to occupy her time and imagination. Well, within a few years, her family drama would outdo anything she’d find on the written page.

Distance not only defined her relationships with her family, but also her parents’ marriage. Within a year of Anjelica’s birth, her father dealt her mother a devastating blow. He not only refused to cast Soma in his film Moulin Rouge, he also had an affair with the woman he did cast. He avoided Soma and the kids for months at a time and engaged in multiple affairs over the years. The tension was rising—and her parents didn’t exactly handle it well.

Anjelica’s mother moved her and Tony to London in 1960, but she left out a very important detail: She never told the kids that she’d separated from John Huston. But at holidays, things quickly became apparent, and Anjelica recalls meeting a literal cavalcade of girlfriends back in Ireland—actresses, socialites, novelists, and diplomats.

When she returned to London, Anjelica was in for another surprise.

Her mother told her she was pregnant—but her parents, still technically married, hadn’t seen each other in a year. Once again, Anjelica’s parents were hiding something from her. Soon enough, the truth came out. Anjelica’s mother had carried on an affair with a married man, but he’d refused to leave his wife. She gave birth to a girl, Allegra, in 1964.

Anjelica doted Allegra and had a special bond with her—but life would test their bond in more ways than one.

When Anjelica Huston was still in school, fate came knocking at her door. Franco Zeffirelli was adapting Romeo and Juliet, and producers were looking for their Juliet at her school. She wanted to audition—but her father had other ideas. If she was going to launch her career, it would be in one of his movies: 1969's A Walk with Love and Death. It was a dire mistake.

Not only was making the movie with her father miserable, but critics also panned her performance. Somehow, despite this, it wasn’t her last time working with him. But first, she had to put her burgeoning career on hold.

Anjelica Huston spent her high school years skipping class to hang out with boys. Meanwhile, her mother Enrica Soma spent most of her time mourning the failed relationship that had produced Allegra. Finally, the day before Soma left on a trip, she addressed the distance with her daughter, and they had a tearful reunion. The next day, Anjelica bid her farewell, feeling happy that she’d finally reached a good place with her family. Within hours, though, her sense of relief would be shattered.

Late one night, one of her mother’s friends shook Anjelica awake. He had heartbreaking news. Her mother Enrica Soma had been involved in a car crash in Dijon, France. While the driver survived, Soma didn’t. She was just 39. Instantly, Anjelica’s whole world changed. Even worse, she and her brother Tony had to explain the loss of their mother to four-year-old Allegra. The weight of the world was on Anjelica’s young shoulders—and the pressure was too much to bear.

Enrica Soma

Anjelica Huston fled to New York, instantly beginning a new chapter of her life—for better or for worse. Harper’s Bazaar called her, wanting to take her photo before the release of the film she’d made with her father. They matched her with one of fashion’s most in-demand—but also erratic and provocative—photographers, Bob Richardson.

Instantly, he drew her into his world, reassuring her of his impending separation from his wife and telling her they belonged together. She didn’t know it, but she was in way over her head.

Anjelica Huston may have lost the unconditional love of her mother, but the constant shower of attention from Richardson helped her feel safe again. However, his disturbing dark side soon began to show. The age difference reflected that of her parents when they’d met—he was 42 to her 18. Richardson was addicted to speed, had been institutionalized before, and his previous marriage had melted down after he and his wife began swinging.

And that’s just all the stuff that happened before he got together with Anjelica.

Despite the poor reviews for her first film, the world had taken notice of Anjelica Huston, and she was soon in demand as a model and actress. Vogue booked her to model for legendary photographer Richard Avedon, and not-so-coincidentally, the cracks in her relationship with Richardson began to show. Huston’s recollections of this time were heartbreaking, and she says that she lived in terror of him—but the worst was yet to come.

Once, after she briefly left to make an appearance on The Tonight Show, Richardson tore apart all of Huston’s belongings in the hotel room they shared—just because she’d committed the dire offense of not unpacking her suitcases. Next, when Huston expressed reticence about seeing her father, Richardson made her repeat recriminations and regrets about their relationship, first to him, and then on live television.

She had no idea why he acted like this—but the effects on her were incredibly dark.

Driven to the edge by his manipulation and gaslighting, Anjelica Huston once slit her own wrist in a dramatic attempt to convince Richardson how much she loved him. Their one-sided toxic relationship was now mutual. They attempted to save it with an ill-timed trip to Mexico where local law enforcement nearly detained them after catching them having a little too much fun on the beach.

Huston was at a dire breaking point, and in danger of losing herself completely.

Anjelica’s father John insisted that she and Bob Richardson join them on a fishing trip to Mexico with his new fiancée Celeste Shane, AKA Cici. Tensions were high, and one night, after Anjelica went for a drink with her father, Bob retaliated by throwing a bottle at her head when she came back to the room. It was the final straw—and her parting words were unforgettable. They flew home in silence with the elder Huston and his fiancée.

When they arrived in Los Angeles, Huston told him that it was over. Richardson reached out to shake her hand, and she replied: “If you were the last person alive, I wouldn’t shake it". Mic drop.

Shaken from the terror she’d felt over three years of living with Richardson, Anjelica Huston retreated to Cici’s home in the Pacific Palisades, where she rode horses, spent time in nature, and tried to avoid the blatant fix-ups that Cici subjected her to…that is, until Cici invited her to a party hosted by a popular young actor by the name of Jack Nicholson.

Anjelica had already developed a crush on him after seeing him in Easy Rider, but seeing him in real life only cemented it.

Still fresh from her breakup, Anjelica nonetheless began dating Jack Nicholson—but it wasn’t exactly smooth at first. Early on, she caught him on a date with his ex, musician Michelle Phillips. Soon, the tables had turned, and Michelle caught Anjelica at Jack’s. Regardless, the two became friends. Anjelica soon learned how to play a delicate game, balancing Jack’s romantic past with their budding relationship—but it was not without its missteps.

Anjelica’s modeling career was flourishing, as was Jack’s acting, which meant they had to briefly go long distance while he made a film and she worked in London. Days after they first parted ways, Anjelica made a disturbing discovery. One of her friends confessed to sleeping with Jack mere hours after she’d left for the airport.

The smooth-tongued actor got out of it by claiming it had been an act of “mercy". Anjelica didn’t know it, but it would become a dark omen for the future of their relationship.

Whether she was traveling with Jack or living with him, whenever Anjelica suspected that he was cheating, she was able to find evidence of it. He wasn’t exactly the most fastidious with his affairs, but still, she put up with it. In a strange turn, he ended up starring opposite John Huston in Chinatown…in a role where his character sleeps with the daughter of John’s character in the film.

If you know the plot of Chinatown, you know how creepy that situation was. Regardless, Anjelica was delighted when she saw her father and Jack getting along. Still, there was something missing from her life—and she soon identified what it was.

Anjelica Huston knew she wanted to try her hand at acting again, but after the failure of her one and only film, she was reticent. She refused to get by on nepotism—but on top of her dad’s legend status, she also happened to be dating Hollywood’s biggest star. There was no getting away from these types of connections.

Huston proudly refused to use them, which meant that she was often left sitting home alone at Jack’s—just as her mother had once been when still wed to her father.

During one of these times, Jack left Anjelica in L.A. and went to New York on a boys’ trip. She found herself at a party, where troubled star Ryan O’Neal approached her. When Jack returned home a few days later, Anjelica gave him the shock of a lifetime. She told him that she was in love with Ryan, and was leaving him. Anjelica even amazed herself with the admission—but there were a lot more surprises in store for her.

After years of reticence, Anjelica Huston finally decided to try her hand at film acting, hoping to get a part in The Last Tycoon—only to be brutally shut down by director Elia Kazan, who told her that she wasn’t beautiful enough for the leading role she wanted, but that he’d cast her as another character’s rejected date. Still, she went with it.

She appeared in the star-studded cast alongside a familiar face—none other than Jack Nicholson, her ex. Soon enough, she was seeing both him and Ryan O’Neal. It was two steps forward, and one step back.

Huston’s reunion with Jack Nicholson soon put her square at the center of one of Hollywood’s most notorious stories. It all began when director Roman Polanski asked her on a date. She accepted, and they went to dinner and a movie. The next day, she went to Jack’s to get some of her things, and noticed Polanski’s jacket there.

Soon enough, he emerged from the back of the house with a girl, and told Anjelica that they’d been taking pictures for Vogue. They went on their way and she thought little of it—until the next day.

The next day, Anjelica spotted a group of men with flashlights outside Jack’s home. It was a group of plainclothes detectives, and they had Roman Polanski with them. He told her they just wanted to look around, and she let them in. While looking around, they found some of Anjelica and Jack’s pot, and a bag of white powder in Anjelica’s bag.

They ended up arresting both Anjelica and Polanski on the spot. But there was much more to the story than just that...

Later, Anjelica found out the chilling truth about that day. When she got to the empty house (Jack Nicholson was out of town), Polanski had been in the bedroom, assaulting the 13-year-old girl he was with. That was why authorities had detained him, and a trial was forthcoming. Everyone expected Anjelica to testify in the case against him—but she never appeared on the stand, and her account of that day is quite controversial.

For her part, Anjelica Huston denies knowing that anything bad had happened that day. In her account of things, she never saw Polanski and the girl in the bedroom, and had barely noticed the girl’s age—only her height—when she briefly encountered her and Polanski as they left the house. However, the girl told a completely different story.

According to Samantha Geimer, Polanski’s victim, Huston was suspicious of Polanski and banged on the door during her assault, demanding to know what was going on. However, Polanski then reassured Anjelica that it was only a photoshoot, and she left them alone. Either way, her involvement threatened to overshadow everything in her life.

In a surprising twist, the court dropped the charges against Anjelica, as the search and seizure had been illegal. She never had to testify for or against Polanski, who later fled the US before his sentencing. Anjelica felt guilt over being involved in the scandal at all, and the repercussions on her family. And it’s not like she could turn to either of the romantic partners with her struggles…

With Jack Nicholson away, Anjelica Huston was spending most of her time with Ryan O’Neal—and she described life with him as a Jekyll and Hyde situation. And just like that story, their relationship had a chilling end. Ryan was physically abusive throughout their relationship. It escalated one terrifying night, when he head-butted her because he couldn't find her in the middle of a party.

Anjelica fled to an upstairs bathroom, and told security that she was fine. Soon after, he entered the room and continued to hit her. The writing was on the wall—but adrift as she was at the time, she still struggled with making a decision.

Anjelica had no one to look to for guidance. She’d kept her relationship with Ryan mostly secret, and most of her friends were Jack’s. She ended up getting help from an unlikely source—her 13-year-old half-sister, Allegra, who had just two words for Anjelica: “Leave him". Thankfully, Anjelica did, turning back to Jack Nicholson, who bought her a house nearby.

Their reunion may have been gleeful, but what followed had more ups and downs than a roller coaster.

After the disappointment of The Last Tycoon and the Polanski scandal, Anjelica Huston took a five-year hiatus from film, but when her friend Bob Rafelson offered her a part in a movie Jack was starring in, The Postman Always Rings Twice, she jumped at the chance—and it didn’t hurt that she’d then be able to keep an eye on Jack as he acted opposite a Hollywood’s newest blonde, Jessica Lange.

Still, she was bothered by the fact that her connections had gotten her the part—but she didn’t have much time to dwell on it.

After she finished her part in the film, Anjelica Huston was driving down the road near her home when an oncoming car crossed the center line, hitting the vehicle in front of her. Without her seatbelt on, she was thrown into the windshield. In a quick flash, she thought she was blind—but it was actually just all the blood pouring down her face.

A friend beat paramedics to the punch and rushed her to Cedars-Sinai, where doctors operated on her nose and face. As terrifying as the accident was, it had an unexpected side effect. It made Anjelica realize that she spent too much of her time waiting for things to happen to her—and that it was time to break that habit.

Anjelica Huston had spent the first 30 years of her life looking for love—first, with her family, and then, in romantic relationships. But now, she wanted something for herself and herself only. She wanted to act, without relying on her father or Jack or their friends for parts. And act she did. The roles weren’t large, and the films weren’t massive successes, but she took lessons and got by on her own.

Then, a friend passed her a book that he wanted to adapt. He thought she’d be great in the lead role. She was thrilled—but he had a major twist in store for her.

The book was called Prizzi’s Honor, and not only did he want Anjelica Huston to play the female lead, he also wanted to cast Jack Nicholson as the male lead and get her father to direct. At first, she refused, not wanting to have to act as a mediator between them. Finally, she agreed to appear—only to be met with a brutal insult.

When she asked for more money than the base rate, her agent called the producer only for him to say: “You must be kidding… She has no talent. Her boyfriend is the star and her father is the director. That’s the only reason we’re having this conversation". That’s gotta hurt.

The old Anjelica Huston would’ve taken the insults to heart and retreated, but the new Anjelica decided she’d make him eat his words. And that’s exactly what she did. Of the eight Oscar nominations that Prizzi’s Honor got, there was only one win—Anjelica’s, for Supporting Actress. After her speech, she ran from the stage back to her father instead of exiting to the press room. His response was heartbreaking.

The proud dad had tears streaming down his face as his daughter rushed over to greet and thank him. For the first time, Anjelica was able to bask in her own success—but only briefly.

Next, Anjelica Huston did some screen tests to appear in The Witches of Eastwick, but after Bill Murray dropped out, they needed a male lead. Well, when Jack Nicholson heard about it, he insisted that Anjelica push the director to cast him. Oh, how the old tables had turned. Sadly, they hadn’t quite rotated enough though.

After a terrible screen test, it was Anjelica who ended up not getting cast. Okay, I’m repeating myself here, but that one seriously had to hurt.

Still, there was one man who definitely wanted to cast Anjelica—her father, John. In the 80s, he began working on a film called The Dead, and he wanted it to be a family affair. Anjelica’s older brother Tony had secretly written the script. As John was ailing and needed to have oxygen tanks pretty much everywhere he went, producers and the Huston family moved heaven and earth to make it happen. While it was rewarding, it also took a devastating toll.

The stress of the production, and watching her father direct in such poor health, had an adverse effect on Anjelica’s health and she developed Epstein-Barr syndrome. And it wasn’t just taxing for her.

Not long after completing The Dead, John Huston fell even more ill than he already was. Confined to a hospital bed, Anjelica visited him daily. One evening, she bid him farewell and promised to come back the next day. Sadly, he passed before she could see him again. He was 81 years old. Despite their distance during her childhood, he had since become a steady presence in her life. Anjelica reeled from the loss.

Soon after, she returned to work—but as she grieved, many professional and personal challenges arose.

First, there was the matter of her relationship with Jack Nicholson. They had drifted apart throughout the 80s—for more than a few reasons, as we’ll see—and by 1990, they had finally called it quits. It even came with a devastating parting gift. At Christmas, Jack had a present delivered to Anjelica: a beautiful pearl-and-diamond bracelet that Frank Sinatra had once given to Ava Gardner, whom Anjelica adored.

He’d written that he hoped it wasn’t overbearing and signed the card, “These pearls from your swine". Ick. Well, she rebounded quickly…and rebounded well.

After the break-up, Anjelica went to Cannes to act as a juror at the festival. Within hours of her arrival, she had a new, very impressive suitor—Prince Albert of Monaco. While she did enjoy one date with him, it wasn’t the prince who ended up giving Anjelica her happily ever after. Like something out of a rom-com, one of her friends wanted to fix her up with a sculptor named Robert Graham. But instead of doing it the conventional way, he decided to tell Anjelica that Robert had a crush on her, and vice versa.

The reality couldn’t be farther from the truth. Neither had ever really considered the other. But somehow, it worked.

Anjelica and Robert began dating and fell in love. He had everything she’d loved about Jack—the humor, charm, and spontaneity; and none of what she’d loathed—the constant affairs with other women. And with this newfound happiness came professional success as well. Producers approached Anjelica with a role that had been her dream nearly her entire life.

As a child, Anjelica had read Addams Family cartoons and fantasized about playing Morticia. Now, she would—but the role also came with an unexpected dark side.

Playing Morticia Addams, as glamorous as it seems, does not sound fun. The corsets were so tight that Anjelica couldn’t even sit down in the car to get to set. Her makeup artist glued fabric tabs to her face that she’d then tape to the back of her skull, constricting her whole head and resulting in intense headaches and rashes.

Luckily, her hard work pulled off, and not only was The Addams Family a huge success, it also became a beloved family classic, defined at least in part by her iconic performance.

When Anjelica brought Robert Graham to Ireland to visit her childhood home, he surprised her on one of their last days there by proposing. In 1992, they had a star-studded wedding where Anjelica wore a smart white suit to walk down the aisle. Her close friend Jerry Hall, whom Anjelica also cited as an inspiration for her Morticia performance, was a bridesmaid.

As she was wearing a cream lace gown, Anjelica claimed that Jerry looked more like the bride than she did. Still, she was ecstatic to have finally found lasting love. But there was one piece of the puzzle missing.

Anjelica Huston hadn’t put that much thought into having children—after all, her relationships had frequently been tumultuous. She’d considered it with Jack Nicholson, but after they broke up, she finally tried to address why she’d never gotten pregnant, and made a devastating discovery. Doctors diagnosed her with endometriosis and told her that it was unlikely she’d ever have kids.

She felt inadequate and angry, especially in the wake of her break-up with Jack. After her marriage to Robert Graham, they made attempts at fertility treatments, but sadly, nothing worked.

Without the looming legacy of her father or Jack holding her back, Anjelica found untold professional success in the 90s. She appeared in more films, a TV miniseries, and even began directing herself. She became the kind of natural A-lister she’d been surrounded by her whole life. Robert Graham built them a home in Venice, California—but the decade was not without its setbacks.

Anjelica Huston appeared alongside an all-star cast in the critically-acclaimed The Royal Tenenbaums—but the making of the film seemed like a total nightmare. The set was notoriously dysfunctional, and Huston later revealed her disturbing side of the story. As she tells it, veteran actor Gene Hackman was a vicious presence on the shoot, and he often hurled insults at the young director Wes Anderson.

Huston confessed that it got so bad that she and Bill Murray would have to step in to protect Anderson, with Murray even coming in on his days off to make sure nothing happened. You’d think that would’ve bonded them together, but not so…

Though Bill Murray and Huston worked together previously on The Royal Tenenbaums, the actor was reportedly extremely rude to her on Wes Anderson's film The Life Aquatic. According to Huston, when everyone arrived on set, Bill dealt her a cold-hearted betrayal. As she said, "The first week I was there, we were all in this little hotel, and he invited the entire cast to go and have dinner, except me". Ouch. But he wasn’t her only Hollywood enemy…

Reportedly, Huston is on the wrong end of a one-sided feud with one of the most powerful women in show business: Oprah. Ever since Huston beat out the Great O's performance in The Color Purple and bagged her first Oscar for Prizzi’s Honor, she claims Oprah has shunned her. For one, Oprah never had her on the show—but at one Hollywood party, the feud went to the next level.

According to Huston, she was in the middle of talking to Clint Eastwood at the soiree when Oprah inserted herself between them without a word, putting her back to Huston and refusing to acknowledge her. Yeah, that's a grudge.

At the home he’d built for them in Venice, Anjelica Huston finally found her storybook ending with sculptor Robert Graham—but like so many of her other relationships, tragedy made its way into her life. In 2007, Robert fell ill. Sadly, six months later, he passed, leaving Anjelica a widow. The loss absolutely devastated her.

While she hasn’t moved on romantically, she did find solace in making the TV show Smash, and by writing two memoirs, one of which covered not only her love story with Robert, but also the nitty-gritty depths of her childhood.

Though they eventually reconciled, there was one event from Anjelica Huston’s childhood with her father that she never forgot—and took a long time to forgive. John Huston had his fair share of illicit trysts, frequently cheating on her mother, but one time, he went way too far. John started sleeping with his teen daughter’s friend, Zoe Sallis.

Although Zoe was older than Anjelica, it was still a shock to realize the person she’d considered a friend was hooking up with her dad. But that’s not even the worst part.

When John Huston broke the news to Anjelica about his affair with her friend, he did it in an utterly brutal way: By telling her she now had a baby half-brother. That child, actor Danny Huston, later became a beloved part of the Huston clan, but it took years for Anjelica to accept Danny and Zoe into her family. No wonder it hurt so much later on, when she experienced something similar…

Anjelica and Danny Huston

Anjelica Huston and Jack Nicholson were together on and off for 16 years, and according to Huston, there was never, ever a time in their relationship where she felt that she could fully trust him. She’d often find evidence of his affairs in his home, but would brush it off. After all, none of them ever stuck around for more than a night or two—until the day Nicholson committed the ultimate betrayal. One night, Jack invited Anjelica over for dinner. There, he informed her "Someone is having a baby". Except by "someone," he meant him, with another woman.

After years of infidelity and her own struggles with fertility, it was the final straw in their relationship. That was when she finally left Jack—although not without at least one instance where she, as she put it, wailed on him. He took it, knowing he deserved it, and they laughed about it later.

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The future Catherine the Great of Russia had surprising beginnings. For one, her name wasn’t really Catherine—and she wasn’t really Russian. She was born the German Princess Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst on May 2, 1729 to Prince Christian and Princess Johanna. But great women aren’t born, they’re made…and Catherine quickly showed how far she'd go for power.

Catherine’s mother Johanna was notorious around Europe as gossip-monger and glory hound, and the matron was bent on turning her daughter into a royal thirst trap. Over the years, Johanna schooled Catherine in fashionable French and rigorous etiquette, hoping to snag her an advantageous marriage. Yet even Johanna couldn’t have predicted just how “successful” she’d be.

Johanna had big dreams for her little girl, but even she must have been surprised when Catherine caught the eye of Peter III, AKA the heir to the Russian Empire. When Catherine was just 10, mommy dearest carted her off to meet the 11-year-old boy. Close in age, they could have been a great match—but it turned into an absolute nightmare.

Even at the tender age of 10, Catherine knew she despised Peter. They say that girls mature faster than boys, but in Peter’s case…this was true tenfold. Pale and sickly, the almost-teenaged Peter still played obsessively with toy soldiers—all while somehow nursing a burgeoning drink problem. Great combo there, bud. And that was just the beginning…

Though Catherine never had a classically beautiful face, she was still mega attractive, and men flocked to her for more than just the favors she could grant them. She had a high, wide forehead—considered the height of hot at the time—a greek nose, and large, intelligent eyes. She also had dark, thick hair that she often wore up in a perfectly coiffed do.

Catherine’s courting of Peter III couldn’t have started out more horribly, and not just because she was less than impressed with her beau-to-be. For one thing, her meddling mother Johanna got herself kicked out of court within a matter of months for offending the courtiers. Catherine only managed to hang on by working her charms overtime.

As a young girl, the whip-smart Catherine was rambunctious and easily bored. Left to her own devices, she got into as much trouble as she possibly could around her estate, and soon earned a reputation for being an incorrigible tomboy. Those closest to her even gave the young princess the sprightly, boyish nickname “Fike".

As we’ll find out, Catherine would do anything—and I do mean anything—for that sweet, sweet Russian crown, including sticking it out with her idiot of a suitor, Peter. Catherine had a mean follow-through, and she soon applied herself to learning Russian with an obsessive focus, practicing at all hours of the night. This strain soon had devastating consequences.

Like most other European nobility at the time, Catherine and Peter III were related; they were second cousins. Just because it was common doesn’t make it any less gross, guys.

Though she never quite lost her accent, the German-born Catherine worked tirelessly to improve her Russian, and even took to walking around her bedroom barefoot in the middle of the night, practicing her pronunciation. Soon enough, she developed a raging case of pneumonia in 1744 that nearly felled her. Catherine’s response? Work harder.

Despite her long, scandalous life, Catherine was a sickly girl. Not only did she contract pneumonia in 1744, she also fell ill from a near-fatal case of pleuritis. But the cure was even worse than the sickness. To recover, she participated in the gruesome 18th-century practice of bloodletting, even suffering through four procedures in a single day. Ew.

Catherine the Great wasn't turns out, so "great" when it came to her height. She was much shorter than many of her subjects imagined, particularly since she had such an outsized reputation. One of her correspondents remembered meeting her for the first time and being so surprised at how short Catherine was that she “could only stare at her".

If Catherine could seem single-minded in her pursuit of power, well, buckle up—It goes deeper. On August 21, 1745, she actually married her pale little fiancé Peter, officially becoming Catherine Alekseyevna. Though she was barely 16 years old, her father didn’t even attend the dynastic nuptials. The worst, however, was yet to come.

Quick-witted, gorgeous, and curious, Catherine soon found she hated her dull new husband Peter even more than she thought she would, which says something. At first, she turned to books to stave off boredom, devouring Voltaire and learning Machiavellian power moves from Tacitus. For a while, Catherine was satisfied…until she began to feel a darker urge.

Catherine and Peter had set up their “young court” at the lavish Russian royal palace Oranienbaum, filling it with vibrant, good-looking nobles from all across the empire. This was a fatal mistake. Soon enough, Catherine’s bored eyes wandered over to the handsome Sergei Saltykov, and the pair began a lurid affair. Oh, but it gets even juicier.

According to Catherine herself, Sergei had one naughty claim to fame: He was the man who “took” her virginity, not her husband. That’s right, Catherine may have had the steel ovaries to go through with her miserable marriage to Peter, but the girl still had standards, and she refused to warm up his marriage bed. Which soon led to a lot of awkwardness.

Peter III gave as good as he got in his awful marriage. While Catherine soon took up with a series of lovers, Peter was off on his own extra-marital adventures, most famously courting the beautiful Elizaveta Vorontsova. There were even rumors that Peter wanted to divorce Catherine and live happily ever after with Elizaveta. That’s, uh, not what happened.

To this day, Catherine is Russia’s longest-reigning female ruler, with a reign of almost 35 years.

In early 1754, Catherine found herself pregnant, giving birth to a bouncing baby boy named Paul on October 1st of that year. But the child hid a dark secret. Catherine later claimed that little Paul wasn’t exactly his royal father's son. According to her, the babe was Sergei Saltykov’s through and through…meaning the heir to all Russia was illegitimate.

Although it’s entirely possible the future Emperor of Russia was an illicit love child, historians actually disagree with Catherine—for one hilarious reason. Paul grew up stout and ugly, just like Peter III, whereas Catherine and her lover Sergei were reportedly 18th-century smokeshows. That’s right, experts debunked this saucy theory with a dignified game of hot or not.

Before you feel too bad for Peter III, you should know that he made Catherine’s life a living nightmare. While most the information we have is through the biased Catherine, Peter would reportedly drill all the male servants early in the morning with exhausting routines, waking everyone else up in the process. The Great needs her beauty sleep, Pete.

Interestingly, most historians don’t lay the “blame” on Catherine for her bedroom troubles (or lack thereof) with Emperor Peter III. Many experts believe that it was Peter who was somehow unable to consummate the marriage, or else they think he could have been infertile. So take that: It’s not all Catherine's fault.

In the late 1750s, Catherine was pregnant again, this time giving birth to a little girl, Anna. Peter’s response to the birth was disturbing. Apparently he’d finally cottoned on to this whole cheating thing, and he refused to believe he was the girl’s father, saying, “God knows where my wife gets her pregnancies". When Catherine protested, he only spat out, “Go to the Devil!”

Sadly, Anna’s life began in scandal and ended in sorrow. Catherine’s second child and likely only daughter lived to be just 14 months old before the frail girl passed on March 8, 1759. We all have different coping mechanisms, but Catherine's mourning was pretty chilling. Whether out of cruel flippancy or the depths of grief, she almost never mentioned the girl again.

According to several historical records, in order to become a lover of Catherine the Great, there was an intimate test. Before being welcomed into Catherine's bed, prospective suitors had to first satisfy Catherine's lady-in-waiting, the beautiful Countess Praskovya Bruce. But as Bruce soon found out, this was far from a cushy position…

Catherine and Countess Bruce's relationship didn't exactly end well, at least according to reports. In 1779, an advisor happened to lead Catherine into a room—and she saw an utterly disturbing sight. One of her lovers was re-sampling Countess Bruce’s goods without Catherine’s permission. The Empress’s response was swift and brutal.

Without batting an eye, Catherine sent her now ex-lover into exile, shoving Countess Bruce along with him. Needless to say, the empress also relieved Bruce of her lady-in-waiting duties shortly after. For what it's worth, when it comes to Catherine the Great, this was actually the merciful option. As we'll see, she'd do much worse to better people.

Few people knew it at the time and even fewer people know it now, but Catherine was completely tone deaf. For all her refined tastes, she was so disabled in this respect that she had to receive a signal from her servants to tell her to applaud during operas, ballets, and other performances. She called music “infernal noise".

On January 5, 1762, Catherine’s biggest ambition (so far) came true. Peter ascended to the Russian throne as Peter III, taking Catherine along with him as his "mere" consort. The upgrade in title also came with an upgrade in digs, and Peter and Catherine moved into the now famous Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. Which is right about when Peter started messing it all up…

While some generously called Peter an “eccentric,” Catherine had no qualms calling him an “idiot” and “the drunkard". When Peter became emperor, he really rose to those occasions, and for some reason bizarrely backed Russia’s old enemies, alienating himself even further from his wife in the process. Don't worry, Catherine soon got even.

By July 1762, less than half a year after they’d become emperor and empress, Catherine and Peter were living in separate palaces. Bad for their crumbling marriage—but great for Catherine’s revenge. You see, for years she had been cultivating allies among her court for a coup d’etat, and she was now using all her “alone time” to ramp up a brutal taste of karma for her idiot husband.

Catherine was incredibly fond of horses and horse-riding, and spent much of the early part of her restless marriage riding. But since this is Catherine we’re talking about, she had to do it with a twist. She refused to ride side-saddle, and wrote, “The more violent the exercise, the more I enjoyed it." This passion would crop up again in a horrifying way...

On July 9, 1762, Catherine finally put her chilling plan in motion. After hearing that Peter had detained one of her allies, she knew her attack had to come now—and what an attack it was. She marched down to the Russian regiment and, playing the poor, helpless woman, begged the men to save her from her "unhinged husband." They did that and more.

Right after addressing the men, this “poor, helpless” woman went over to another barracks, where a host of clergymen were already waiting to make her the sole ruler of the Russian Empire. But Catherine wasn’t done yet. She had Peter detained and forced him to officially abdicate, just in case. And then she dealt her husband the cruellest blow of all.

Needless to say, Catherine’s effective and brutal takeover of her own husband had the entire world in a tizzy. After all, Peter had only been in power for a measly six months and, I repeat, Catherine had just DEPOSED HER OWN HUSBAND in a legendary baller move. But then eight days later, some say she took it one step further...

Catherine was holding Peter captive at the palace of Ropsha when he suddenly fell ill and passed on July 17, 1762 at the suspiciously tender age of 34. Although his autopsy stated that a severe attack of colic and a stroke were the culprits in his passing, much darker rumors swirled around his death—and clung right to Catherine.

Some historians believe that, given the convenient timing of Peter’s ignominious end, Catherine had a hand in offing the emperor for good and making sure he never came back to claim her throne. According to them, a courtier named Alexey Orlov, the brother of one of Catherine’s lovers, performed the dirty deed on her behalf. But this is only part of the story.

Though Catherine the Great was definitely an ice cold femme fatale, she may not be able to entirely take credit for Peter III’s tragic end. There’s no real evidence that she knew about the dark plot against her estranged husband, and Orlov may have been acting out of turn. But by the time Catherine found out, it was too late. Then again, her reign of terror was just beginning...

Truth be told, Catherine was a pretty terrible mom. Sure, things get busy when you’re trying to turn Russia into a modern superpower, but Catherine’s eldest son Paul wasn’t just neglected, he was downright mistreated. One day when he was still a baby, he fell out of his crib and, with exactly zero people checking up on him, he “slept the night away unnoticed on the floor". Yikes.

You gotta respect it: Just months before she plotted her husband’s downfall, Catherine was heavily pregnant with her third child. On April 11, 1762, Catherine gave birth to another boy she named Alexei Grigoievich Brobrinsky. And if at this point you’re thinking, “How could she plot against her newborn's father?” I have news for you…

There might have been some confusion around Catherine's first two children, but her third son Alexei was definitely not Peter III's son. In fact, Catherine boldly went and named him after his true father, her macho lover Grigori Orlov. The intrigue, it’s endless.

Getting rid of Peter III wasn’t even the worst thing Catherine did in her coup. Another claimant to the throne was Ivan VI, an insane 23-year-old who had been locked up since he was a baby because his royal blood threatened the crown. So what did Catherine do? Had the poor guy offed too, of course. Oh, those Russians.

Catherine took such an astounding amount of lovers that she even developed her own scandalous system to cycle through them. She would seduce them, promote them to high ranks, and then when she grew bored of them, she “graciously” pensioned them off with a nice plot of land and some servants. But her lover Girgoi Potemkin really went above and beyond.

Potemkin was one of Catherine’s favorite advisors, both in matters of state and matters of mattress. When their romance petered out, Potemkin happily vetted his replacements, hand-picking lovers for their good looks and intelligence. Now that’s full service. However, as we'll see, Potemkin might have had a very good reason for his grace…

Catherine loved to dote on her many lovers and court favorites, but the same couldn’t be said for her own children. One year, she gave her "friend" a 500,000-ruble present—but her gift to her son was utterly disturbing. On his own birthday that year, Paul got…a cheap watch. Mmkay Catherine, methinks you can afford the Rolex.

Although servicing Catherine the Great in the bedroom was a booming cottage industry, the empress (probably) never married again after she removed Peter from the throne. This, like most everything else Catherine did, was a calculated power move. I mean, why give away the crown to some dude when she was already Empress of all Russia?

To say Catherine had a difficult relationship with her eldest son Paul is an understatement. Whether because he looked so much like his royal father or because Catherine was threatened by his power, she never bothered to offer him a chance to co-rule, which wasn’t uncommon in Russia at the time. But when Paul had a son of his own, things got even worse.

In 1777, Catherine became a grandmother when Paul had his own heir, Alexander. The empress’ reaction was chilling. Unwilling to show Paul any kindness, Catherine eventually planned to make the child her official heir, rather than choosing her grown son. Gee, thanks mom. However, fate had other plans in store...

Maybe Catherine was a little insecure about how she came to the throne, because she set out hard and fast to prove that she could turn “little” backwater Russia into one of the most enlightened powerhouses of its day. She waged conflicts left, right, and center to expand the empire and also modernized its cities, changing the architecture to a classical style.

Throughout her reign, Catherine gained a reputation for ruthlessly expanding the empire, but her territorial ambitions went right into the bedroom. See, Catherine had a type: cunning military hunks. She often took commander-in-chief advice from her battle-hardened lovers, most famous among them Prince Platon Zubov. Imperialism begins at home, people.

According to some persistent rumors from the time, Catherine and her lover Girgori Potemkin married in a secret ceremony. But just in case you’re worried about Catherine holding onto her power, rest assured: The woman knew what she was doing. Because Potemkin was way lower in rank than her, it would have been a so-called “morganatic” marriage, and thus illegitimate. See? You can have it all.

Catherine took some big swings in her life, but this also meant she suffered some big misses. One of her hugest embarrassments happened when she pushed to get her granddaughter Alexandra to marry King Gustav IV of Sweden, even throwing a lavish engagement ball in their honor. But then the king dealt Catherine a cruel humiliation.

Catherine poured her heart, soul, and rubles into the engagement ball—only for the guest of honor to never show up. Worried that Alexandra wouldn't convert religions, Gustav got major case of cold feet and fled back to Sweden, leaving Catherine with egg on her face. Some say the embarrassment even brought about her downfall…

Always hard working, Catherine had her days mapped out in five-minute increments, which she maintained until her passing. The only part of the schedule that was subject to change were her waking hours, which moved from 5:00 AM to 6:00 AM as she grew older.

In 1773, one of Catherine’s darkest ghosts came back to haunt her. A group of peasants started to rebel, and when Catherine found out about their leader Emelyan Pugachev, her blood must have run cold. Pugachev claimed to be Catherine’s late husband Peter III, resurrected and looking for vengeance. Is it any wonder Catherine’s retaliation was so brutal?

After a year of “Pugachev’s Rebellion,” Catherine gathered an enormous force of men and crushed the rebels under her thumb. Then she came for Pugachev himself. She imprisoned him in a metal cage for all to see and ridicule, then decapitated him in a Moscow square, then had him drawn and quartered. Ok Catherine, you can stop now.

Whatever her faults, Catherine the Great had impeccable taste. The world-renowned Hermitage Museum at the Winter Palace in started out as Catherine’s own personal collection.

Maybe no one learned about Catherine's exhilarating heights and frightening lows like her Polish sidepiece Stanislaw Poniatowski. When Poniatowski was in her favor, Catherine gifted him with no less than the kingdom of Poland, installing him as ruler. But what Catherine giveth, she could taketh—and Russia hath no fury like empress scorned...

Shortly after becoming King Stanislaw, Poniatowski did a supremely stupid thing and decided to start rallying for Polish independence away from Catherine. This did not sit well with his former sweetums, and Catherine forced him to abdicate as punishment for his disloyalty. Stanislaw was lucky to escape with his life.

Catherine had some sense of decorum, and she didn’t always want to showcase her endless parade of lovers to all and sundry. Instead, she did something more scandalous and made an illicit hideaway. At her “Petit Hermitage” near the Winter Palace, Catherine held intimate parties for those nearest and dearest to her…need I say the getaway spot came with a bedroom included?

With her new-fangled, Enlightenment ideals, Catherine was a modernizing force in Russia. Yet in 1762, even her most loyal courtiers said “Slow your roll, girl". With smallpox raging through her country, Catherine decided to promote the then-radical method of inoculation against the disease…and she did it in an unforgettable way.

Not content to merely patronize inoculation as a scientific method, Catherine put her money where her mouth was and actually got herself vaccinated against smallpox with the help of English doctor Thomas Dimsdale. Oh, and she threw her son Paul in the ring too, inoculating him as well. To everyone’s shock and surprise, it worked.

All of Catherine's boy toys knew exactly where they stood with their empress, no matter how infatuated she seemed with them and no matter how regularly she invited them into her bed. Catherine may have been generous, but she also expected total loyalty. One of her lovers even described himself and his cohort as “kept girls".

In her spare time, Catherine somehow managed to cultivate hobbies that weren’t just bedding men and performing acts of barbarism. She was a big fan of English and Chinese gardening, and took a great interest in building foliage in these styles. She also penned a range of written works, from comedies to her own memoirs.

Catherine was infamous throughout Russia for her life-long bedroom appetite, but her last lover still managed to raise more than a few eyebrows. Prince Platon Zubrov was a whopping 40 years the empress’s junior, and the pair hopped into bed together when Catherine was 60 and Zubov was just 22 years old. Go get it, girl.

Catherine was an ardent admirer of the philosophers of the French Enlightenment, and they loved her right back. She corresponded intimately with the philosopher Voltaire, and even extended her protection to Jacques Diderot when he got into a bind in France. See? She could be nice as long as your name wasn’t “Peter".

November 16, 1796 was supposed to be any other day in the life of Catherine the Great. She got up early, as was her habit, and sipped her morning coffee. She even told her lady’s maid that she’d gotten some of the best sleep she’d experienced in a long time, and then got to work on signing papers. But just hours later, everything changed.

Catherine knew that a strong monarchy starts with swag, and her lavish coronation on September 22, 1762 put “crown jewels” on the map. As a celebration of her special day, Catherine created the now-iconic Imperial Crown of Russia, a Byzantine-inspired, diamond-encrusted marvel that even the last Romanovs used.

Say what you will about Catherine, she got the job done. By the end of her reign, Russia had risen to such heights that the “Catherinian Era” is still known as the Golden Age of Russia.

It was under Catherine the Great’s supervision that the legendary and magnificent “Amber Room” was installed in the Catherine Palace near St. Petersburg. Though lost to history after the ravages of WWII, the room was recreated in all its blinding, opulent glory in 2003, and is currently on display at the Catherine Palace.

Once Catherine arrived in Russia to marry Peter, she never left the country again. Some historians believe that she was afraid people would attempt to usurp her throne if she left, and she spent the rest of her life looking over her shoulder.

Catherine’s private life is full of dark mystique, and a number of tenuous, unprovable, and very juicy claims about her exist. Some say she kept her hairdresser in a cage to keep her wig a secret, while others insist that she advocated for having intimate relations at least six times a day; apparently her busting bedroom life helped cure her insomnia.

Catherine might have been a proponent of progress and the Enlightenment, but don’t get it twisted—any revolutions in Russia would just have to wait until 1917. The serfs of the country were still very much serfs at the end of her reign, and she once even wrote, “I am an aristocrat, it is my profession". In other words: Back off my absolute power, plebes.

Though Catherine may have a brutal reputation as a maneater today, her real story is a lot different than that. She remained in devoted relationships for years at a time, and even once wrote, “The trouble is that my heart is loathe to remain even one hour without love". It just so happened that she ended up looking for that love in a lot of places.

Just after 9 o’clock in the morning that November, Catherine’s servants found their imperial majesty lying on the floor, her face a lurid shade of purple. By all accounts, it was horrific: Her pulse was fluttering, her breathing was ragged, and she was at heaven’s door. She quickly fell into a coma and passed soon after. But what really happened?

Just a few short years before her passing, one of Catherine’s aides found an undated will in her belongings. Its contents give intimate insight into the empress. In it, she asks for her body to be “dressed in white, with a golden crown on my head, and on it inscribe my Christian name. Mourning dress is to be worn for six months, and no longer: the shorter the better." That’s our Catherine: Gaudy, glorious, and to the point. As for how her funeral actually went? Well...

In the end, Catherine’s funeral was even more lavish than she requested. Though she got her golden crown, mourners placed her in a silver brocade dress instead of a simple white one, and they decorated her coffin in gold fabric. Sorry to say, though, that this ends the “regal” portion of the funeral, because things were about to get a whole lot grosser.

When Catherine passed, instead of just burying her, as you do, the Russians displayed her body for six whole weeks in one of the most impressive rooms in her palace. While her body lay there, presumably getting riper by the second in the lavish chamber, people would come by and kiss the rotting flesh of her hand.  This is not the way I’d want to go.

Sadly, although Catherine’s son Paul survived his horrific childhood to become Emperor after his mother, he met the same tragic end as his father. Just a few short years into a very unpopular reign, Paul was offed, making way for the heir Catherine had intended all along: Her grandson Alexander. Whatever Catherine wants, Catherine gets…even from beyond the grave.

It’s safe to say that Catherine was addicted to collecting art. She started out by buying King Frederick II of Prussia’s reject collection that he was trying to get off his hands—only to find there were 13 priceless Rembrandts in there. High off her beginner’s luck, Catherine’s classic collection soon totalled the thousands…and she indulged in some kinkier tastes, too.

Catherine’s public and private images were two very different things. So while she played up her role as a chaste “Enlightened Empress” to her people, she went about collecting some hair-raising art in private, putting works such as Giulio Romano’s sensual painting Two Lovers in her basement. But the most scandalous parts of her art collection weren’t paintings at all…

During WWII, German forces raided the Winter Palace—and came across a discovery that shocked them to the core. According to the men, they stumbled across an old boudoir of Catherine’s full of “sensual” furniture. These chairs and other items were decorated with objects mother would not approve of. They took photographs, but the furniture is now lost.

Catherine’s many lovers weren’t the only naughty thing in the Muscovite palaces. Catherine also employed full-time foot ticklers. In this respect, Catherine was actually a traditionalist. Russian royalty long employed sensual foot ticklers, who would sing bawdy ballads while feathering their master's feet to provide relaxation and arousal.

The manner of Catherine’s passing has been the subject of myth and legend for hundreds of years now. Almost immediately after her passing, people started talking. Incredibly, they infamously claimed that Catherine passed after having, er, “intimate” relations with a beloved horse. Except nothing could be further from the truth.

Catherine the Great's autopsy revealed the truth amidst all the lies. The mighty Empress had actually succumbed to a brutal stroke, which was ironically the same ailment that was supposed to have felled her late husband Peter III. A sad end, but not a bestial one. Even so, the unsavory rumors about the insatiable empress live on.

Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29

With a 15-year-old boy in our house, my husband and I have grown used to the *knock knock* *laptop screen slam* "JUST A MINUTE!" *scramble scramble* "....Ok" dance. We have grown used to silently replenishing his room with tissues almost daily. We have grown used to herding the two younger ones to the downstairs bathroom while they wonder why their brother is taking so long in the shower.

We have even grown used to the occasional tightly bundled sheets or towels in the laundry hamper with a sticky note on top reading "wash separately". But there was one big thing we did not anticipate. We did not anticipate that the minute everyone else was out of the house, the living room would become fair game. Having driven halfway down the block without my phone, I decided to just walk back to my house because parking in my weird driveway takes more time than the walk.

I unlocked and opened the front door in the span of a couple of seconds. This was my mistake. How could I be so careless as to expect to be able to just open my own front door? What was I thinking? I should have knocked. I should have pointedly jangled my keys for 30 seconds before unlocking the door. I should have worn a cowbell.

Anything to prevent me from seeing my darling offspring, my beautiful baby boy, my only son, pants down, humping the couch through a strategically placed towel. WHY?

quiet_but_not

Last summer, my boyfriend and I were on a road trip from New Mexico to Mexico. We have a Honda Element converted for living in, so I crawl in the back to nap while he's driving. He stops at a gas station in the desert of Arizona and while he's pumping, I get out to use the bathroom. Come back out, don't see him, and walk around the parking lot to have a look.

I jokingly think to myself that maybe he drove off, not knowing that I got out to use the restroom, but brush that off. I sit on a bench outside twiddling my thumbs, realizing this may now actually be the case. I reach for my phone to call him, but of course, my phone is in the car. I go back inside to ask the cashier to use their phone, but she says they don't have one.

Obviously, they do, but whatever. So I start asking random people in the store to use their phones, which makes people visibly uncomfortable because we're in the middle of nowhere and they think I'll take it I guess. I go back outside and continue asking strangers for their phones. I realize I don't know my boyfriend’s number by heart so I just call my phone repeatedly, hoping he'll answer.

He doesn't. I use one person's phone to log into my Facebook to find my boyfriend's number, but alas, his phone is out of battery when I call. I resort to explaining to everyone whose phone I ask to use my situation. Some don't believe me, others feel really bad, and one man offered to buy me a hotel room for the night in the next town over, thinking that my boyfriend left me on purpose and I was just being modest.

It's been about two hours now. The store clerks through the windows have been looking at me suspiciously for a while, I'm still sitting on this bench in the desert, and have no idea what to do and start bawling my eyes out. A patrol car pulls up and the officer comes to me and lets me know the store clerks called them because I’ve been loitering, haggling people for phones outside of their store, and crying.

Yep, that’s what I’m doing. I explain my situation and the officer is as confused and sympathetic as all the other people. She tells me I can't stay there so she can either take me to a truck rest stop in the town over or go to the station. I ask her to take me to the rest stop, although she’s not convinced that my boyfriend legitimately left me there on accident.

We're driving down the highway when on her radio, another officer says he's at the gas station and there's a guy there looking for his girlfriend. I just crack up and she does too. She flips the car around and takes me back. And there my boyfriend is standing outside of his car, banging on the windows and nearly crying because he couldn't believe he'd actually done that.

He said he was passing some really cool scenery far into the drive and went to wake me up to see it too when he realized I wasn't in the car. He flipped it around and drove faster than he's ever driven in his life to get back to the gas station. He said he wondered why so many people kept calling me but didn’t feel comfortable answering my phone.

He thought for sure that was the end of our relationship and the trip was ruined.

dyslexiyeah

Today I messed up by pranking my office à la Jim from The Office. I thought it would be funny to put a Bluetooth speaker in the ceiling and play sounds of cats over it. I found an eight-hour video of cats meowing on YouTube that was perfect. I paired an old phone to the speaker, tossed the phone in a drawer of an empty desk, and tucked the speaker under a ceiling tile.

It was perfect. You could only hear the cats if you listened real close. It sounded like there was a cat in the ceiling, but you really couldn't tell exactly where it was coming from. I went to my office, got busy with work, and forgot about it until I went to break. I walked into the break room and several people were talking about the cat that must be in the ventilation system.

I chuckled to myself while I grabbed my coffee and made a loop through the accounting department to see if there were any more people talking about the cats in the ceiling. What I saw made my blood run cold. To my horror, half the ceiling tiles were removed and there were two maintenance men on ladders looking for the cat.  They were real close to the speaker but hadn't found it quite yet.

I just reversed out of there and went back to work. They eventually found the speaker, and shortly after everyone got an email from the big boss reprimanding the guilty party and asking for any information on the culprit. A conspiracy theory emerged by the end of the day: Several of them don't believe that it was a prank at all.

They think the maintenance people lied about it being a prank. That management made it up to get people back to work, and that maintenance is planning to set out traps and poison to kill it. One person claimed they absolutely heard the cat yesterday, and I kid you not, a couple of them claim they still hear it. This is completely my bad.

ShadrackMeshax

This mess-up has been set up perfectly for disaster over the past few months and is continuing to destroy my life. This is a long one, but every detail counts in portraying one of the worst weeks of my life. Let me preface this by saying I love my cat more than anything, and while he is currently not sleeping anywhere near me, he's still getting a lot of cautious love.

Truly, I love him too much—too much love got us here today. In January, I adopted an 11 year old, 19 lbs chonker. I fell in love instantly. His last family returned him after six months with a bad case of fleas. He had been de-fleaed but came home with a slew of other health issues. By the end of January after a lot of vet visits, he seemed to be on the mend.

I knew what I was signing up for when I adopted a senior cat, but just didn't realize the endless possibilities. Truly, I tell him every night before bed how much I love him, and that's about to be tested with this saga of the greatest love story ever told. Early February, he starts coughing and stops pooping in his litterbox, despite me cleaning it daily.

He's still peeing in there, but seems cautious and runs out immediately. Even when he started pooping on the floor (thank God for wood floors), he'd run under my bed from it. That was the only time he'd go under my bed, otherwise, he was cuddled up on or next to me. His medical chart from when I adopted him said he had issues with litterbox pooping.

They suspected he was afraid of his last family's other cat and it was behavioral, but something didn't add up. He was fine with pooping in the litterbox for the first month after his kitty enema. I cleaned up his poop every other day and saw nothing out of the ordinary. He was starting to lose weight, which was good because as cute of a chonker as he is, it's not healthy.

I stopped free-feeding him, started feeding him scheduled wet food meals, and we had daily playtime to get him to a healthy weight. I bring him in to the vet in February for the sixth time in a month and a half. He had half of his teeth removed before I adopted him. This resulted in an incision infection and an enema due to opioid constipation.

This visit was for his cough. I even ask if he could have worms. The vet tells me, "I know you're trying to be a good pet owner, but he likely has allergies and it's a behavioral issue. This might be something he has to live with. Come see me if his mucus turns brown". I had been right about every single Dr. Google diagnosis up until this point, but whatever.

I buy an air purifier, vacuum and clean regularly, change the bedding weekly. I already have an obsessive cleaning schedule. Ask any of my previous roommates and I am the cleanest person you'll ever live with. Despite the cleaning, some coughing days were better than others. All of a sudden end of last week, he starts coughing a lot less, and I start feeling like absolute garbage.

My best friend even makes a joke that I caught whatever my cat had. Sick, sick foreshadowing. My chest was tight, frequent bathroom runs, just pure exhaustion, losing weight rapidly despite not really exercising, and malnourished to the point that my hair is falling out. I'm a mess. I guess it's a good thing I got laid off two weeks ago because the bathroom and I are very close friends these days.

I wake up Monday morning to the pungent smell of my cat's usual poop surprise on the wood floor. He's such a kind cat to poop where it's easy cleanup. That's when I see them. Worms crawling around EVERYWHERE. I'm gagging, take a little sample for the vet, and flush the rest. I Dr. Google the heck out of it and it is for SURE tapeworms.

Then I read about the eggs. Let me remind you I change my sheets and wash my duvet cover weekly. I make my bed the second I get out of it and even vacuum my duvet cover. I RUN to inspect my bed. There are eggs EVERYWHERE. Little rice demons that have been dropping from my poor cat's bum for three months. I'm dry heaving at this point.

I live in an old studio apartment and my bed is against a brick wall, so I get little grout crumble patches that I have to vacuum up pretty regularly. I remember feeling little patches of what I assumed one night was grout in my sheets, but fell asleep and ignored it. When I tell you they were everywhere, I mean they were everywhere.

My pillow, under my pillow—my cat and I fall asleep cuddling every night. Again, I love this cat too much. I call the vet and it is undoubtedly tapeworm. We suspect he's had it since I adopted him. His prescription gets to me within a few hours. I also get flea medication and spray. I check him for flea dirt regularly and hadn't seen anything, but better to be cautious.

I bag all of my bedding, throw out half of what I own, vacuum every inch of this place for an hour, I'm on the freaking floor with my flashlight, and find a tapeworm under my couch. Swiffer, disinfect my couch, flip my mattress—like total mental breakdown. I give him his medication and his cough stops instantly. He hasn't coughed once since Monday.

This has been one of my childhood phobias since I read that urban legend about the guy who starved himself then put a burger patty on his tongue and lured the tapeworm out until he could grab it from his mouth. I'm thinking about this story after giving my cat his medications when holy moly diarrhea. I look in the toilet bowl…and nearly puke.

Three long strings floating on the sides that normally I would have flushed to sewage heaven without a second thought, but they are undoubtedly tapeworms. My grown self calls my mom and sobs while still sitting on the toilet in all of my wormy glory. I call and embarrassingly show the doctor, the doctor undoubtedly tells me I too have tapeworm and writes me a prescription.

He asks me if I want just tapeworm or a full deworming? I'm like what does that mean? He's like, "You'd be surprised how many parasites are living in you regularly. Just wait and see what you're about to poop out". I honestly just want to expire at this point. My cat and I are prescribed the same medication, obviously just different doses and different price tags.

His was $13 for two doses. Mine? $130 for one dose, two pills. That's WITH my last month of insurance from my previous employer. I immediately receive a text that my prescription is on backorder. I'm trying to fall asleep that night on my couch without any blankets, when would you guessed it—my heat stops working. So now I'm just shivering on a small couch knowing there are worms crawling around inside of me and eggs everywhere.

I don't sleep. I call the pharmacy when they open in tears, asking when my meds are going to get there. Lucky me, they had just arrived. He asks me, "Did you know your prescription is $130?" I'm like, "Uh no, I've never had tapeworms, but I guess the price is irrelevant". We both nervously laugh. This is trying on soooo many levels.

I order delivery for a bi meal from my favorite restaurant because first, I have no appetite because the thought of feeding the worms makes me want to retch, and I was hoping ordering from my favorite restaurant would entice me to eat. Second, the medication has to be taken with food. Third, I realize this is the last day the calories don't matter. Might as well enjoy it.

I pick up my prescription, light a candle, call my best friend, we have a little virtual funeral for my worms, and try to make light of the situation. I play the song I want played at my funeral. But it just keeps getting worse, y'all. My best friend hesitantly tells me he was telling his physical therapist about my worm saga. She recommended buying clove oil and rubbing it on my, er, pink starfish.

I'm like why? Apparently, worms like to bite your butt on the way out, and clove oil prevents that. I hate everything at this moment. It's like the different levels of a nightmare. I take the pills and am reading the prescription pamphlet. It notes that you'll experience random aches and pains while the worms are expiring. Let me tell you, I felt every worm as I lay blanketless on my couch in the fetal position.

All of a sudden, I'm thinking about the worms and I can't breathe. My throat is kind of itchy, and I'm thinking there are worms in my tonsils at this point. I'm laying there in the fetal position, telling myself it's just a panic attack. My cat decides to go pee at 2 am and jumps out startled, trailing pee all over the apartment. I know the medication says to limit your alcoholic beverages, but I say screw it and make a drink.

I clean the pee and finally fall asleep for about three hours. I wake up bright and early to the smell of cat poop. Still half asleep, I searched his normal spots and couldn't find any poops. He left it in the tub for me—a new spot—thanks, cat. Easy cleanup and no worms, I take it as a win. I flush it down the toilet, bleach the tub, and obsessively wash my hands.

Let me tell you, my hands are bleeding from the number of times I wash them in wormageddon. I look at myself in the mirror while scrubbing my raw hands and oh my god. My face is swollen to the point I'm still surprised I can see out of my eyes. My tongue is flopping all over the place. I am having a severe allergic reaction to the tapeworm medication.

That panic attack while falling asleep was actually an allergic reaction. I immediately video chat my doctor, and he tells me to go get Benadryl immediately and writes me a steroid prescription. I get a call from their finance department on the brief walk to the pharmacy: $140 for that five-minute virtual visit. I try to dispute the charge, but she can't do anything.

I just flat out ask her: "Can I just tell you about my awful life then for $140?" We talk for five minutes about how much my life sucks and she agrees. She was very nice about it, but still $140. She basically tells me that if I had waited a month to get tapeworm and almost die from the medication, the virtual visit would have been cheaper without insurance.

I cut my losses go back to the same pharmacy from the day before and they ask me what's wrong. I lift up my glasses and they were like "Ooooof—did you know you were allergic to this medication?" At this point, I'm like "WHY DO ANY OF YOU THINK I'VE HAD TAPEWORMS BEFORE?" Truly, complete mental breakdown. I buy my medication, 12-pack, and $20 worth of candy to ease the pain.

So folks, here I am. Unemployed, clenching my butt like never before, still haven't pooped because I'm terrified of worm kisses on the way out, face still swollen shut, but I'm breathing fine. My cat is a new cat, so for that? I am grateful. I am 100% sure I will have PTSD from this experience. It is going to be a long, long, time before my cat and I snuggle regularly again, but I know we'll get there and I still love him.

Adopt senior pets regardless of this story, because 10/10, would still get worms again for him. Wormageddon 2020 will not soon be forgotten.

carsgobeep3

This morning I was feeling frisky and really wanted to hook up with a local guy. So I got to talking with a guy and even though he was a lot older (like late 30s-mid 40s), he had a great body, So I said what the heck invited him to my hotel room. After 45 minutes to an hour of fun, I thought I’d never see this dude again because I’m flying home this afternoon (right now).

Wrong. I went to the gate when they started boarding. Guess who was pre-boarding with his wife and children? You guessed it. To make matters worse, they are just a couple of rows from me and I can hear all their conversations. I’m on the plane right now and he keeps texting. I am saving screenshots in case I need them in the future.

I’m sitting here wondering how he was able to get away from his family that long...he was staying at the same hotel, which now just dawned on me because he made it to my room super fast. This is so uncomfortable.

Permalink

To begin, my husband and I can get naughty in the bedroom. My husband often cuffs and spanks me, and on Wednesday we had a pretty intense session. He put these big leather cuffs on me, but failed to take off my Apple Watch. I didn't realize that if you hold the dial down, it automatically dials 9-1-1. So we get into it, and he's spanking me.

I'm pulling on my restraints, and the restraints hold down the button. Suddenly I hear from my watch, "Ma'am, I hear what appears to be hitting and screaming. We are sending someone to you. Hold tight". "Did you call 9-1-1???” My husband asked, "tell them it was an accident!!" So I tell the operator that it was just an accident, and she says is your name [She said my name here]? And I say yes...

She says "We have your address from our database, and we're sending someone over now. I’m sorry, but we hear a male voice telling you what to say, and this sounds like coercion on our end, so we are obligated to make sure you're safe". I said okay thank you, and I hung up. Oh, heck no. I'm literally covered in bruises and welts, and the authorities are coming to check on my well-being.

Within a few minutes, there's a stern knock at the door. We put our clothes on and come to the door, and the officer takes my husband outside, separating us from communication. I calmly explain that it was an accident and we were just having intimacy. I didn't mention the spanking. Well, apparently my husband did. Another officer comes in and asks about our contract, which we use to make sure everything is consensual".

He told you about our contract?" "He felt it best to come clean about your extracurricular activities tonight, and thought the contract would possibly show State of Mind". I go get our contract and showed it to the officers. After a mortifying few more minutes explaining that he was only smacking my butt and thighs, they believe us and tell us to disable the 9-1-1 feature on the Apple Watch if we're going to do that again.

DrByNight

This weekend, I was at one of my best friend’s weddings. The bride, my friend, is diabetic and forgot her insulin when we went to the church, so technically, diabetes is the villain of this story. No problem. I volunteered to go back to her house to pick it up. I like a mission. Me against diabetes. After a morning of bridal stuff, my adrenal glands were more than happy to kick some dust off.

The bride says the back door is unlocked, so I dash to her house, drifting the corners (in my mind), finding the apex in the road. The back door is not unlocked. No doors are opened, but I am NOT taking the L on this. All of us bridesmaids had gotten ready at her house earlier, and one of the other bridesmaids was leaning out her window on the second floor at the time.

I gaze up at her window, praying that it’s still unlocked. I know this house. I went to high school with the bride, snuck out of that window onto the roof, and clambered down the tree beside the house many times. Only this time, I am in a strapless, tight, mermaid-style dress. Driving a stick in this constricting skirt was challenge enough. There is no way on God’s green Earth that I can climb a tree.

It’s barely above freezing, but this is a DefCon 2 situation. I’m in the backyard, and there is only one house that can see me. I accept the crazy-low odds that the grandparents that live next door will notice me. Decidedly incorrect assumption. Because apparently, Gramps has assigned himself the position of overwatch. I kick off my heels, sling off my jacket, and toss the Morticia Addams-style bridesmaid dress over the fence.

I pat my old friend, the tree, and begin to climb. I’m sure I sloth-climbed it, but the adrenaline pulsing through my veins has me convinced that I ninja warriored it. The window is unlocked **Oorah**! Once I open it, I ungracefully fall into the room from the roof. I don’t care because the distinctly male movie announcer voice in my head is sexily broadcasting the trailer for the movie I’m acting out.

The crowd cheers when my icicle toes hit the hardwood floors. The room looks like a girl’s purse exploded. Curlers, hairdryers, make-up bags, and clothes cover every square inch of the carpet. I super kung fu hop over the piles to the dresser where she said her insulin bag would be. It’s not there. I look through the piles, shaking like a scared dog from the cold.

Nope. To the bathroom. Nope. A massive rock drops into my stomach when I can’t find her insulin. The clock is ticking. I launch down the stairs, two at a time, and run through the house as my eyes scan every surface. I find it on the kitchen counter, a full floor away from where she thought she left it. Booyow! I’m back in the game. I pump my arm and grab the bag.

I make sure I can lock the kitchen door from the inside. I mentally check—yep, I left all of my stuff outside. I step into the garage, shutting the door behind me. As I’m jiggling the locked doorknob, I hear the Woop Woop of a patrol. I slowly turn and do some weird half raise of my hands. There are two…TWO officers in the driveway.

All official and stern-looking. In a split second, I flash on images. I’m in the back of the car, handcuffed, search warrants are getting issued. I see the courtroom, a stern judge, and an unforgiving jury. In a moment of catastrophic cognitive dissonance, I swear I heard my brain misfire. The only thing that zaps me back to reality is that, I kid you not, my chest is frozen.

I’m going to have the pleasure of explaining this to the officers. I could have vaporized on the spot from the humiliation as the officers approach me. I don’t even know what I said. I virtually shoved the bag of insulin at the older officer and vomited out the preposterous details of this Texas-sized oof that landed me in my skivvies, coming out of a house that I technically broke into.

They try to keep a straight face, but then I start to laugh. It begins as a small embarrassed chuckle, but then it takes on a life of its own, commandeering all of my self-control and flinging it into the icy wind with the ashes of my dignity. I howl. Tears run down my face and I shoot inhuman sounds at them. I can make no sound other than drawn-out vowels.

God, it’s embarrassing. They are trying to ask me questions, and instead, they get Mutley the dog. All I can do is wheeze, or tear and shake from the cold. Finally, I beg them to let me put my clothes on. One gallantly swings his arm to tell me to proceed to the backyard to recover my assortment of clothing cringingly clinging to the fence.

They are gentlemen about it as I jump and shimmy into this contraption of a bridesmaid’s dress. They ask me if there is anyone that I can call from the family to confirm the story. I call the bride. She doesn’t pick up. I call the bride’s mom. She doesn’t pick up. I call the love of my life. He picks up on the first ring. God, I love that man. He doesn’t know why I left the church but immediately goes into solve-this-fast mode.

He gets the bride’s dad. It gets sorted. My guy is waiting in the parking lot when I pull up. Panic rolls across his face when he sees me, thinking I have been crying. I laugh the rest of my make-up off with him when I tell him the story. We’re getting married soon, and I think the bride should have to perform a commensurate task of climbing a tree in freezing weather in her underwear.

I’m definitely taking suggestions. This all happened in a decently small town. This story has ripped through the gossip mill like Taco Bell through the colon. My oldest brother is apparently friends with the “young” officer that I could never make myself look in the eye. Yep, never living this down, and I’m never more grateful to have moved away.

I’ve been living in this house for the past 11 years. In my bedroom, there’s a ceiling fan that I always have on to try and make my room colder. My room has always been insanely hot compared to the rest of the house and I never understood why. Flash forward to today when I’m talking to a friend that said they found out their fan can switch directions to heat the room in the winter. I immediately realized my screw-up.

When I got home I took a closer look at the fan, and hiding by the light is a little black switch. I hit the switch and what do you know, my room is about 10 degrees colder in minutes. I’ve been sleeping in a sauna for the past 11 years and had no idea. Every day in the summer waking up sweaty was because of a tiny black switch.

trevdogmill

So this took place maybe half an hour ago, and to be honest there's still a chance there will be some kickback for this today. I work in a call center to make ends meet currently. It’s no career but it’s a pretty nice job with some decent people and it’s easy. All we do really is facilitate switches for people looking for better deals on household stuff, usually their internet provider or supplier of gas/electricity, etc.

We have agents in the field who make sales, then call us for verification with the customer, simple right? Not today. See, usually it’s company policy not to do call-backs. Nobody wants annoying call-center calls right? So unless the customer specifically requests a scheduled call-back, we just don't do them for that reason and others.

I had a customer two days ago looking for a pretty pricey internet switch, going from some basic setup to a full TV/Phone/Internet package, the works, all the channels, anytime calls to numbers including international, 500+ mbps wifi, and it came to over £100 a month. I inform the customer, who's an impatient-sounding guy, that because of the price increase he'll need to have a quick credit check run on him and it'll mean the call takes a little longer.

The guy gets all annoyed about being busy and says he "can't waste all afternoon on the phone to some call-centre" so would it be alright if I called him after the weekend to go through it then. Seemed straightforward enough...This is pretty common, people are always up for the sale until they realize they'll need to spend more than one whole minute on the phone.

But I scheduled the call anyway and asked if there was a specific time he wanted me to call. He says any time is fine and follows with "If Emily answers, just ask her for me, she'll make sure I get the phone" and gave me a home phone number. Fast forward to today, and I make a grave error. See, the application I had from the customer had his home phone number already filled in.

It turns out this was NOT the same number he'd given me for today's call back. I called the number I thought was correct, and a woman answers. I say without thinking; "Oh hi, I'm calling for Steve to confirm his broadband switch, we spoke the other day? You must be Emily!" .....cue uncomfortable pause. She says, "This is Steve's wife, Amanda. What do you mean I ‘must’ be Emily?"

I apologized, and said, "I'm so sorry, when I spoke to him the other day he said if Emily answered to just ask for Steve?" And she just goes, “I knew it, I freaking KNEW IT" and slammed the phone down. After checking the application against the post-it note I'd jotted some info down on the other day, I realized Steve must have given me the number for where he was going to be today, and I'd instead called his unsuspecting wife at home.

Nobody's called into my workplace yet, but if they do I don't think they'll be happy.

BolsonaroIsAPunt

For those of you who don't know, a menstrual cup is a soft and flexible medical grade silicone cup that you can leave in “there” for up to 12 hours. As you can imagine, a full cup has a fair amount of blood. This is important for later. This morning at 5 am, I felt the need to go to the toilet.

I noticed that a little blood had spilled out so I knew it was about time to empty my cup. This usually doesn't happen to me, but I guess overnight I had more blood than usual. Groggy at 5 am with the lights off, I take my cup out and dump it into the toilet. It was messy, and I finally discovered that I had an accident with how much blood came out.

I chucked my cup in the sink next to me, ready to clean everything up, but at this moment, my boyfriend peeks into the bathroom to see if I'm okay and what I'm doing awake. From his perspective, he just sees blood all over my hands and in the sink. The lights were off and he just can see me from the flash on my phone. It looked like a horror scene.

He freaked out and fainted at the door. Me, being concerned without thought, jumped up to aid my boyfriend who had just collapsed on the floor. I then instantly realized I had blood all over my hands, and now all over him and the floor. He wakes up a moment later, freaking out not knowing why there is blood everywhere. I explained it to him and was left with a shocked boyfriend and a literal bloody mess I had to clean up at 5 am.

amphibbian

I’m a bank teller at one of the biggest banks in the US. This is also by far the highest-paying job I’ve ever had as I only just graduated high school. This dude who looked to be on the older side came in and he wanted to know why his debit card kept declining. So I pulled up his account history and there were literally pages upon pages of online purchases.

The kicker? Every single one of the purchases was to a cam site. I guess that he subscribed to many, many pages. But then came the crazy part. They were over the last few days directly after he got paid, so he got a bunch of money then blew it all on the site subscriptions. When I saw the account history I pretended to cough because I had the biggest urge to laugh, but I managed to hold it in.

I asked him if he had online banking or if he’d managed to look at his account history recently, and he said no. I offered to print it out for him and he said, “yes please". When I handed the print-outs to him, he just said ahhhh. And I came so close to laughing again but I managed to hold it in and be professional. Then I asked if he made those purchases and he just dejectedly said yes.

And. I. Giggled. I couldn’t help it. He gave me this weird look and left. Afterward, I had to excuse myself to the bathroom and laughed it all out of my system. I guess he called in to complain because after I came from my lunch break, my manager called me into his office and now we’ve scheduled a call for HR tomorrow. I’m probably pretty screwed…

triiiiiiiiiiiiiiina

I am a Med Student in my second year of Med School. Today we had a urine lab and for the vote of confidence, my professor decided it would be appropriate for everyone to bring their own urine. So everyone had their urine in front of them in the container, and we were doing several tests on the central table. So after doing all my tests and recording them in my journal, I thought it would be fun to mess around.

There was a pack of pregnancy strips. I don't know why the heck these things were there in the first place. But I thought literally nothing and picked up the strips and started reading the leaflet. In the meantime, everyone was done and they saw me. I don't know why we all had the same idea, but we did. All 15 students picked up a strip and mindlessly dipped it in the urine container.

As expected nearly all of them tested negative. All but one. I cannot describe the horror on that girl's face. Like it was really, really horrified. Without thinking, she took another strip and tested again. Still positive. She ran out of the lab rather VERY visibly upset. Me and the other classmates were really awkwardly staring at each other and trying to understand what happened. What a wild turn of events.

Huzzy_1999

This happened quite a while ago, but it only just caught up to me a few weeks ago. About 11 months ago, I moved into a new house as a temporary sort of thing until I could get the money together to sort something out properly. I was hoping to have already moved out by this point. On my second day after I’d finished unpacking, I decided to break the house in with a nice acid trip.

I’d brought some with me that I’d recently bought but not had the chance to use yet. Things were going well with the trip, but then it seemed to be getting really intense and I quickly realized that the tabs were much stronger than I had been told they were, and I thought being locked up in the unfamiliar house wasn’t helping me relax.

I figured the best thing to do to relax would be to go for a stroll because I was starting to get pretty overwhelmed at that point. I left the house to start my walk and my next-door neighbor happened to be just arriving at the same time. It’s a street of tightly packed terraced houses, so next door’s door is about one meter away from mine.

I’d not met anybody on my street yet and didn’t realize this was a friendly tight-knit community where people talk to each other. She said something along the lines of, “hello nice to meet you, my name’s (her name), are you new to the area?” So basically, I do this thing sometimes when people try to sell me things on the street where I pretend I can’t speak English.

I remember a few words from my GCSE French, so I just say some nonsense sentences and then people usually leave me alone. In the state I was in, this conversation seemed like it would be way too intense for me, and French just sort of came to me as my default response to the situation. My exact words were “je voudrais une boulangerie” (one of my favorite lines to use) and I shrugged my shoulders a bit with a weak smile.

She pretty much just left me to it after that and I went on my way. I did my walk and got home about two hours later. I was tripping majorly so the walk ended up taking a lot longer than it needed to. When I got home, though, my next-door neighbor was standing in her doorway talking to another neighbor who was stood outside. I tried to keep my head down because I couldn’t handle any more human interaction but she waved at me and said “bonjour".

So I instinctively returned the bonjour and got inside my house as fast as possible. When I got in, I started freaking out straight away. I realized that I’d just become French and now two of the neighbors think I can’t speak any English. The next day when I woke up, I realized the best thing I could do (as an Englishman) was just live with the lie for the rest of my short stay in this house to avoid the excruciating embarrassment of having pretended to be French for seemingly no reason.

Fast forward 10 months, I still live here, and at this point, I’m in DEEP. My life on this street is a web of lies. I’ve perfected my French accent and over the course of 10 months. French Me has learnt a decent amount of English so he can hold a disjointed conversation. I’d gotten to know the neighbors pretty well and I was the nice, quirky French guy on the street.

I didn’t let the lie slip ever, because every day and every conversation had just meant that it would be even worse if anyone ever discovered I wasn’t French. If I had friends come over (I don’t have many so it wasn’t too bad) they knew to never speak to the neighbors because of my strange situation. Most of them found it amusing, at least.

Things were going okay and I wasn’t too worried about being exposed anymore because I’d gotten so used to it. I’m not home that much and when I am I rarely leave the house for any reason, so I only had to do it for maybe five minutes a day when I was out on my street. If anything, it was a nice way to spice up my day when I got to take on my French persona.

French Me somehow had much better social skills than the real me, even if his English was a bit limited. But then there was the day it all came crashing down. I was walking to my car and saw one of the neighbors coming towards me from the opposite direction with someone else next to her I didn’t recognize. She stopped to say hi, as she normally does, and then she says to her friend “this is the guy I was telling you about".

You might be able to see where this is going. Her friend hits me with a question in French that I didn’t understand a word of, and I knew he was actually French straight away because his accent was way better than mine. I didn’t know what to do and I just froze. Every second that went past just made it so much more painful, and after way too long of a pause I just decided I had to come clean.

I told her I wasn’t actually French and couldn’t speak French and then I tried to play it off like some kind of practical joke I’d been doing on everyone. Nobody was buying that. I fast-walked straight to my car and then let the embarrassment just swallow me for a while. I haven’t spoken to any of my neighbors since, some of which I’d struck up a friendly relationship with over those 10 months.

I make sure nobody is around now whenever I leave the house, and I do a loop around the block in my car if any of my neighbors are walking down the street when I get home so that I never come into contact with them. Every time I think about the day I was discovered the embarrassment physically hurts me. I have to get out of here.

Today I messed up so bad. For context, my dad was hired to work an IT job at the school I attend around two years ago. I am a third-year college student. While he was doing this job, he became friends with some of the other IT people, and through this, he has been invited to go to a club where they listen to music and appreciate it. Some of my teachers are in this club, especially one of my favorite teachers, horrifying I know.

They have moved their meetings online through video calls, and here is where the mess-up begins. To join these calls, my dad uses the family computer in the living room. My room is adjacent to the living room and if my door is open, I can directly see the computer from my doorway. Last night, I was hanging out in my room wearing headphones and watching some Netflix.

As I am playing, I spill some salsa on my white shirt, meaning if I want to salvage the shirt I have to soak it immediately. So I get off my bed and take off my shirt. Oh, and I’m not wearing a bra. Why I took off my shirt before I left my room I don't know. The stars must have lined up for this to happen because 1. I did not know my dad was attending this video conference,

2. My dad had left the living room to go to the bathroom, and 3. I am in clear view of the video camera on the family computer in the living room and didn't think about it at all. So, I leave my room, tiddies out and all, and walk to the laundry room to get the stain out of my shirt, done easy no problem. As I walk back to my room, I get a craving for some soda and decide to go get one.

The kitchen is adjacent to the living room, right next to the family computer. I walk by the computer and into the kitchen, open the fridge, and behind me, I hear "Uhmmm?” and I immediately recognize my teacher's voice. I stop in my tracks. You know that feeling when your stomach drops and your entire body just freezes? Yeah, that.

In my panic, I was so shocked and I was just putting 2 and 2 together and just go "no" and drop to the floor. I sit on the floor, my back against the kitchen island with my knees to my chest and I have no idea what to do, there is no way I can get back into my room without going past the camera. Luckily, my dad came to the rescue and came back to the room shortly after.

This was the conversation that followed. Teacher: "Hey, I believe your daughter might be in hiding, you might want to hang up so she can safely return to her room". Dad: "You there?" (He can't see me because of how I am sitting). Me: “…...yes" Dad: "Do I want to know?" Me: "No" Dad: "Should I disconnect from the call?" Me: "Yes...can you also close your eyes until I tell you to open them?"

Dad, very confused at this point: "Ok?" My dad proceeds to turn off his camera and tells me I can leave. I then fled the scene, locked my door, and immediately put on a shirt. I called out for my dad that it was safe, and a few minutes later I could hear him laugh with everyone in the call. We have yet to discuss this. For personal reasons, I will now be expiring, thank you.

justannothermonday

This happened a couple of hours ago. I proposed to my long-term girlfriend a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately, due to the nature of my work we have to move soon and having a real wedding before then would be impossible. I got off work early today and after getting home, my fiancée asked if we could go get some paperwork notarized for the courthouse wedding that we planned to have in a month or two.

We hopped in the car with a form we printed off the county website and drove to the closest UPS. The notary checked our IDs and had us sign and then she signed, notarized the form, and said congratulations. Cool, now all we have to do is go to the courthouse on a day of our choosing to be wed. My fiancée called the courthouse afterward, double-checking to see if we needed to bring anything else.

After calling me her boyfriend, the lady on the phone corrected her by saying “husband". She then told my fiancée our state no longer requires a ceremony with the judge at the courthouse. That form is literally the marriage certificate and she is now married. Whoops! We had a honeymoon picnic at a park near a lake. I’m married, I guess?

Dirty_Toothbrushes

This was several years ago now, but I still cringe about it every now and then. When I was a freshman at university, I had a huuuge crush on one of my lecturers, who was honestly just a regular-looking, middle-aged man. I was so obsessed with him that I often stalked him online, including on LinkedIn, where I made a profile just so that I could stalk him.

I’m talking really often. It was creepy. Years later when I joined the workforce and actually started using LinkedIn seriously, I realized that people actually get notified every time someone views your profile. He used to give me odd looks when I would pass him around campus and I used to be paranoid thinking, oh god he knows that I fantasize about him bending me over his desk in his office.

But then I’d think nah nah nah, how could he possibly know that? He must’ve been thinking, hey there’s that weird girl who used to look at my LinkedIn profile daily. He even saw me at my graduation and made a very deliberate glance at me. He. Knows.

z_planet

My boyfriend suffers from pretty low self-esteem. Like it's not like he's too bothered about his looks, but he rates himself a 5 out of 10 at best. Obviously, I think he's gorgeous and handsome, but even though I've been saying this for years, he does not believe me. I came up with the stupidest plan to prove him wrong. For some reason, I decided to show him that other girls would find him attractive by making him a tinder account.

I set him up an account, make him a bio, and just start swiping right. After a day, he got around a dozen matches on tinder. After I showed this to him, I saw how he immediately became more confident and thanked me for the whole gesture. Cue my surprise when a couple of days later, I check the tinder account I had basically forgotten after 24 hours, and I could see lots of messages sent to lots of the girls my boyfriend had matched with.

I confronted him and he denied it, but I mean these messages even included promises to meet each other. Obviously, we broke up and out of curiosity I checked the tinder account again after a week and this breakup has clearly not slowed him down one bit. So now the tinder I made for him not only broke us up but is now helping him navigate his newly single life. Wow. I played myself.

Jessie5681

This happened six years ago and was deeply repressed by shame. I only remembered it in a conversation with my wife when she asked, “What was your most embarrassing moment?” So I was at a work party, and my girlfriend at the time (not currently my wife) offered to pick me up and drive me home, knowing I would get fully sloshed at the party.

She was right. On the way home, I ask her to pull into a gas station. She pulls her light blue Jeep into the parking lot, I stumble out of the Jeep, go in, and complete my purchase. I over aggressively yank open the passenger door to the blue Jeep, plop myself down on the seat, and say to my girlfriend, “I can’t wait to get home and rail you". I was not expecting what came next. Which was…to get hit in the face.

I also did not expect the loudest screaming I’ve ever heard in my life. Instinctively, I covered up my face and wondered what the heck I said wrong, as it was not uncommon for either of us to say something like that to each other. The screaming was intense and sounded very scared, so I couldn’t really make out what my girlfriend was yelling.

That is until between punch three or four, when I heard, clear as a bell, “Get the heck out of my car!” WHOA WHOA WHOA instant sobriety. I uncovered my face and looked up, and it’s finally dawning on me that although I was in a blue Jeep, it was not my girlfriend’s blue Jeep. Her identical blue Jeep was parked next to—and blocked by—this random woman’s blue Jeep.

I finally tumbled out of the car, went to my girlfriend’s car, and told her what happened. She convinced the woman not to call the authorities to tell them about some crazy guy breaking into her car and telling her he was gonna rail her. I did not sleep with anyone that night.

This happened a few years ago. I was pretty efficient at my job and faster than my colleagues at getting reports done. We mostly wrote reports that had the same calculations and said very similar things. So I created a large database, linked it to Microsoft Excel, let excel calculate everything for me, automate various sentences for me, and then exported it to Microsoft Word.

The end result? In only two hours I could push out what took my colleagues eight hours.

I decided to work only 2.5 hours a day, spending the other five doing anything I wanted to, YouTube, day trading, reading up investments, or looking at silly memes. It was awesome. One day, a colleague took a romantic interest in me. Since I had nothing better to do and was single for a while, I gave it an honest shot.

The relationship went fairly well. She was lovely, really smart but, like me, really lazy too—except that it didn't seem to bother her that her work performance was close to the bottom of the pack. In order to both impress her (and help her), I showed her what I do, and how it could be used to speed up her work. She didn't seem to take an interest at the time.

After some time I broke up with her. We tried our best but I wasn't feeling it as much as she was and I felt it would be better to end it sooner than later. She was already saying she loves me and I wasn't even close to using the word love. The breakup seemed somewhat peaceful. And then the other shoe dropped. Two days later, I got called into HR at work for a disciplinary hearing.

To my horror, I was presented with screenshots of my activity of the previous days: memes, trading activity, news reading, YouTube, and even a tally of how many hours I actually worked vs how much I didn't. Turns out, my ex shared my screen via Microsoft Skype when I went on a break, recorded all my actions for the day, and then reported me to HR.

I should've actually worked my hours in, I shouldn't have tried to impress my ex, and I definitely should have noticed my screen was being shared.

Flying_Koeksister

So I have an uncle who has always been VERY vocal about his disapproval of my sexuality. There is not a family gathering that goes by where he doesn't say something jerky about homosexuality or me specifically. Well, this weekend in between family gatherings I was looking to meet somebody. I started chatting with an older man because that's how I roll.

A lot of older guys don't like to show their faces because they aren't out, so I don't think much of it when he doesn't show me his face. We actually hit it off great and after receiving a few pictures I wish I could unsee and sending a few I wish I could take back, we decided to meet up for well... you know. So I'm at this coffee shop down the street waiting for my man to show up…and you know who walks in.

It is at this moment I realize my screw-up. I've been flirting with my gay-hating, closeted uncle. He tried to play it off like a random encounter but I wasn't letting him get away with that. After some pressing, he finally admits that he is the man I've been talking to and I told him I don't judge him as he does me. He apologized for the hurtful things he's said to me over the years. OH, but it got awful real quick.

He kept talking with me like he was still INTERESTED and I had to make it clear that was NOT going to happen. I had to get up and walk out and after multiple texts from him, I had to go ahead and block his number. I can't believe this guy had the nerve to judge me and treat me as less of a human being all these years when he's a total creep and a massive hypocrite. Always get a face picture, people.

gaythroowaway

So last Thursday night, I saw everyone tagging their stepdads in this Budweiser commercial. Without watching it, I sent it to my stepdad. About an hour later, my stepdad and mom call me and ask if I’m hinting at something. My stepdad is like, I know you had intent. I’m like HUH??? Then it hits me. IN THE COMMERCIAL THE ADULT CHILDREN ARE ASKING THEIR STEPDADS TO ADOPT THEM.

So he starts crying, thinking I want this. Now I can’t tell him that I didn’t mean to. Friday he squeezed me so tight and said he wants me to take his name and make it official. All I can think is wow, that sounds like a huge hassle. But I can never say anything about it being an accident. So now I’m being adopted and changing my name.  I’m 31!

crafteequeen

This morning, I decided to surprise my girlfriend with a proposal in bed. Not the most original or romantic approach, I know. Initially, the plan was to pop the question over dinner last night, but alas, the build-up towards the big moment got the better of me. However, today I woke up determined to do what needed to be done.

So, there I was, on one knee next to my girlfriend's side of the bed, waiting for her to open her eyes and see me holding the ring. The moment I attempted to wake her up she groaned and rolled over, leaving me with nothing to look at but the back of her head. My heart was beating hard enough to hear. I leaned over my girlfriend and gently tapped her on the shoulder.

Instead of waking up like a normal person, she hissed in her sleep like a vampire before elbowing me in the face. I stumbled back and dropped the ring. My girlfriend woke up during the commotion and the first thing she saw was me bleeding from my nose. Not gonna lie, when she rushed over to comfort me, I flinched. The hissing thing she did scared the heck out of me.

After all the drama calmed down, I managed to recover the ring without her noticing. Speaking of recovery, my nose still hurts. Tonight I'll try again. This time I'll make sure to propose while my girlfriend is wide awake and still human.

UnknownGuestUser

Right off the bat, I want to say that I am in no way shape or form making light of suicide. This was not a prank gone wrong, or something I did on purpose, but rather a very unfortunate series of usually perfectly benign activities that led to me accidentally terrifying and mortifying my wife. This happened a couple of weeks ago. I tripped and sprained my ankle.

It's been bothering me enough that I've been taking Epsom salt baths in the evenings after work. In addition to helping with the sprain and swelling, I also find it incredibly relaxing. Say what you want about a grown man taking a bath, I enjoy a good soak. I also deal with a condition called angiokeratoma. It's basically blood vessels that have expanded and cause a few small (albeit slightly unsightly) dark spots in a rather sensitive area.

I call them old man spots. They're harmless, and most of the time I don't even notice, BUT every once in a while...I'll irritate one of these small bumps and it bleeds a ton. Additionally, it takes FOREVERRR to get the bleeding to stop. It’s not like I can elevate my balls, let alone put a band-aid on. Well, on the day in question, I get a text from my wife that she's going to be working late.

So I get home and decide to soak my ankle and enjoy a little peace and quiet. It's not really important how I did it, but I ended up nicking one of those spots. After cursing a reasonable amount, I start the lengthy ritual of holding toilet paper against it and checking every so often to see if it's stopped. Even after the bleeding stops I have to be very careful for the next few minutes to not get it started again, almost like scratching off a very fresh scab.

I finally get it stopped and a short time later proceed with my bath. I put on my headphones, closed my eyes and relax. I wasn't asleep but I was really zoned out and relaxed...until I was snapped out of it by my wife screaming in absolute terror. I've never ever, ever heard her or anyone scream like that. It scared the living daylights out of me, and I jolted awake and nearly flew out of the tub.

I shouted "HONEY? WHAT?? She didn't answer me. She was in a heap on the floor, bawling. It took me a second to figure out what was going on before shouting "Jesus Christ!” I could see what it must look like to her. I had apparently NOT stopped the bleeding as well as I thought I had, and my wife walked in on me eyes closed, slouched over in a bathtub full of very bloody water.

It took me a long time to calm her down, and I don't think that's something you just get over. Hopefully one day we can laugh about it, but it won't be any time soon.

burn320948

This happened two years ago on this day, which will make sense a little further down the road. In 2016, I started using Tinder for the first time after a bad breakup. I had met a few people but nothing had ever really panned out beyond a few hook-ups. My profile was filled with some stuff along the lines of “not the love of your life. Perfect date for when you want your family to question your life choices".

It was mostly filled with pictures of me hanging out with my dog. Fast forward to March of 2017 and I matched with someone. After a couple of one-off messages that don’t really go anywhere, we ended up talking one night and stayed up until 5 am messaging each other back and forth. A couple of nights after that, we decided to meet up and she invites me over to her house for dinner.

This all sounds great. Except for two problems. The first problem is that I have a beard in all of my photos. And even calling it a beard is a bit of a stretch. My facial hair is like if someone shaved a Guinea pig and then superglued it to my face. If I grow it out too long, it looks like a tuft of pubes growing out from a chin. Wiry and sparse. It’s not good.

For six years, I’d still kept a reasonably trimmed beard length because it was better than nothing and actually looks full when it's shorter. But for some reason, the week before we started talking, I had decided to shave my face for the first time in years. I just wanted to know what it looked like. The answer? Not. Good. At this point, I was 27 but still looked young for my age.

Shave the beard off and I look like a 12-year-old with a bunch of tattoos and insomnia. Really awkward. So I pulled up to her house and text before I got out of my car to say, “Hey, by the way, if it looks like a 15-year-old is knocking on your door, it’s just me". Luckily, she's not as turned off by my baby face as I expected. All good so far.

I went inside and we end up hanging out all night. She cooked a great dinner and we decided to watch a movie. She was blown away by the fact that I’d never seen Labyrinth and demanded we watch it. We ended up watching three movies that night. For Labyrinth, I was about five feet away on the couch.

For Young Frankenstein, we were sitting next to each other. For the third movie (which I can’t remember for the life of me) we were cuddling. And this is where the second problem comes in. After my breakup in 2016 and realizing I’d been battling lifelong depression, I started taking antidepressants. One of the SUPER FUN side effects of SSRIs is that it can be really hard to climax.

Like, try as you might, nothin. Dust. Moths. Nothin. Thanks, Big Pharma. And so commenced the next two hours of the worst intimacy either of us had ever had. Two hours of awkwardly grinding and sweating, stopping to try new positions, and statements like “I might have a heart attack. Why are my ears ringing so loudly?" and “What about this position?”

“OUCH!” “Oh my god, I need a towel. So. Much. Sweat. I can't see". We were in the basement on a large three-piece couch. You know, one of those ones with seams to connect the pieces. Well, at one point I tried to plant my toes in the seam to get some traction and ended up kicking the couch piece away from us and sending us both flying to the floor.

A bruised butt. A lot of questioning of whether this was a good idea. If this had been a movie or a romance novel, a two-hour binge sounds like a dream come true. Well, let me tell you that sucks if you haven’t done any cardio in your life. And Jesus Christ the sweat. So slippery and gross. This wasn't “golden light streaming through the windows and we're both glistening” sweat.

This is bog monsters come to life sweat. This is Ace Ventura crawling out of the rhino sweat. At one point, our chests become suction-cupped together. I could have run and slid on my belly down a hallway like a naked nightmare slip-n-slide if my heart hadn’t felt like it was going to explode. And the chafing.  No matter how ready either of y’all are when you start out, after two hours, it’s gonna wear off.

We both felt like we’d gone at our bits with sandpaper. Not to mention that she just spent two hours with a baby-faced human who couldn't make her come and who might die of cardiac arrest in her basement. This was no climactic movie scene. This was a John Waters film come to life. Well, after two hours and nothing, we called it a night.

It's obviously not gonna happen for either of us and we figured we might as well quit while we're ahead and no one has perished. We went outside for a smoke and at this point it’s about 6 am. I’m wearing only a hoodie and briefs and she’s only in a bathrobe. We sit down and the next thing we know, her mom came out too; she had just moved back home before finding a new place.

So not only did we both just have the worst encounter of our lives, but now I get to meet her mom for the first time! GREAT! I'm definitely not half-naked covered in sweat, and sitting next to her half-naked adult daughter. Somehow, the mom is completely unfazed by this whole encounter and actually starts going on about her most recent Tinder match with a self-proclaimed oil baron.

Life is weird. Well, the reason I am posting this now is because this is our two-year anniversary and we’re engaged to be married on the same date next year. Our bedroom life is FAR better now and we both look back in humor/horror on that night and wonder why the heck we decided to keep hanging out afterward. I mean, now we know, but our past selves must have been really, really desperate.

This happened a year ago, but I just remembered this horrific event and the poor victims that never fully recovered. I was set to go on a 10-hour road trip through the interior of British Columbia, and with me were two of my cousins and my uncle. However, before our 6 am start, I decided the night before to wolf down these chocolate chip Fiber One granola bars that had something like 75% of your daily fiber intake.

These things were crazy good and I ended up eating an entire 8-pack of them in one sitting. After that I went to sleep and woke up in the morning to a bloated stomach but felt fine otherwise. 45 minutes into our ride, the cramps began. My stomach grew larger and larger and I ended up needing to remove my seatbelt, and undoing the zipper on my jeans to give it more space to expand.

My cousin next to me couldn't believe what he was seeing, he said it was like the blueberry scene from Willy Wonka. I couldn't hold the gas in any longer and asked my uncle to pull over. He did and I struggled to get out of my seat as every move was agony. I walked to the back of the car and let her rip. A thunderous roar escaped me like a jerk racing his Harley Davidson around the block on a Sunday morning.

The gas hissed out of me as my stomach grumbled, shuffled, and shuttered. I am not exaggerating when I tell you that this lasted AT LEAST 15 seconds. Little did I know that I had just broken the seal. I would proceed to experience uncontrollable and obnoxiously powerful farts that lasted 10-15 seconds on average, with only a brief period of relief between them.

The fact of the matter was that I was now experiencing major flatulence every two to three minutes, and we couldn't stop the car every few minutes to escape the smell, so we decided to roll all the windows down and allow me to let loose whenever I needed. However, we had no idea that this would become a much longer ordeal than we initially thought.

Truth be told, I couldn't stop for nearly seven hours, and each one just HAD to be more epic than the last. By the time hour two rolled around, my butt was sore and aching, and my insides feeling like shards of glass were ripping through me. And the smell had become so overpowering that we had to stop at a gas station and buy as many air fresheners as we could.

I took one of the air fresheners and sat on it in the hopes that each toot will be freshened up. Instead, it just smelt like rotten eggs and pine. My cousins and uncle resorted to using Vicks around their noses to stop the smell. The pain from constant tooting brought me to tears at one point and I realized how ridiculous it must look to see a grown man crying while tooting non-stop. At hour four disaster struck.

I stopped tooting, but I was still swelling with gas. I knew I was plugged up and if I didn't do something soon, the pain was going to become unbearable. We stopped at a Coffee Shop and I ran in to use the bathroom. I gingerly sat down on the toilet and gently pushed but the pain was too much. I resorted to pushing on my stomach to help things along and suddenly I felt this wave of pressure hit me that made my butt cheeks break into a cold sweat and start to tingle.

Suddenly, and without warning, poop rocketed out of me like a cannonball and plastered itself to the back of the toilet bowl. With that came this tidal wave of what could only be described as peanut butter oatmeal. I could feel the muscles in my abdomen squeezing my intestines so hard that it actually hurt. It was like when you are throwing up and you can feel your stomach violently squish itself to push everything out, but instead, it was my butt that was throwing up.

Once everything was pushed out, it was topped off by the longest toot in my short, pathetic existence, one that I could never accurately give the length other than say well over 20 seconds, and that I could literally feel and see my stomach shrinking as it happened. I destroyed that poor coffee shop bathroom and I frequently wonder what happened to the person who wandered in after me.

From that point forward, the toots were just as frequent and long, but they felt cleaner and less restricted. It began to feel like I was airing my colon out, blowing out all the accumulated dust. My ribs and butt ached horribly, but I was starting to feel euphoria wash over me that I assumed was just the endorphin rush my body was giving as a way to protect my fragile mind from this ridiculous ordeal.

However, the smell permeated my clothes and the seat behind me. The family had gone through almost an entire container of Vicks, and they appeared to have survived the ordeal too but I could tell that a part of them was broken that could never be fixed. It was as though they felt violated by having to breathe in my butt breath for seven hours, and I knew my uncle was upset that his car's interior would never smell the same again, as it already smelled like hot garbage by this point.

We eventually arrived without further incident, and we refused to speak of this event. Things were never really the same between all of us after that, and I have a feeling none of us will ever touch eggs ever again. They already ate enough of my farts, they don't need a reminder. I should have never eaten that much fiber. I had no idea it was capable of that.

Baba_dook_dook_dook

This happened Sunday night. My oldest son is in the Marines and hasn’t been home in almost a year. He took 10 days' leave so he could come visit. At first, we did not tell his mother in case the leave got denied. When it was approved, he just decided he would fly in and surprise her. I tell the wife I am going over to a friend’s to watch the game as a cover to pick him up.

I get to the airport and actually watched the second quarter of the game waiting for his plane. He gets off the plane and we talk for a bit waiting for the luggage and then he goes to change into his dress blues. Now the whole time I’ve been texting my wife saying I was bored, the game sucked, and I wasn’t going to stay much longer.

We discuss the plan on how to surprise his mother on the drive back to the house. We go back and forth from having her open the front door to see him on the porch to just having him walk into the house. We settle on him waiting a few minutes after I go inside, as I wanted to get the whole thing on video. I walk in and the house is quiet. No one in the living room.

A little odd but it is after 9 pm, maybe by some miracle my other kids are actually already in bed? Alarm bells start going off in my head when I open our bedroom door and the first thing I notice is the flickering candlelight. What I did not know was that the entire time I was gone, my wife set in motion her own plan for the evening.

She got the kids settled by letting them keep their tablets after bedtime. Took a nice hot bath, re-did her makeup, and when I told her I was on the way home lit the room with candles and put on her lingerie. So there I was, staring at my wife giving me her best come hither look, with our 21-year-old son outside not 30 feet away, waiting to surprise her.

A handful of reactions to this scene are acceptable. Pulling out your cell phone and sending a text message is not one, but I had to do it. The text told my son to stay outside. I had solved the most immediate problem of our son walking in and seeing his mother like that, but I was drawing a blank on how to fix everything else. So my brain latched onto what has to be the most stupid plan I have ever had in life.

I told my wife to get dressed because she would never believe what the neighbors were doing and she had to come to see. The look of confusion on her face was priceless. It took me five minutes to convince her to put on some sweat pants and a sweatshirt to go to the front door. Finally, after dodging all her questions and getting her to open the door, there was our son in his dress uniform.

She was ecstatic. The noise brought all the kids out and everyone was happy. Except, well, me. The wife excused herself after a few minutes and took off the lingerie under her sweats before anyone noticed. It goes without saying I did not get any action that night. Also in trying to salvage the whole surprise, I forgot to video it for my free internet points.

throwaway5438957

I’m a third-year medical student on my gynecology clerkship “assisting” on a laparoscopic hysterectomy. In this procedure, the abdomen is pressurized while the surgeon inserts several instruments to remove the uterus. If you can imagine, maintaining pressure in the abdomen after you remove the uterus is difficult because, you know, air just freely escapes.

As this was my first laparoscopic surgery, I soon found out that my role was to place a rubber stopper up there to prevent air from escaping. Like many of you, I had no idea this role even existed, but I quickly accepted my new job as sealer. I approached from the bottom of the table and stuck my hands underneath the sterile drapes that covered the legs.

I placed the rubber ball in and stood there trying not to make eye contact with anyone in the room. After several minutes, the pressure in the abdomen continued to decrease. The attending physician, frustrated at this point, walked around next to me, ripped the drape in half to reveal the pelvic area, and said, “Do you even know where it is? Get that stopper out of her butt!”

Thank you for reading. I’ll go bury myself now.

nafearious

One of my favorite video game series of all time is the Yakuza series. The narrative, gameplay, everything about it I absolutely love. I bought Yakuza 0 a few days back, as it is the only game in the series I have not yet played. I bought it off the PSN Store for $9.99! I'm absolutely in love with it. So yesterday I was having a conversation with one of my online gaming friends.

I was telling him all about the game, how much I loved it, etc. Well, he expressed interest in wanting to play it too! Money is pretty tight for him, so I offered to PayPal him the money to get it. He did his usual polite, "Oh no it's fine I'm sure I have some extra money I can use to get it". Well, I PayPal'd him the money for the game plus a little extra for food or whatever he wanted.

PayPal gives you the option to send a message along with the money. Me, in my infinite wisdom, sent the message "SHUT UP AND TAKE MY YAKUZA MONEY". Apparently, when sending money to someone online, using the name of a syndicate is not the best thing to do. PayPal does not send the money and tells me my payment is pending while it undergoes an investigation, and that the process will take no more than 72 hours.

Fast forward to tonight, I get an email from PayPal saying that they have now restricted my access to my account and that I have to go through steps to resolve the process. I follow their link, and there is the payment in question. In the text box provided, I then have to explain to them the context of the message and that the money is for a game called Yakuza 0, and that I, a US Citizen who does not have a passport and has never been out of the country, am not a member of the Japanese Yakuza.

I am now waiting for PayPal to review my written statement and hopefully, this is all resolved.

ThorOnADyna

This is a true thing that happened and is happening, and now there is more to it because I actually got broken up with over it. With all that is going on, my girlfriend and I had stocked up on supplies, including some canned goods. I ordered a few weeks ago 30 cans of beans. 10 are black beans, 10 are kidney beans, and 10 are pink beans.

Also, I ordered 15 cans of chickpeas. I thought this is a reasonable amount of beans and chickpeas to have every now and then and would last for quite some time. However earlier this week, I opened the cabinet because I wanted to make a vegetarian chili using two cans of beans, but all of the beans were gone. What the heck? I asked my girlfriend and she told me she buried all of the beans in the woods.

At first I thought she was joking, but she explained, no, she had buried the beans in the woods. What? I asked her to explain and she told me she was afraid that "if things get bad" we might have to worry about "looters or whatever" and that the beans would be in danger. I said I thought this was completely ridiculous and unlikely. She became angry at me and said she "is protecting our beans".

According to her logic, the beans are safely buried in the woods behind our apartment complex, and if we ever need some beans she will go to the "stash" and dig up a can or two, but would prefer if we save them all for "if things get worse". I said why only bury the beans, why not bury our more valuable items? She said the canned food was most valuable for long-term means, and that since we get fresh food in our online grocery deliveries, it would make sense to continue to stockpile beans.

She intends to go bury more beans in the woods every week. This was too insane for me and I got very upset. I demanded to know where the beans were buried, and she refused to tell me. She said if I knew she was afraid I'd dig them up, I said darn right I would. She said, "I will never jeopardize the beans". The following day I tried to put my foot down.

I'm not usually a foot downer but there are rare issues where compromise is out of the question, and I foolishly decided this was one of those issues. I demanded to know where the beans were buried and I told her if she was going to bury beans I paid for in the woods that I would move out. We fought about it and I kept insisting. In hindsight, I should have just let it go and created my own hidden stash of beans in the apartment.

This would have given her time to maybe cool down about this bean burying scenario, but I blew it all out of proportion. Yeah, it's weird to bury beans in the woods but why did I have to press it? What's the harm at the end of the day? In the grand scheme of things? But I kept demanding her to take me to the beans, or at least draw a map or something, and finally, she BROKE UP WITH ME.

Over the beans. I have lost the love of my life because I couldn't let the beans go. I am in disbelief. She moved out. Not only am I heartbroken but I am now paying full rent instead of 50% which is a huge financial issue for me.

Permalink

To start the semester, I ended up missing the first week of school because I was on a last-minute trip with my friends. It was completely unplanned and actually, a few of my friends who had graduated helped chip in to buy my ticket since I technically couldn't afford to go. Anyway, I came into class a week late and it is scheduled for Tuesdays and Thursdays at 7-8:15 pm.

On both those days, I have classes all day until 2 pm, so I usually go home to eat and grab a snooze before the night class. So my first Tuesday home I ended up oversleeping and turning up to class five minutes late. As part of my degree, I have to take microeconomics which all I knew about it previously was that it's about the economy and money.

When I get to class, they're talking about supply and demand curves shifting so I just take a spot in the back, not thinking twice. This goes on for 3.5 weeks. I came to class. Took notes. Then did the weekly assignments. On the course syllabus, it had a date for the midterm, which is February 1st. So the class before the exam, January 30th, I decided to stick around after class and ask some questions.

Now I was doing all the assignments and thought the course material was relevant but it was ALL theory-based while the class was heavily math-based. I understood what was going on but there was obviously some disconnect. I explained my concerns about the midterm to the professor and the conversation went like this. Prof: "What do you mean theory? All the assignments are filled with math. Are you using launchpad?"

Me: "No the assignments are online. Like the website we bought the textbook from. What’s launchpad?" Prof: "Pardon? I don't have a textbook for this course". Me: "It literally says in the syllabus, look!" Shows syllabus Prof: "Wait, what class are you supposed to be in?" Me: "What do you mean...? This is ECON 202 right?" Prof starts laughing... Prof: "Haha this is ECON 301, you have to take 202 before you take my class. This is a new one, I've never experienced this before".

Me: "Well this is awkward. I better go see my actual teacher and explain". I then just grabbed my stuff real quick and sprinted through campus to go explain the situation to the other guy. I caught him just as he was leaving the lecture and explained my predicament. I even showed him my ECON 301 notes to prove I couldn't make this up.

He just laughed and said the same thing, "This is a new one for me". Turns out all the assignments for both classes were due the same day. Same with the midterms. They were relevant because it was obviously a level above what I was supposed to be doing and the only thing I got wrong was the building code. They were both classroom 112, just different buildings.

So basically, I just spent the last two nights forgetting everything from this class all month and learning the real material. Wish me luck!

I am currently stuck in my girlfriend’s room while she and her family are having dinner downstairs. I haven't eaten since morning nor showered and I need to take a poop. Back story to this morning, I haven't seen my girlfriend for over a month plus. I woke up to my girlfriend's call around 11 am saying that her parents went out to get something.

I thought okay I'll come over, return her camera I borrowed, and maybe we can sit in my car around her neighborhood and hang out awhile. It was a little rushed as her parents just left her house as I left mine. I'm about 20 minutes away from her place. She assured me her parents will be out for at least an hour and a half as they need to get lunch.

I drove as fast as I could and picked her up from the front of the house and we drove to the park nearby to hang out. After a couple of minutes, I ask if she brought some water as I asked her about it before I came and she said no. She said why don't you come in and take some water since her parents will still be far away. I said yes (obviously) and went in, drank water, and we sat on the couch for a while to cuddle.

I was a little paranoid but I haven't seen her in a long time so I needed it. About 10 minutes in, we hear a car outside her house—and it was her parents. They were only out for 40 minutes. We started to panic. Luckily, I parked away from her house and took my slippers in. I contemplated just owning up and lying that I needed to use the toilet but her mom is really difficult.

She would assume my girlfriend was lying and get her trouble and I haven't even met her parents officially as her boyfriend yet. If you are from an Asian family or have heard of Asian parents being strict about relationships, it's true. We both ran up to her room and I hid behind her door. Mind you, her room is really small. It’s about the size of two single beds.

I can't hide under the bed as she has to keep her door open and you can see straight under her bed from the stairs. The only place possible is behind her door. I stood there frozen as she went down to greet her parents. I could hear them coming in as I hugged the wall as tightly as I could. She came back up freaking out, but I said it's okay. Let's just try to formulate a plan.

She said okay and she went down to eat with them first. I then had to stay as silent a possible with no fan or air-conditioning so I sweated my butt off. At 1 pm, she comes back up and we try to listen to whether her parents are coming up or not. They usually sit downstairs after lunch and nap, which they did. This gave me a little bit of relief as I could sit down on the floor.

The space in between the door and her table is super tiny, which is uncomfortable, but I'm not complaining. 2 pm. Her dad comes up to shower and her door is right next to the bath area. I can hear the water rushing. But good news, my girlfriend is in the room doing her work so she can look out. It’s weird as I'm just standing up behind the door and looking at her look back at me.

After his shower, her dad leaves to go to his store, which leaves her mom downstairs. She gets on a long phone call, which gives me a bit of room to relax. My girlfriend and I make out a bit to calm our nerves and I gotta say it did help. For the next three hours, her mom stays downstairs and we try to formulate a plan, but everything involves the timing of her parents which is impossible.

Can't jump out the window cause it's grilled and she doesn't have the key...Around 5:30 pm-ish, her dad comes home and almost COMES INTO HER ROOM. He asks her to print something and she quickly walks to her door to stop him from coming in. I hear his voice right outside the door. Thankfully, he walks away and goes down to watch TV.

And I swear to god the universe wants us to suffer because right after that her mom comes upstairs and hangs about the common area. My girlfriend had recorded a zoom meeting so she tells her mom she has a meeting and plays it, closing the door giving my legs much needed rest and I sit. 7 pm, her mom calls her from downstairs that it's time to eat.

And that's where we are at now. It’s currently 9 pm at this sentence and I can hear her family talking to each other. She has to turn off the lights and fan and air-conditioning so I'm freaking drenched in my sweat in the dark. I'm sitting down but I've got pins and needles in my feet now. I would stand up but because the area is so tight, I don't want to risk any noise.

Oh, remember how I haven't eaten and need to poop. That's attacking now. My stomach is growling. I'm so scared to be caught because my parents are gonna slaughter me, too. My girlfriend and I will discuss our plans for me to escape when she comes up...

sugohfu

I’m currently sitting on the toilet playing chess because I don’t want to show my face until it loses three shades of red...I was going through some project details with one of the engineers at my work before she left to go to a job site. We wrap up, she gets up to leave, and I attempt to say, “go spread your wings". But right as the word “go” comes out of my mouth, my brain decides now would be a terrific time to switch things up.

I go to say “go stretch your legs”...And before I knew it I was having an out-of-body experience watching myself tell her to “go spread your legs". I will never forget the look on her face. I immediately told her what the heck brain just did for that combination of words to come out of my mouth as she is on her way to a worksite full of men.

Thankfully she believed me (seemingly) and laughed it off. Doesn’t make it any less embarrassing, unfortunately.

bac0ndip

My dad grew up with his family slamming him for not being his father's biological son. The rumor was that grandma had an affair with a man named "Tillery" when she got pregnant with my father. My grandparents always denied it, but the rumors have always hung around my dad. Grandpa was a Native American man, grandma was white, and dad was their only supposedly biological child; his siblings were adopted.

My dad was blonde as a kid but got darker as he's aged, and he looks like grandpa, so because we all believed 100% that he was biologically grandpa's son, we decided to finally set his fears aside and prove it with a DNA kit for his 61st birthday. The kit came back today after nervously waiting several weeks, and there's a lot of matched relatives, with the name "Tillery". No native American DNA results at all, no one with his father’s family's name.

He's crushed and I feel awful. This has to be the worst thing I've ever done to my dad.

ButtsNPartsNPoops

This morning I woke up with my girlfriend after a night of drinking together. I say good morning to her and her response was, “Do you remember what happened last night?” And I’m like, “Oh yeah that was such a fun night!” Her answer changed my mood instantly. She’s like, “Well, I’m sure you don’t remember peeing on me then".

I am just so taken aback by this. I thought maybe I had peed the bed or something, but no, it was worse. Apparently, and I have no recollection of this at all, she got up to go use the bathroom and like a minute later I stumble in there and she’s sitting on the toilet and I just pee like she wasn’t even there. Obviously, this is a surprise to her, I mean who expects that!?

But she said that she just took care of me and got me back to bed. Luckily she’s really great and we can just laugh about it. What a way to wake up, though.

Apprehensive_Abroad3

Yesterday, I got onto a subway train around rush hour so it was quite packed. I squeeze in with my brother and find a spot to stand. I notice a little dude (about six or seven years old) in the seat next to where I'm standing squish up against his mother to make room for me. He looks up and smiles, his eyes inviting me to sit down next to him.

As a larger human, 6'3" and almost 200 lbs, the tiny half a seat that he had opened up wouldn't quite fit me. Still, I couldn't let his kindness go unnoticed so I decided to half-cheek it, to be sure he understood what he did was really nice. As I sat down, I thanked him for making room and told him I really appreciated the gesture. We high-fived, and in hindsight, I should have ended it there.

I noticed he had his backpack with him so I asked how school was that day. He told me it was just all right. Then I asked the fatal question. "Do you have a lot of homework over the weekend?" He let me, the stranger, know he had a big math packet that he had to get done. Unfortunately for him, his mother was listening to our conversation.

Her eyes lit up when he told me about the packet. She yelled "Oooo boy!! You told me you finished that yesterday! Guess who doesn't get to play his video games this weekend?! You, ya little liar!!!" His head sunk into his chest, as did mine right along with him. A few stops later his mom dragged him off the train by his little jacket.

He looked back at me as they departed, a look that said "Bro, I thought we were cool, how could you do me like that???" His look of betrayal is going to haunt me for days. Hang in there little buddy! One weekend may seem like an eternity at your age, but time flies!

Danzic_LOL

I was on my first date with a lovely girl named Michelle. I took her to what people my age consider a pretty nice restaurant for a date. She didn't know where we were going ahead of time. A few minutes after we ordered, her face turned bright red and she told me to hide. I was confused, and about to ask why, when an older couple approached our table and introduced themselves as Michelle's parents.

After some brief, uncomfortable small-talk, her father, who had already casually mentioned twice that he was an officer, each time placing his hand where his holster would be, asked me a question I didn't know people still asked. "What are your intentions with my daughter?" For the record, my intentions were simply to get to know her and maybe start a relationship with her.

Unfortunately, the question caught me off-guard and I tend to (read: unfailingly) use humor as a defense mechanism. So I replied: "I don't know, officer. I have Intention Deficit Disorder". Michelle and her mother both burst into laughter, but her father was not amused. He dragged my date away, never to be heard from (by me) again.

Brainsonastick

I used to be acquainted with another girl my age; we were both about 17 at the time. It was a typical friend-of-a-friend situation. I am bi and thought she was really cute, but never once thought that she could possibly be into girls as well, least of all me. My self-esteem was extremely low around that age and I did all kinds of mental gymnastics to explain away all of her flirting.

I once saw her at the grocery store and she became really shy and didn't approach me (she was very shy in general) but later that day sent me a message saying something like, "I saw you at the grocery store today, you looked cute". But the absolute boldest move I completely ignored was Valentine's day when we hung out as a group with our friends and she walked over to me and gifted me a hint so broad, I can't explain how the wrapper didn't burst.

She had made me handmade heart-shaped chocolates and put them in a small transparent gift bag. There was only one other thing in the gift bag, the only thing in the universe that could be gayer than heart-shaped chocolate from one gal to another: a little paper card with some kind words on it, and printed on the other side was a picture (a manga panel from the looks of it) of two girls holding hands.

And my only thought was: "Wow, what a nice girl! I have to be really careful not to develop a huge crush on her since she couldn't possibly be into me! She probably felt bad for me on Valentine's day because I'm so single and unfortunate-looking. Those straight girls really lead you on without meaning to!" Today I looked back on this situation with horrified realization, as Facebook told me she got married recently. To a woman.

MirrorverseSpock

So my dad has had this didgeridoo in the house since he visited his sister in Australia 10+ years ago. My parents wanted to go out for a walk but I decided I’d eaten too much cheese and couldn’t be bothered. While they were out, the Internet went down so I was sort of wandering around, looking for something to do when I spotted the didg.

I thought to myself, in all these years I’ve never actually tried to play it. It’s more of a decoration and I barely take it in when I see it, but maybe it’s time. I pick it up and put it to my lips. I felt like I knew what I was doing and that it was similar to playing a trumpet and I wanted to play a long, loud note. I take a sharp inhale and immediately feel something hit the back of my throat.

I splutter really hard and a small white globular thing comes flying out and hits the floor. At first, I thought it was saliva and ignored it as I had a weird sensation in my throat and mouth. It felt like tingling to start with but grew into more of a tickle on the inside of my cheeks and a bit on my gums. I glance down at the white stuff on the floor…and see several baby spiders crawling out of it and in all directions.

The second I clock what’s happened I feel something tickling my top lip and hit my mouth with my hand. I have a squished spider on my lip and instantly go into panic mode. I run into the bathroom and spit repeatedly into the sink to see crushed spider bodies and some severed legs, some of which are still attached to parts of the body and are trying to drag themselves away from the drain.

I purge several times and then frantically swill my mouth out with water. I don’t think my mouth will ever feel normal again.

Snedgemaster

I'm never living this down. It's really destroyed me on an emotional and spiritual level.  The first thing you should know is that I am NOT a flirty, passionate person. I barely ever have “urges,” I rarely think about anything like that, my libido is comparable to that of a fence post’s, etc. However, I started noticing that I was becoming increasingly bitter towards things like that.

So I decided, “You know what, I'm going to try and explore that side of me, maybe bring it out a little more!” And so, I did... it. I bought two toys. Nothing extravagant, just basic, cheap little items, plus a bottle of lubricant because I work smart, not hard. Things SHOULD be fine, I think to myself. I'll order them and they'll come in a week or so.

No one's expecting any packages then, so there will be no issues and they'll hand it right off to me, none the wiser! And then that DIDN'T happen, can you believe it? No, what actually happened was worse. It also proved to me that my dad is a monstrous, monstrous man who lives to cause me pain. Unbeknownst to me, I was still under my trial of Amazon Prime.

I'd forgotten to cancel it after buying a Vulpix plush, sue me. Then the package shipped and arrived...the next day. Even this should have been fine, because no one in my family opens packages that aren't theirs except one little thing: MY package came in with my MOM’S packages. I didn't realize they were coming in that day, so I was still curled up in bed watching TV.

When I heard the delivery truck pull up, I thought, “oh cool” and then went back to my show. It just so happened that my mom ordered a lot of different parts for her car, and then she assumed the box was one of hers as well without checking the label since I hadn't mentioned ordering anything to her (obviously). According to my mom, she opened it, thought, oh, *my dad* must have bought something.

And then...she checked the label. And saw my name. Did she do the respectable thing and tape it back up with clear tape like nothing happened? Did she just hand it to me and walk away silently? No, she went to my dad. Because of course she did. According to my mom, she walked in, said, “Our daughter ordered bedroom toys and I don't know how to handle it".

My dad shot up in bed with horror. A moment later, he giggled and jumped out of bed, taking the box from her and saying, “I want to give it to her!” He walks into my room. I say hey to him and sit up to look at him. He tilts the box towards me to show its contents, and then we stare at each other in silence for several seconds before he sets it down next to me with the biggest grin on his face, and then calmly walks off.

I can't look my parents in the face anymore. I might actually have to move out because my dad won't stop making jokes.

ningensfriend

I used to play an MMO with a bunch of people I knew in real life. Out of all of them, I was the most interested in person to person, but sucked at it. One day a new guy shows up. He used to play but stopped for a few years. Everyone starts talking about how he was basically a legend, a god at one-on-ones, was one of the former top players in the game, was so inhumanly good he got mistaken for a bot, etc.

I immediately developed an awkward crush on him. He heard I was into one-on-ones and challenged me, where he promptly kicked my butt. Then he spent a lot of time condescendingly giving me tips on how to improve and said he would show me the ropes. Being a dork with a crush, I was so grateful for any attention he gave me. His idea of teaching me was basically beating me over and over again.

After a few days of this, he got bored and stopped paying attention to me. I was embarrassed that I was so bad and kept losing, so I thought if I could impress him, he would spend time in game with me again. I spent a stupid amount of time practicing on the side and researching. I'm talking like six hours on weekdays and 10+ on weekends.

I literally lost weight because I stopped snacking on the side and ate the minimum amount at mealtimes. So after like 10 months of nonstop playing, I improved a stupid crazy amount. Managed to jokingly convince him to duel…and I beat him. He thought it was a fluke and demanded a rematch. So we played again, and I beat him again.

He got so mad he changed his build to exactly counter mine, and he beat me. I was so happy because I thought he was into it, so I changed my build to counter his and beat him. And it turned into this stupid back and forth. I was having the time of my life. I thought I was showing off my improvement to a guy I liked. I learned theory-crafting, I learned how to play properly, etc.

Meanwhile, he was raging his head off on his side of the screen. After a lot of back and forth, he finally says he's done and logs off. I had no idea what happened and figured real-life things were going on. Anyways, he didn't log back on for a while and I heard from our mutual friend that he quit the game. He claimed he only came back temporarily from a break and needed to focus on real-life job stuff or something.

I did not connect that with beating him. I just thought the timing was bad and I was sad I wouldn't be able to see him around anymore. He never logged back on again. A few months later, we had another in real life hangout and he basically ignored me, then made a few pointed comments about how he didn't like girls who were as into gaming as he was.

And that girls who liked games too much were basically guys and he wasn't into guys. And that's when I finally realized. He was mad I beat him. And he literally never returned to play again. After a few more years, I quit gaming. And funnily enough, I heard from our mutual friend again that that's when he decided to start playing again.

For what it’s worth, I didn't quit the game because of him. I played for several more years after and got back into one-on-one and shot up the ranks because I went from a keyboard turning skill-clicker into someone who could actually play. Did weekly tournaments for a bit, got good enough to see the occasional pro players in my queue, and formed a little team with other people around my level.

The game itself went through a ton of bad balance patches and a ton of people left. I ultimately left because the game mode was "dying" and I realized it was making me depressed and more angry and toxic the more I played.

kitamoo

This happened on Friday and is still ongoing. I've tried to keep things as detailed as possible but vague enough so I won't be outed since I guarantee someone I know will read this eventually. I still do not know if I am the culprit, but I am 90% sure that I am. I feel like this is a fireable offense and I will step up and take it if it comes to that.

I work at a pretty sizeable software company with roughly 100-150 employees. We migrated to Gmail and other Google services about two years ago and have been relying on them and the e-mail system to do our job. It's safe to say that everyone is using Gmail or Google in one way or another. Now, our Gmail accounts are set up for our company, so everyone is connected. Keep this in mind, as it will be relevant later.

I have a friend who creates Android apps on the side. I do something similar to this, but instead, my apps revolve around cloning .apk files and restoring them, similar to a service called Titanium Backup. As a joke, every time my friend releases an app (usually paid), I buy the app and clone it with my software, and then refund it. After that, I send him an e-mail with the cloned version through Gmail with something along the lines of: "Look at this cool app I found on the store, it was completely free! Try it out!"

Just stupid stuff like that. It was a bit of an inside joke that kind of stuck for a while and was only between us. Recently he uploaded a new app and I did the same thing as usual. I was actually on the toilet at work at about 10 am or so and was doing my business in the stall on my phone. I was on my work account and bought the app and refunded and all that jazz.

I e-mailed it to him and then finished up in the bathroom and went back to work. About an hour later, before lunch, everyone was talking to each other about problems accessing their Google accounts. At the time, it didn't click with me what had happened. One of my colleagues requested help and I went to check it out. It turns out that their account was blocked by Google due to ToS violations.

Their Google Payments account was blocked as well. I thought this was insane and wondered if it happened to me and everyone else in the building, and sure enough, it did. We got banned by Google, all of us. The afternoon was pandemonium. We were all freaking out, our IT guys were trying to get a hold of Google but couldn't get in touch with anyone.

We could sign into our accounts but not do anything with them. All our work was shared with Google services. Eventually, someone realized that their non-work accounts were banned as well. It wasn't until yesterday that someone made the connection. Anyone who had their accounts as a recovery option was also caught in the ban wave.

One of the girls at work was bawling her eyes out since she couldn't access her e-mail. Anyways, we were all told to go home on Friday. I went home and looked this up myself, and I found out that this ban (sometimes on the entire account but always on the Google Payments account) happens when someone misuses their refund policy.

It bans all the accounts associated with it, and remember how I said all our work accounts were connected? Yeah...So it's been two days now and we've been chatting over Skype, no one knows what happened and the IT guys are livid along with our supervisor and boss who are angry that Google isn't helping us out. Their policy is to not share any information about what caused this and they will not reverse these actions.

The posts I've found online relating to this have had similar problems (not to this extent of course), but no one has been able to solve this type of policy breach since Google does not help them, even if it was by accident or due to some other cause...So yeah, that's that.  I'm 90% sure that I am the culprit who caused this. I do not know why Google has a scorched-earth policy when it comes to this kind of stuff, but I messed up.

kindamuckedupsorry

I was 25 years old and heading to a 21st birthday for a girl from university at her house; she was living with her parents. It was far from my house but I knew the street, so I just left home. Except when I got to the street, I realized I didn’t know the number and didn’t have the invite. I messaged another friend to find out the address, but he didn’t have it either.

There were only about 40 houses in the court, and it was pretty quiet, so I figured id just have a stroll and listen for music and a busy house. I stroll up to the only house with any music going. I’m a 25-year-old dude, bottle of happy birthday present in hand, and knock on the door. “Hi, I’m a friend of Steph’s, here for the birthday". The mom looks at me a bit confused but pleasantly welcomes me in.

She walks me through the house, past a group of roughly 15-year-olds, the family eying me uncertainly. I start thinking maybe that’s just the younger cousins and the main party is out back. She takes me further through the house to her other daughter’s room, who coincidentally is named Steph. “Steph, your friend is here..." As I round the corner into the doorway, I look at this 17-18year old and my face drops.

“I...don’t know you,” I say awkwardly, then look at the mother, desperately hoping I have not just become the biggest creep on the planet bringing hard stuff to a 15th birthday as a dude in his mid-20s. Very fortunately, I explained who I was and who I was looking for, and the lovely mom walked me down the street to the house I was meant to be at, as she knew the family.

I apologized profusely again and thanked her for her help and understanding.

iamnotjacksipples

A couple of weeks ago, my five-year-old daughter found a black widow mom and her egg sack. She wanted to look at it, so I very carefully scooped it up into a jar, twisted on the top, and went around it with duct tape for good measure. She begged to let them hatch so she could watch them, and this seemed to be decent science homeschooling, after which point I planned to put them in the freezer for a somewhat humane end.

What’s the harm? I thought. They are sealed up well. Well, guess what, they weren’t. The jar I used was plastic and something some toys had come in. There were small HOLES in the bottom and sides, barely visible. Smaller than a hole punch, but plenty big for a baby black widow. So today we’re going about our lives when she notices a tiny spider. Then there’s another. Then another. I start to think....oh no.

I grab the jar to find the egg sack has indeed hatched, with hundreds of tiny little venom babies. But I see with relief that the duct tape is still there, there’s no way they could have gotten out. Until I look at my hand. IN THE MOMENT I WAS HOLDING THE JAR, ONE CRAWLED ONTO MY HAND. At which point I noticed the holes. I screamed, said some words that definitely shouldn’t be said in front of a five-year-old, and wanted to fling away the jar but managed to hold onto it for fear that tossing it would further distribute its contents.

Now my child is playing outside while I furiously vacuum and clean and wash every surface. God have mercy.

Psalms143-6

It was a four-player family game of Monopoly. My brother, our parents, and I were playing, and I wasn't doing well. I wasn't bankrupt or heavily mortgaged yet, but I could tell that if something drastic didn't change in the next three turns or so, I was toast. I didn't have any monopolies, but I did have a couple two out of three properties (New York and St. James being the standouts) and a couple scattered here or there.

My brother was the clear favorite at this point, with my dad in clear second. My mom was losing right along with me. It was my turn, and I was trying to arrange a favorable trade. I'm negotiating with my dad. I have a property that'll give him another monopoly, he has a card that'll give me a monopoly. We both have enough money and side properties to even things up afterward.

With a good trade here, we'd both have a higher chance of winning, significantly cutting in on my brother's lead. Seems like it should be a slam dunk, right? But no, my dad is pushing for the most ridiculous trades possible, and outright refusing to trade away those properties that are most valuable to me. If I don't get a monopoly out of this, I might as well not even bother with a trade.

I'm getting frustrated as the negotiating stalls. But I get an idea. A terrible, terrible idea. I say to my dad: "Dad, I'm clearly in the weaker position, here. But right now, that just means I have less to lose. So here's the deal. If I don't get a trade from you that gives me a monopoly, I'm going to sell all of my properties to [brother's name] for $1".

Dad didn't like that at all, and there was no trade. He also probably didn't expect me to carry through, but immediately after, I sold all my deeds to my brother for a dollar, and my dad lost any chance whatsoever of winning the game. Dad isn't speaking to me right now. Was that a supremely jerky move to play? Yup. I'm feeling a little vindicated, though, for not letting myself be pushed around when I was the little guy.

But will anyone ever want to play Monopoly with me again? I kinda doubt it.

SqueakyCleanNoseDown

This just happened last week. I got home from working out of town Thursday night and my wife warns me that there is a problem with my seven-year-old daughter. “Beth” comes in and I can see that she has a few bug bites on her face and one of her eyelids is a little droopy. She feels fine though. I am off work the next day and my wife is going to the office.

I wake Beth up for breakfast and her eye is now much worse. It is more than half-closed and a little red. She still feels fine. As soon as the doctor opens, I call them and they tell us to come in. We get there and I go to check in. The receptionist that I have never seen looks at my daughter and says, “Oh. My goodness, what happened?” So I respond as a joke, “Eh, she got out of line,”

I know! It’s horrible. I’m sorry! I have a weird sense of humor and I’m a bit socially awkward. Anyway, we all smile and giggle before we head to the waiting area. Soon we are called in. The check-up goes as expected. It’s a reaction to the bug bites and he tells me to use some over-the-counter, Zyrtec or Benadryl. Then there is a knock on the door and the doctor steps out.

He comes back in a few minutes later and says that the authorities would like to talk to me. The doctor is angry. We all head to the doctor’s office to talk. There is a male officer and a female officer. The woman starts making small talk with my daughter and asks if she wants to go in the other room and read a book. My daughter has an irrational fear of the authorities from when her older brother would threaten to call them whenever she went into his room.

So she says no and buries her face in my side. The officers then tell me that it is better that she is in another room. I saw one of Beth’s cheer coaches bring her son in soon after we got there and mention that she may still be there to watch her. The doctor, still visibly angry, goes to check and she is, so Beth goes to sit with her in the waiting room.

The officers explain that they have a report of possible child mistreatment. The doctor explains that this was a simple misunderstanding. He just examined my daughter and there is no mistreatment. I now realize that it is the receptionist that he is angry with. She makes an excuse and leaves the room. He says that he thinks he has to let her go.

He says this is the second incident in two weeks. He says that her bad judgment got his practice and the entire executive park closed for four hours last week and his neighbors now hate him. The officers are apologetic but say they need to do a full investigation and ask if I can come to the station. A friend comes to pick up my daughter, who is freaking out at this point.

We get to the station (they allow me to drive there myself), and my uncle, a lawyer, meets me there. They are apologetic and say they already know what happened but a full investigation and report need to be done. They say it is a minimum of 3-5 days, maybe longer. I call my wife, who goes ballistic. The county attorney says that they normally seek restraining orders in these cases, but if I sign an agreement to stay away from my daughter until the investigation is closed they would not seek one.

My uncle recommends this too, as the restraining order would be on public record. I stay at my brother’s for the weekend and schedule an out-of-town trip that I really don’t need to make for this week. I can’t wait to get home to see my family and sleep in my own bed, but I’m pretty sure my wife will have me on the couch for a little while.

KatzDeli

I go to this “mommy and me” thing every week with my daughter. Not because it’s my kind of thing, but because my mother-in-law paid for the membership for a year as “a Christmas gift” to my one-year-old. In other words, she doesn’t think I am socializing her grandchild enough and this was her way of passive-aggressively correcting my parenting.

Anyways, we go to this thing every week for an hour, and all the Pinterest moms are planning themed birthday parties and discussing screen time and sharing gluten-free recipes while their kids stare at each other. But all these kids know sign language, and I thought that was pretty darn cool. So I start looking into this and try teaching my kid some basic signs for basic needs, and it’s working!

Suddenly, my tiny human who otherwise could not effectively communicate with me knows how to say “more” and “all done” and “drink”! She can call me mom and my husband, dad! Wow, thanks Pinterest moms! I take back all the stuff I talked about you to my kid on our weekly drives home. Well, today with my husband out of town, I didn’t feel much like cooking.

Since my daughter is pretty laid back at restaurants, I decided to go out for a quick dinner. The kid loves French fries and so do I, so we hit the local burger joint and I order a drink, a burger with fries, and a side of fruit. The server brings a little styrofoam cup with a lid and a straw filled with water for my daughter, and I set it out of her reach so she doesn’t hulk smash the styrofoam and make a mess.

So of course every time she wants some, she signs “drink". And every time she wants my attention, she signs “dad” because apparently, the slightly different sign for “mom” isn’t as fun for her. Ok, whatever. Well, I notice a couple of tables away, there are a couple of women who are also signing to each other but they’re looking over at us and snickering.

I’m like okay, I did like four quick Google searches, maybe I botched some of what I taught her. It’s fine. But then as the women are leaving, they stop by our table and one of them lays her iPhone down with a message typed out for me to read. It says something to the effect of “She’s calling you ‘dumb’ and telling you she wants to drink alcohol".

I’m like... wait... what? So she continues to show me that I have in fact taught my daughter the wrong signs, that there are different signs for “drink (non-alcoholic beverage)” and other drinks, and by balling her fist up instead of using a flat hand at her forehead, my daughter has been calling me dumb instead of dad, which was already wrong obviously since I am her mom.

I can only imagine what the Pinterest moms would’ve done had I shown up next week with my kid asking to guzzle pints.

midwest_sweatervest

This happened around five minutes ago. I feel so nervous right now. I’m 17 years old, and I’m bi. My family is very religious and most of them are prejudiced as heck. Today, we had to go to church. Now, for some background information here, I’m considered “the perfect Christian girl” and it sucks. I have to pretend to be someone I’m not just to satisfy many of these people.

Today I was in a really bad mood, and when my family and I went to church, they started talking about LGBTQ people. Nothing out of the ordinary. I don’t know what came over me, but I started to defend them. Definitely didn’t look suspicious. When I was in the middle of an argument with an adult, this kid says, “You sound so gay right now defending those abominations". I just snapped.

I said, “ I am bi, you ignorant idiot". Best way to come out. Anyway, the realization didn’t hit me until five seconds after. Currently, I’m in a bathroom typing this. As for the people at church, we had a little talk. They said that this news wasn’t very pleasant in the slightest, but I convinced them to think about giving LGBTQ people a chance.

Some apologized to me, but others looked at me differently. My mother said she actually supports me. Not exactly a mistake in the sense that I’m happy with who I am, but yeah…would have done that differently.

For background, I usually make the bed in the mornings, but I didn't yesterday morning because I was running late. I went to see my dad yesterday, but my wife wasn't feeling well so she stayed home. I got back at around 8:30 and couldn't find her anywhere. I checked the bedroom, the living room, the kitchen, the bathroom, everywhere, and I just couldn't find her.

Her wallet was there so I figured she just went out for a walk, which is normal since we live in a big city that's active into the night. I started getting worried at around 9:30 because she also wasn't answering her phone. I called a few of her friends and asked if they'd seen her, but none had. I called her parents and asked them if they knew where she was, which led to them freaking out because no one could find her.

My father-in-law told me to track her phone, so I went into her Apple account and it told me that her phone was in our apartment. I turn on the find my iPhone sound and start running through the apartment thinking I should call the authorities. I hear the sound coming from our bedroom, so I go in and start tearing the room up…when suddenly my wife pops up from the bed and asks me what the heck I'm doing.

Turns out the small lump that I thought was just a pile of blankets since I didn't make the bed that morning was actually my wife, who went to sleep early because she didn't feel well. She sleeps with earplugs in so she didn't hear me in the apartment. I had to sheepishly call her entire family, own up to my stupidity, and apologize for terrifying them.

tifu439587283

I work at a popular coffee shop in Canada, and have been here for the last two years. Most customers who come here a lot don’t have to order, because we already know it. One guy who comes in orders something distinct, and was very nice to me when I first started. His order was the first I memorized. For example, he orders a large and a medium coffee but sometimes would just get a large.

He came in today for the first time since I started working again from time off. I told his order to the girl working the counter with me, listing the large and medium coffees, but he ended up just getting the large. Afterward, my manager told me he wasn’t getting the medium anymore because it was his wife's order AND SHE HAD PASSED.

kid-kobold

This happened a couple of weeks ago. So I sometimes drive for rideshare companies to make extra cash and keep me off of the couch. I live in a touristy area that booms during summer months and vacation rental homes are common. So common that I sometimes do pick-ups and drop-offs at the same homes for different people week to week and family/friend groups of people renting the homes are the norm.

One particular day, I dropped a guy off at a beautiful home near the beach that I had just picked a guy up from just an hour or two prior. So as we arrive I mention this to the rider: “Hey, I just picked one of your buddies up from here about an hour ago". Rider: “No, must be the wrong house". Me: “Nope, he walked right out of that side door. I dropped him off at a bar. His girlfriend is still in there though, she stayed behind".

I had seen her kiss him goodbye at the door but didn't mention this to the rider. “You guys having a vacation?” Rider: “This is a family-owned home, it's been in my family for years and we don't rent it out. Nobody lives here but my wife and I and I've been in New York for work for the past four days". Awkward silence as we both come to the realization.

He got out and I drove away, scolding myself for having such a big mouth.

EatBroccoliNotBooty

Source: 1

My manager had never been that great, but she completely lost it as soon as our company shifted to mostly work from home. She didn’t want to pay us overtime and had the mindset that working from home would always be less productive than in the office. Her entire opinion was based on the fact that because she got a quarter of her own work done when she was at home, the rest of us would too.

Because she was so set on getting back into the office, she volunteered our department as the pilot project to go back in first, even when cases were at an all-time high. Oh, but it gets worse. Everyone goes in, except one person: Her. She's a no show. We couldn't believe it. After that, everyone started looking for other jobs.

I had a boss who would scream in my face so often, I started to strategize how I would handle it when she finally hauled off and hit me. She never did, but she did eventually lose her job after being accused of hurting children.

We had a younger manager at McDonald’s for my first 10 months. Then they decided to bring in a second manager from another store. The first week he was fine. Until one day, when one of the girls who usually worked drive-thru was put on the grill for no reason. She got grease on her shirt, and he told her that she looked like a pig.

Then he said to clean up or go home. She left crying. The next day another underage kid asked to just get a drink of water after a 3-hour non-stop rush. The kid looked like he was about to pass out. The manager told him no, so he said he'd drink from the sink in the back. He told him if he did that, he’d send him home.

I lost it when I heard that. I went off at him and then left. I never went back. I heard that he was fired a month later.

I hated my boss. Nobody ever received any positive comments in evaluations. One time in a meeting, someone asked, "Do you think we could hear something nice about somebody just once?" All my boss did was bark, "That's not what we're here for!" That's that kind of person I had to deal with for five long years. It was absolutely brutal.

People who held grudges against me personally rose up to the right positions to put together a case that would get me railroaded out. Fortunately, one of my co-workers clued me in about it, and I was able to interview and get another job before the hammer came down. They would have fired me at 11 in the morning. I got the other job offer at 9.

I pre-emptively turned in a resignation that said nothing more than, "I resign my position effective XX/XX/XXXX." I also refused the exit interview and presented state and federal statutes that showed I was not required to give one. Even though they so badly wanted me gone, they were mad that I got to leave on my own terms, instead of getting fired.

And I got them good. I handed them a post-dated resignation instead knowing they would immediately throw me out of the building, but also that they would have to pay me until the date on my letter. And the timing worked out perfectly. The dates worked out so that I received my annual bonus too. Now, I'm in a job with far fewer hours, making more money, and coworkers who I actually like.

Meanwhile, the old company where I worked laid off ten percent of their employees and slashed the compensation of those who remained by thirty percent. Good. They suck.

I had been running the restaurant for weekend nights for three years. These were not easy shifts. They were from 5 PM–3 AM and the restaurant was always packed with drunk college kids. Still, I was a night owl, and it was my pleasure. Or it was, until I took a few days off and went to a hot spring with my wife. On our way back, I noticed that my leg hurt.

Within 2 hours, I was in the hospital for a severe infection. It needed three antibiotics at once to treat. I called in sick three days in advance. My AGM told me to heal up and that they would cover my shift. They did not. For my "first infraction" they gave me a final warning. I was one step from being fired, after all my years of hard work. I put in my notice the next day.

At my last job at a marketing company, our president and owner went off on an hour long rant to a client basically calling them "stupid ungrateful idiots" along with a bunch of swears. It started because the client, a dentist, presented my boss with some ideas that came from her receptionist. Just standard suggestions.

They were things like bench signs and radio ads that a layperson would know, but it was nothing so bad that someone should ridiculing them.

bucaqe

I had a boss who tried making every single interaction into an argument or confrontation. I would be at work, going about my business, and he would come around, and our interactions would go something like, “I want you to do it this way,” he’d tell me. I’d say, “that's how I'm doing it, that's how I've always done it.”

He’d answer, “don't argue with me, just do what I'm telling you to do!” If I protested, he’d interrupt me and yell, “if you can’t do it the right way, I’ll find somebody who can!” My only course of action around this guy was to act dumb and make him feel like he was a wise old sage because he had been there for longer.

Sometimes 30 years of experience just means that you've sucked at your job for 30 years. Oh, and during my last review with him, he wanted to know why we weren't better friends.

DrWhoisOverRated

I was 19 and working my first job. My awful boss criticized my lipstick, saying that the color was ugly and recommending a bright red lipstick to match with my bright red uniform shirt. He also didn’t like my choice of all black shoes. And he didn’t like the way I mopped the floor. He would take the mop from me and show how to “properly” do it.

His condescension was insane. But the day he creepily told one of my coworkers that she couldn’t wear a sports bra under her uniform (because it "flattens" certain things), I knew I couldn't deal with him. I quit a few days later.

My efficiency scores all quarter were on track to be amazing, but when the time came for raises, I received an impossible task. When I couldn’t complete it, it was used as the reason for not giving me a raise. This was complete BS. Our company was growing and becoming more and more profitable because we were accepting bigger jobs. But management never hired new workers.

A lot of us would stay late and work overtime, guaranteeing the company profits, but never meaning any of us would see a penny. Eventually, after we didn't get raises for two years, I changed careers.

I’m currently trying to leave my job. If I worked any amount under 40 hours, my boss would dock my pay. If I worked over 40, I’d get my salary pay. I worked until Tuesday and then discovered that I’d been around a COVID positive person and developed symptoms. Work sent me home. I got a test. Work kept me home until I got the results: negative.

My paycheck showed up with hundreds of dollars less than normal. Of course, my boss didn’t bother to tell me it would be like that. Luckily, I went to HR who told her she couldn’t do that. She later called to apologize, saying she "didn’t know she had to pay me." This, amongst many other things, is why I’m trying to get out of there.

I left Journeys because everyone got sick. I was a new hire, but instead of finding somebody to come work and train me or close the store, they just said I had to do it all alone, so I left. I’m all for being thrown to the wolves if I have the knowledge to handle it, but this was too far. I couldn't even process returns!

I had missed one day of work in a two-month time span to attend my aunt’s funeral. Then my manager called me into her office to be “coached.” The first thing the manager said was, “I'm so sorry for your loss. I would have done the same thing.” I thought she'd be cool about it, but nope. She proceeded to make me sign paperwork instructing me on how to avoid absenteeism. I guess just...never attend a beloved relative's funeral?

I work in home care. My “boss” is typically the family I work for. It’s always the families that are the reason I leave, never my clients. Families are the worst. One mom got so mad when I dared to take a week off. I had worked for her for five long years, taking care of her very handicapped child. I did not get paid if I took time off.

So, I planned accordingly. She told me that I needed to make that time up and that she had no idea what she was going to do with her child while I was gone. This was ridiculous. I was one of 3-4 home aides; she had enough help. I told her I did not need to make any time up. I didn’t get paid for not being there, so it wasn’t my problem.

I told her that she would have to take care of her own kid. She didn’t like that answer. I went on my vacation and decided I had had enough of her, so I quit. I felt bad for the kid who wasn’t a bad kid at all. But I could not take that mom anymore.

A now-former colleague and I both applied for a more senior position that had become vacant. I had vastly more experience and had held a similar role in the past. I was better qualified and, frankly, a better fit for the job. But none of that mattered. Even before my interview, senior management had already decided to give the job to my colleague.

Unfortunately, nepotism prevailed. My colleague was so smug about his promotion, which was already bad, but then he decided to treat me like an idiot child for the next year, rather than the experienced professional that I am. I chose to leave after like six months and secured a much better job with better pay and working conditions.

I gave my required 90 days’ notice. My new manager was so good at their job that they didn't even advertise my job until it suddenly occurred to them that I was due to leave in two weeks’ time. The manager tried to offload my duties to someone on my team. To my satisfaction, that worker promptly burnt out and resigned due to the impossible workload.

After working for the same company for 17 years and always getting praise for my work, I finally got a position in a department that I'd always wanted to work in. My manager was excited to have me and continued to praise me. Then one night, while I was on-call, we got an "urgent page," which was sent to my phone. My phone didn't ring.

They called my manager. She texted me a few times. Well, I didn't have my texting alerts set to be very loud, so I didn't hear anything. She was annoyed the next day. I apologized that my phone hadn't worked properly for the call. Besides, my “backup” co-worker got the call and fixed it quickly. But that didn't satisfy her. She would not have it and kept telling me I'd screwed up.

She told me that it better not happen again and suggested I get another phone. I apologized again but said, "Look, what happened could happen to anyone. Mistakes happen. [my backup] got the call and handled it anyways. Besides, it really wasn't that urgent." She wouldn’t let it go. Our relationship went downhill from there. Mind you, I’d been at this job for almost 20 years.

I would get up early and work late to accommodate our customers' schedules, put in time on my days off for big urgent issues, and never got paid overtime. I didn't mind. I liked the job and got paid well. But then, a few months after the text incident, I  ended up sitting with an HR rep who tried to mediate a truce between me and my boss.

From the beginning, it was clear that he’d sided with her. They just kept bringing up the very few times I hadn’t performed up to par, missing the context every time. Like, "Boss-Lady says there was this one email where you were a little rude to the customer. Is that true?" I had tried explaining myself, but he’d interrupt me with, “No. Just answer the question. Were you rude?"

I said, "Well, yes, a bit I suppose." HR Rep then moved on to the next accusatory question. After a bit of this, I looked across the table at my boss and said, "Boss, are you willing to meet me halfway here?" She just looked at HR Rep. "Okay, that's what I thought." That was it. I stood up and threw my security badge down.

I grabbed my personal bag, which I had prepared for just such an eventuality, said, "I quit," and walked out.  Then the HR Rep followed me out the door calling after me, "Don't quit! We don't want this!" I turned around and said, "Neither do I." I felt so good driving back home. I've got a much better job where I'm much more appreciated now.

I worked in an agency environment with big clients and big expectations, but we had a small staff for all the projects we took. Late nights were expected, and some nights I barely had time to eat before I went to sleep, so I could wake up the next day and restart the cycle.

We tried to ask for structural change to have some breathing room between projects, but upper management and my boss always ignored us. I was tired, frustrated, and felt like I was just a tool for the man. We worked late and never got anything back from the company. So, I sent out applications and found a bigger company with a cool culture. They offered me a gigantic pay raise and offered better benefits.

I went to my boss to hand in my resignation. I gave him two weeks’ notice. This somehow became a thirty-minute conversation telling me how good I had it there and how miserable I'd be at this other company. I hadn't even mentioned the name of the new company, so I knew he was talking straight bull. I went back to work.

But my boss then pulled me back into his office and told me he was going to let me go that day. I did so and never looked back. My new job is great by the way. Better boss, better work, better life.

The company where I worked rented out office space to self-employed people, entrepreneurs, etc. One of my clients approached me about starting a business together that actually piqued my interest. I didn’t know it was against any rules to work a side hustle, and I was very transparent about the whole thing. My co-workers and supervisors all knew about it.

My boss in particular always knew and never said anything negative about it. Six months later, there was a new sales manager hired for the company who was a bit of a jerk. Within two weeks of her starting, she became aware that I had a side hustle and reported me to HR. I went into work one Friday and saw I had an HR call scheduled.

I felt my stomach drop. That was never a good thing. So, my actual boss and I got on the call, and HR said I’d broken a huge rule. I explained that I did not know and thought it was okay since I had been telling my boss about it for nine months. And yet, HR still gave me the option to quit my side hustle and receive a final written warning from them.

This was despite me not having any other discipline in all of my time with the company. My other option was to quit the company. It made me so furious. But the worst part was that my boss never stepped up and defended me. She didn't even acknowledge that she also had not known about this rule. That's what made me thank them for their time and leave.

I used to work at Comcast and had aspirations to move up into management. I was pretty green to the corporate world, so I thought that helping my supervisor with her job would help move me up. And by help, I mean my supervisor made me do her whole job. I ran her meetings, did scheduling, and went through her paperwork.

I did all this while working on the phone as she sat at her desk playing Candy Crush on her iPad. I did this for months until I was so stressed that I snapped at a customer. Now, I took full responsibility for what I did, but that wasn't good enough for her. Nope, she had to sit me down and humiliate me in front of the upper management.

For an hour and a half, she made me listen to the recording while pausing it every few minutes to say something like, "How could you?" I was in tears at the end, and she used that to show how bad of an employee I was and how good a boss she was for "helping" me learn from my mistake. She then pushed for a Final Notice.

If I went out of line one more time within a year, I'd lose my job. She wasn’t going to fire me. I would have to do that for her. HR was predictably useless as were my friends in management. Now that I had become a pariah, people didn't care about me at all, except for my supervisor who, of course, still expected me to do her job.

My next few days were filled with a lot of crying. What followed was rage: Endless, white hot rage. I didn't quit. I didn't give up. Instead, I went back to school to finish my degree. After a while, I was offered an internship at 20 hours a week, which I took while fighting an uphill battle at Comcast 40 hours a week.

I was also a full-time student. And I let my supervisor know this. "Sorry, boss," I'd say, "I can't do this report for you. I have a final to study for," or, "Want me to stay late? No can do. My internship is working me hard, so I want to spend my night off at home doing nothing." I kept ignoring her whenever possible.

If she emailed me a question relating to my job, I'd respond, but if she sent out a group email about an incentive plan, I’d put it in the trash. At one point, she pulled me into a meeting, which was just me and her where she antagonized me and repeatedly told me, "You don't know me." The whole thing was really cringey and awkward.

This went on for the year that I was on probation. During that time, I always kept my sales numbers just high enough not to get fired, but good enough so it looked like I was still “trying.” This affected my commission, but it was so worth it. Before my probation was over, I had the option to switch to another supervisor, which I did.

I upped my effort those last few months, and my sales numbers skyrocketed. I had intentionally done this so my old boss would look bad. The upper management saw how my new supervisor succeeded in one month where my older supervisor failed in nine, and it pleased me to no end that I had played the long game and humiliated her like how she humiliated me.

On the one-year anniversary of my probation, I put in my two weeks’ notice. I let them know in my exit interview what I did with my life, omitting the undercutting part, and that had I had spent the last year becoming a better person just to spite Comcast. But even without spelling it out, that exit interview was one of the most satisfying moments of my life.

I worked at a small company with less than 40 employees. My boss encouraged us to get into fights with other departments. And when I refused to participate, my team ghosted me. I went to the CEO indirectly a few times, but nothing happened. Then I finally lost my patience, scheduled a 1-on-1 with the CEO, and told him that he was running a circus.

I said that if he didn’t take action fast, the company would fail, and I’d be gone long before. Three weeks later, they walked me out. But I got the last laugh. A year later, they walked the CEO out.

They changed the commission structure mid-month and did not update sales staff on the new goals. I missed my commission of $3,800 by $4. I thought that I had been $500 over my goal, so I let junior sales reps take sales to get them over their goals too. That would qualify our group for the site-wide bonus, which I later learned did not exist anymore.

We lost four reps in a day over $6k in commissions. The company ended up sending most of the senior staff to the clink on tax evasion charges soon after we left.

I worked for a German bakery for a month. The staff was some of the nicest people I had ever met, the job paid better than most places, and it had pretty good benefits. But then there was the manager. She was rough. She was such a colossal monster that if she visited Japan, the emperor would call Godzilla to help protect the country.

On my trial shift, which she scheduled to start at 4:30 AM the night prior, she screamed at me within the first ten minutes because I didn't know exactly the places or names of all the pastries. She would make remarks about construction workers, saying they were always trouble when they came in, as if they’re subhuman.

She constantly screamed at me to do better, and twice, she had the nerve to call me a "dumb idiot" in front of customers. I quit the first chance I could and made sure to tell the regional director everything she did to me and the other staff. Apparently, I was the first person to bring up anything like this since they’d opened.

I’m a teacher. I worked at a school that was in a very tough neighborhood. We had to know which kids were in which gangs so we wouldn't make them sit near each other. Fights happened pretty regularly. Deals went down on school property. There were definitely some behavioral issues. But there were also a lot of really good kids just trying to go to school.

The principal, though, was bad news. She was on a power trip. She was cruel to kids, teachers, and parents. My first year there, there were four of us that taught fifth grade. By October, one of us was quietly dismissed for inappropriate contact with a student. By early December, another had her skull cracked open on a locker while trying to break up a fight.

That left me and one other teacher with a constant rotation of subs because the principal wouldn’t hire any replacements. The majority of the time, a sub wouldn’t show up, and the students would be split among myself and the other teacher. There were over forty days when I would have 45 plus kids in my classroom. I struggled with no help.

At my year-end evaluation, my principal said I struggled, but that I could have taken more professional development to help. Every faculty meeting was filled with everything we were doing wrong. Never anything positive. And the principal went even further than that. We used to have casual Fridays for both staff and students. The principal stopped that. She stopped pep rallies. She canceled all dances. Anything that was positive to encourage kids, she got rid of.

Eventually, three of my students wrote her a letter. In it, they asked why she took away the 8th-grade dance from everyone and why not just exclude the kids that caused the problems instead of punishing everyone. They asked me to give her the letter because they were afraid of her. She refused to take it from me and said that they, the students, needed to give it to her.

I stuck it out for three years, but by the end of my third year, I had decided that I was leaving. I miss the kids, but I don't miss that horrible principal.

My best friend and I worked at the same small company for a horrific boss with early-onset dementia. My friend got a new job and gave notice. In an effort to get her to stay, our boss offered her my job. I don't know why she thought my friend would accept. She knew we were friends; we had even booked time off together so we could go on trips with each other.

Of course, my friend said no, and I handed in my notice the very next week. And I let her know why. There were many reasons, but I told her that was the straw that broke the camel's back. She had no idea until then that I knew what she had done. I watched as she tried to figure out a way to deny it. The look on her face was priceless.

After two years of incredible personal stress with multiple losses, my marriage ending, a car accident, and two weeks after reeling from another unexpected passing of my brother, I was pulled into a meeting where my boss let me know that I was “too distracted at my desk and spending too much time on ‘non-work-related issues.’"

I tried to explain that I was the executor of my brother's estate, but they explained that away by saying that I shouldn't allow it to affect my work. I was also doing the majority of my work unassisted because asking for help usually fell on deaf ears or my boss would tell me, "Just put in more hours.” Those extra hours were unpaid, of course.

There were plenty of other issues, but this broke me. I had a different job in under a month that paid more. I'm still upset about how I was treated.

Our division chief assumed that if he and the other managers weren’t micromanaging us, we wouldn’t do our work. He was very against working from home even though the job could be done 100% remotely. He only started giving us one day a week at home because his supervisor forced him.

We worked in an area with terrible traffic. It’s one of the worst in the nation, so most people usually understood if some employees were a couple minutes late. Not this guy. If we were even a minute late, we’d get a lecture that would frankly take more than the minute we had missed. The worst part was that if we were late or took a longer lunch, we had to put it in the calendars.

There were three different supervisor’s Outlook calendars and our own where we had to plan to make up that time, even if it was just five minutes. It was so patronizing. Once, I emailed all of my supervisors to ask permission to leave four hours early on a Friday because I was flying to a wedding. It was approved. I put it on all the Outlook calendars.

I planned how I was making that time up by coming in 30 minutes early and staying 30 minutes late for four days leading up to the trip. When I stepped on the plane, I got a frantic call from a co-worker saying that a supervisor was looking for me and “had no idea” where I was. I said she should check her dumb calendar. I had already put in my notice by then, so I didn’t care if they got mad.

I was told to take and hold a heavy piece of hand railing over the edge of a platform while my buddy underneath tried to bolt it. We were about 60 feet off the ground, and this thing weighed probably 100 lbs. If my hands slipped and I dropped it, that would be it for my friend and whoever was on the ground when that thing fell down.

Because of this, I said absolutely not and kept it on the crane. That's when my boss cuts in on the crane operator’s radio channel to cuss at me. At that moment, I snapped. I said that he could get his fat little self up here and do it himself. And I got fired for insubordination. If my wife wasn’t about 6 months pregnant, I would have beat him when I got down.

I had not one boss but three. Each would tell me how they wanted something done, and each would tell me the others were wrong. I finally got sick of getting chewed out every day for doing what I was told. I found the three of them together talking with the owner, politely interrupted, and pointed out what was going on.

I dropped the mic: "You (1) tell me how to do something, you (2&3) two say it's wrong. You (2) tell me how to do something, you (1&3) two say it's wrong, you (3) tell me how to do something, you (1&2) two say it's wrong. Then all of you chew me out for it. Which of the three of you do I listen to?” They stood there looking at each other.

The owner was looking at the three of them. After waiting a whole minute, I took off my work gloves, handed them to the owner, thanked him for employing me, and quit. I heard from another employee that all three were later demoted, and the owner promoted other people to the positions with clearer defined control areas.

I was at my workplace for 27 years. In one year, they terminated all the legacy developers and had us hired to an offshore company. After a year, that company started paying us off and replacing us with offshore workers. I was slated to stay because I was a higher-level manager. But my team was shrinking, and so our productivity tanked.

I could not stomach the toxic environment and attitude. I left and now have less responsibility and more pay. Now the original employer wants me back. It's going to cost them if I even entertain the idea, which I don't plan on doing.

My boss was a jerk on a massive power trip. He knew nothing about cars, despite managing a big fancy car dealership. I was a trainee mechanic/tech on apprenticeship wages. The worst task I had to do was replacing wiring. We had a Karen who was the boss’s friend harass us apprentices for a non-existent wiring issue. We were told to replace all the wiring! Twice! Free of charge for the customer. It was gruelling, awful work.

And this lady was crazy. She was impossible to deal with, and eventually she called the authorities on us because she convinved herself that we were "holding her car hostage." Even though she was the nut, my boss suspended all of the apprentices. We didn't take it lying down. Instead, we banded together and went to the local media and then HR. We got our jobs back, and the boss was sacked.

I worked in a craft store. The boss went across the line of cashiers and smacked each of us in the back of the head saying, "one for you! And one for you! And one for you!" I assumed he was joking. I was so wrong. He never liked me very much, so as he approached me and said, "And one for you!" he smacked me so hard that my glasses flew off my face.

They were not loose, but they were after that day. I didn't get to quit, though. He fired me at the end of the shift.

I had a former boss from Europe who "delegated" most tasks to me and then took credit for them. In meetings, he would constantly interrupt people to note that I would do/fix/resolve/submit whatever. He denied me any interviews for a promotion because he needed me to do half of his job for him. If I applied for a promotion, he accused me of being disloyal.

When I gave notice, I rattled off a list of reasons why, and he just shrugged and said, "okay, if you're going to be that way about it." I wrote him instructions on how to perform certain tasks and run reports, and instead of reading it, he gave it to another employee and told them to call me if they had any questions.

A co-worker who also left was told, "I don't see you being happy or successful at your new job and that saddens me because we will fill your position and you won't be able to come back. But good luck anyway." And as though that's not bad enough, my idiot boss got promoted and sent to China. I swear, the company wants him to mess things up on every continent.

I had the pleasure of dealing with a boss who was both a micromanager and a complete idiot. We tried so hard to preempt all the ways he'd screw up the budget. To my surprise, we managed to go from the least productive team to the most productive. But when review time came, my raise was so tiny that our simultaneous change in health insurance benefits meant I actually got lower weekly paychecks for me. That was my last straw. I left.

I used to clean for a gym. One night, a bunch of patrons utterly destroyed the locker room and showers. There was literal poop smeared on the walls of the showers and messes everywhere. It was like an awful poop explosion blew throughout the place.

When we saw what we had to deal with, we immediately grabbed every free person we could to help us deal with the mess. With seven people, it took us three hours to get that locker room clean again. It smelled so strongly of Comet that two people almost passed out. All the while, the manager on duty was strolling around eating his ice cream and using his phone.

The whole crew worked crazy hard to finish as efficiently and thoroughly as we could. By the time we finished, it looked almost perfect as if whoever unleashed their bowels on our facilities had never set foot in the room. The lot of us were very satisfied even though it was an extremely hard night. When we finally finished, we all gathered at the front desk for the closing shift sign-out.

The manager previously mentioned called me and my partner over and began tearing into us saying that the locker room looked like an absolute disaster. He said that we were only getting out now was because it was two and a half hours past when we were supposed to be finished. Then he stood there insulting us for ten minutes holding up everyone from leaving for the night.

As soon as I got home, I typed up a resignation letter effective immediately. The next day, my actual manager called me and gave me attitude for giving one day's notice. I told him what had happened and ended the conversation there. Never went back.

I was cleaning up behind the counter at McDonalds, and the manager was cleaning the ice cream machine. He sat the primer at the edge of the ice cream machine. When a customer walked in, I hurried to put the broom at the corner of the wall, so the customer couldn't see it. The broom fell, and it knocked over the primer.

I was the only one on front counter, so he had to grab the mop and bucket and clean it up. He then put another cup of ice cream primer in the same spot and said, "if you knock this over, I'm going to knock you out." I pulled him to the side after making sure there were no customers around to hear me tell him something.

I told him, "If you ever decide to put your hands on me, you can consider it my immediate notice. My mama did not raise me to take being hit or threatened by anyone. She won't even try to lay hands on me." That’s how I left my job at McDonalds after only three months.

My evil boss Jerry wouldn't let me go to the emergency room after the heavy vaginal bleeding I had been experiencing suddenly got way worse. I went over his head and got permission. I called my mom and told her to meet me in the ER. The ER nurse said he'd never seen so much blood. I was admitted for badly needed blood transfusions.

My mom called Jerry who then told her that it's just stress and I had to get back to work. By then, I couldn't even lift my own head up, but sure, I can take a bus across town and go back to work. I ended up needing another hospital stay later. They found a large growth. Jerry kept insisting that it couldn't be cancer.

He said that if it was cancer then I would be exhausted and losing weight. I had lost eight pounds in one week and ran to bed the minute I was home. I was still recovering from the procedure when Jerry called me to let me know I was fired for taking too much time off. Then, five days later, I was diagnosed with cancer.

Jenny010137

I had a boss who refused to let me take an "unplanned vacation" to see my very sick grandma. I quit on the spot. It was strange because she was usually really cool and laid back. I asked for the weekend off to visit my ailing grandmother, and she snapped and lectured me about how I needed to “plan my vacations” better.

ostentia

I had a boss who absolutely hated me. After realizing she wasn't qualified for the position, I came to the conclusion that she was a joke and started to just dismiss her. I never paid much attention to her and when she'd randomly show up at my building, I kind of just ignored her. I was busy and didn't have time to play games.

She wrote me up for being late on three separate occasions when I was one minute late, three minutes late, and six minutes late. I lived an hour from work and had to deal with traffic. I left my house two hours early most days to account for this. But when there's a wreck, there's not much you can do as the freeway is backed up.

Each time I got stuck in traffic I would let her know. She still wrote me up in hopes to eventually fire me. So, I started leaving the house crazy early. I went in super early and left early. She hated it. Eventually, her behavior got her fired, and people still remember her and laugh at what a horrible person she was.

RedditsInBed

I used to work in high pressure sales. The director would come in once a week, and they brought Monster drinks in to get everyone energized. She'd have them in her office for the sales people to drink. Now I liked the director; she was nice and professional. My manager on the other hand was an absolute piece of garbage.

I got tired of energy drinks and didn’t drink one. My boss said, "you didn't get a Monster. You know Wendy bought these for the entire division?" I said I was aware but I didn't want one. He came up to me and said this, "listen, go into that office and get one right now." I was so stunned that I didn't know what to do.

So, I got up, took one, went to my desk, and just had it sitting there. He came back and asked why I didn't drink it. I told him I didn't drink one because my body didn't do well with so much caffeine. He asked me to walk into his office. Now, I wasn't the best at the job. In fact, I hated it. He had a problem with me.

He told me that “my lack of energy” extremely distracted him and that it showed in my performance. He ended with, "if you keep this up, we may have to let you go." All I said to him was, "okay, well that is unfortunate, but I won’t drink something that takes a toll on my body." Low and behold, I ended up getting fired.

I enjoyed two weeks of unemployment until I got a call back from the same company. They wanted to hire me for a different position not sales with no interview and higher pay. I took it, and I loved it. Now, my ex-boss ended up being terminated for drug use. He actually had the audacity to send me a request on Facebook.

Orphan_Babies

I once worked at a company where the CEO sideswiped a woman's car as she pulled into a parking space. The woman in the car got out and stood beside her car to see what damage was done. The CEO got out of her Mercedes and brushed right past without so much as speaking to her. She just completely ignored her and went in.

The woman went to the HR department, and the company cut her a check for damages. So, the actual business paid for it, not the CEO. She got away scot free without ever admitting anything or paying anything.

lets_start_a_club

My first job out of college was working as an Office Manager/Exec Admin position in a branch office a part of a financial services firm. The office had 6 financial advisers who came in and out throughout the day, two interns, and the branch manager who was my worst boss ever. Nothing was ever said to me in a normal tone.

If it wasn't sarcasm, it was condescending. Nothing I ever did was right; if a Fed-Ex envelope was sealed even the tiniest bit crooked, I got yelled at and scolded for being messy. If it was perfectly straight? I got asked, "Did you use a ruler to get that? What, can't you just close an envelope like a regular person?"

That was too far. Forget me having any conversation with the guy. If I agreed with him, he would sneer and say things like, "that's how you really feel? Yeah, right," or if I asked a question, I got, "figure it out yourself. You're so smart," drawing out the word smart in my face. That still haunts me. He regularly accused me of things.

He would remind at least once a week that he had cameras all over the office and was going to catch me some day. I was working with one of the interns on a project, and we had a column that wasn't reconciling. The manager blew up at me, not the intern, and said that I had to come in over the weekend until I’d fixed it.

And I was not going to be paid for that. I did not know at that time that I was required to be paid for time worked in a situation like that. I was in a bad living situation at that time, and I had grown up in a bad home, so I honestly thought that working unpaid was a punishment for an error was common. I could go on.

Once, he ordered me to pick up his dry cleaning, and I had a panic attack because it looked like his ugly suit was discolored until I ran into his girlfriend and made a subtle hint. She actually confirmed that it was supposed to look that way. I felt bad because I think he treated her poorly too based off her reaction.

She said, "yeah, it's a good thing you notice that sort of stuff. Thomas is really picky and intense. Sometimes too much so." The incident that made me decide to leave was right before Christmas when one of the advisers had given me a small handful of Christmas cards for his clients and asked me to put postage on them.

I asked if Thomas had given his approval, and the adviser said yes. Later that day, Thomas saw the stack of envelopes sitting on my desk and started screaming at me about taking postage again. I explained that those were not mine, they were for Jerry who told me he had Thomas's approval. Thomas stomped into his office fuming with rage.

He called me in half an hour later. He said he spoke to Jerry who denied ever giving me envelopes to stamp. I handed over the envelopes and said to please look at the addresses as these were Jerry's clients and no one I knew personally. It didn't matter. He was still yelling and raving at me for it. I was quite shaken.

I was just trying to not break down completely all the while denying that I never took from him, I never took postage, and if he was so concerned about my apparent habits, maybe he should check the cameras that he had all over the office. At that point, he picked up his metal wastebasket by his desk and threw it at me.

I ducked, and it hit the doorframe. Then he asked me, “did you like that, huh? Are you going to learn a lesson not to back talk?” I didn't say anything and went to my desk, finished out my day, and left my keys behind. I went home and told my boyfriend what happened who yelled at me for quitting without a job lined up.

Never mind that we had plenty of savings, and he had a really good job. I found a new job two weeks later, and until the day we broke up, I had to hear it that I was stupid and lazy and quit a job without finding a new one first.

prdxthrowaway

I was fired from my job as an assistant manager at a convenience store by the district manager who hated me. I was applying for unemployment insurance, and the company said I wasn't eligible because I'd been fired for cause. We showed up for a review, and I was prepared to explain what my direct boss had decided to do.

He put keys to the inner safe in the outer safe area overnight, which had resulted in more than $100 going missing, which was the reason they gave me for firing me. Mind you, this wasn't even my error, but I was the person on duty when it was discovered. Instead, the district manager had a chilling accusation: They tried to say I falsified paperwork.

I settled in to hear her tale of woe. Then she proceeded to show how I'd "padded paperwork" to hide missing money. I showed them that my manager had accidentally put $50 extra into the bank one day, so I made a note of that on the paperwork for the day she made the error and then on the day that showed the $50 missing.

The panel asked the district manager how I should have noted it, and she went off into some incomprehensible way of "subtracting" the amount from the numbers to under-report income. I got out, "but that" when a panel member cut me off and shushed me. They informed her that what she was trying to tell me to do was against the rules.

They told her that they would be informing the local tax office in case they wanted to perform an audit on the company, thanks to the dumb district manager. I was eligible for my unemployment money. Win, win, win! And the look on the district manager's face? Classic. I wish I had a photograph!

CaptainOnBoard

My first boss managed a gas station. He was good in most ways – efficient, fair, disciplined, ran a tight ship but had just one drawback. He was judgmental. I don't mean that he was insufficiently outraged by Dukes of Hazzard re-runs. I mean that he used taboo words and would loudly. He also resurrected other old terms.

The truck driver who delivered our tankers of fuel every week was a Black man, and they almost came to blows over this. His comeuppance finally came when the corporate office hired a new third level supervisor who was a young Black man out of business school. My boss just couldn’t handle taking orders from a Black man.

When he quit, he trashed the office and tore up every floppy disk in the office so we couldn't do our accounting for a few days.

gnujack

The vice president told me I was being disrespectful during a conversation. I asked how, and she told me that I, "knew what I was doing." I asked again, stating that I had asked because I did not actually know how. She told me she didn't have time for me because I "knew what I was doing,” and again had no time for this. She was nuts.

thatskyguy

I walked into an off-the-rack suit store, resume in hand, and talked to the store's assistant manager. The guy's a couple of years older than me and looked like the kind of guy that would sell you a time share in Florida with his fake tan and bad hair. He hired me on the spot, though, so he had become my new best friend.

Apparently, the manager of the store was on vacation in his native Jordan, but he'd be back at the end of the week. The job itself was very laid back. We spent a lot of time folding clothes and even more time slacking off behind the till waiting for people to come in and purchase cheap suits. I was great at doing both.

That first week was a breeze. The assistant manager had a camping trip on the weekend, but it'd be cool because the real manager was coming back the day before. Except Jordan revolted, and the first thing the revolutionaries did was take the airfields, so he was stuck. I tried to convince the assistant manager to stay.

I had less than a week of experience and no training. He chose to give me a key and go camping anyway. So, with less than a week of experience, I was now the de facto manager of the shop. On Saturday, the vice president of operations came in from across the country to see how the shop was doing. When he learned what had happened, he was ticked. 

The assistant manager was fired. I was given his responsibilities and a very brief rundown of what my new job was while the VP stormed around the store trying to make it presentable barking orders and was very grumpy about stuff. My new day, I was to get in at seven thirty in the morning to prepare to be open by eight.

If we opened five minutes late, we got a $500 fine from the mall. I was the only person on staff able to come in that early. I was also the only person who could reliably close, so I started working 14-hour days, every day, for a little over a month doing a job for which I was unprepared, untrained and under-qualified.

To be fair, the guys at HQ were great. They offered a lot of support that actually took the store through the roughest patches, walking me through payroll management and scheduling, helping me do orders and calmly getting me through merchandising and display making. That month was one of the hardest I have ever worked.

It was not just the long hours but constantly trying to keep up with stuff I was not prepared to do, but the HQ guys made it as easy as they could on me. Then the manager got back from Jordan, and he was mad. Nothing was like how he left it. Displays were a disaster. His assistant manager had been fired in his absence.

The guys from HQ were giving him all sorts of trouble for letting his store get that out-of-whack in the first place. His job was much harder than it would have been if he'd come home on time, and he thought the best way to deal with that was to yell at me. He snapped, and he berated me in front of the other employees.

He made it very clear that the state of the store was my fault and that I had screwed everything up. He complained about me to the HQ guys. For a full week after he was back, I was working the same schedule I'd been working while he was in Jordan, and now, I was getting yelled at the entire time. So, I decided to quit.

The guys from HQ were not happy with that decision and forced the manager call me at home and ask me to come back. So, I went in to discuss the terms of my return, and it was pretty clear the manager wanted nothing to do with me offering exactly nothing above the same entry-level position I'd been hired for originally.

No pay raise. No promotion. No acknowledgement, even. The guy never even thanked me for keeping his store from collapsing. All he offered was just $10 an hour to continue being his monkey butler. I went to work at a comic shop after that.

SlurpeeMoney

I work at a museum. The board president basically cussed me out on the phone before a big seasonal event, saying that she heard from other people that I was not giving 100% dedication to my job and that I needed to get my game up or face some serious consequences. Everyone was stressed due to the event, and I was upset.

I emailed her after that conversation because it had come completely out of left field. I had never had anyone complain about how I did my job – tourists, the executive director, or the president and the rest of the executive board. No one had complained before. So, I asked her to tell me who it was that had a problem.

Her response shocked me. Apparently, no one had said anything. She hadn't "heard" from anyone. She just listed a bunch of her own grievances about what I was doing, which were basically all trivial. I told her that she could just tell me that she was unhappy with things as they happened especially since I was never told not to do these things.

I lost a lot of respect for her that day, but I was still employed. So, I counted my blessings. Also, I found out that the executive director and the president were paying me $1.25 less than they originally agreed. When I first got the job two years prior, they gave me a job description that had the original pay on it.

Naively, I didn't make a copy. When I’d started, my paycheck was much less than I thought it would be, and I was given another job description with the lower pay on it. I didn't make a fuss because I was hard up for money, and I needed the job. Plus, the museum was kind of doing something shady. I also had no backbone.

My boss and the entire executive board stepped down from their positions, and I found my original job description with the original pay. I'm now getting paid what I was supposed to plus back pay. Working here used to be a nightmare. But the new executive board is pretty nice.

SoulCommodore

I used to work for a smaller company with about 12 employees. The president/owner of the company was completely out of touch on how to appropriately run a business. All he cared for was just profit. He provided no health insurance and would purposefully keep his number of employees down so that he wouldn't have to pay.

Employees were only given 2 weeks for vacations and no personal or sick time. If you were sick, oh, well, use your vacation or just don't get paid at all. Raises? What is a raise?! Seriously, one employee had been working there for 10 years, he was still making $8 an hour and had never received a raise all those years.

He did not care for employee safety. Dust particulates and small objects flying around? You don't need a mask or safety glasses. Fiberglass particulates in the air from cutting? Nope, you don't need gloves or masks or really anything to protect you from that. Long sleeve shirts and hair not tied back is perfectly fine!

One employee got a hernia from heavy lifting. He asked for work comp for the surgery that he couldn't pay for without any insurance and wasn’t making enough because he hadn't had a raise in years despite performing above expectations. What did the owner do? He refused because, “he could have gotten the hernia at home."

This was despite multiple witnesses watching him double over in pain after lifting the component he was building. Almost a year and a half later, the guy still had a freaking hernia. This guy was just a total jerk. Every 2 months, he’d come in a new car and take employees off the production floor so he could flaunt it.

We’re talking like Porsche GT3's, 2 Tesla Model S Nissan GTR, Audi S8, and the list goes on. When I quit, I just gave him a 5 minute notice and walked out of the door. He tried accusing me of taking sensitive company information, which was untrue. I left everything given to me on my desk and told him to leave me alone.

I told him that if not, I would contact OSHA and tell them what's going on. He backed off, but since then, about four of their most experienced employees have left, and 3 more are still looking for jobs.

slickvick772

I once worked at a discount sportswear store, and my supervisor was a jerk. I was paid minimum wage with no overtime payment, and he wouldn't let me leave until two hours after my finishing time. His reason? It was because the coat hangers hadn’t been fully extended, which was pretty impossible when you're in the childrenswear department!

caviarnightmares

I worked at a grocery store for three years. At first, it was great! It was an easy job, lots of hours, and I made money, which was cool since I was living at home saving for a car. But then corporate changes happened and ruined everything. They fired my manager and brought in the GM as a new permanent manager. I would ask him things often.

I wanted to make sure I was doing it right so I wouldn't get in trouble later only for him to hassle me with, “it's common sense. You're not that bright, are you?" Rude, I was just asking for reassurance. So, I had a front end manager who was basically like my second mom. She had been working there for almost 10 years.

She taught me how to drive and brought me to the test and let me vent or cry in the back room about personal things. I love her, but the GM loved to be mean to her to the point where he’d make her cry. A lot. He would only treat the female employees badly because the men, "do it perfectly every time." There were three.

And that was including him. 90% of the store was run by women. So, not only did he berate her, but he yelled at me about how I didn't even deserve a job and I was stupid, incompetent, will be like my dad, etc. So, I cried each time I worked with him. When I quit, he gave me some bull about how he loved working with me.

Riggybee

As a nanny, it’s weird when your boss is a mom with no actual experience being a boss. I worked for this mom who was my worst boss. She wasn’t that bad when I first started working for her. Over the course of the year, she kept adding more and more things for me to do. Eventually, I wasn’t just taking care of the baby. I became their maid.

If you think I got a pay increase, think again. And then, things got even worse. Eventually, I was basically this woman's personal assistant. She got a taste of power and took advantage of it. As a young 19-year-old, it was hard for me to see how bad it was. But I knew one thing: my boss was a nut job. One day, she got mad and fired me. The very next morning, she called me asking where I was. It was so confusing.

But I was broke and young, so I went back. At that point, I did everything from taking care of the baby to hand washing her delicates. She gave me a “uniform” and reprimanded me if it and my hair and makeup were not well kept. When she got pregnant with baby #2 and suggested I become a "wet nurse" I just flat out said no. So she fired me. Then, a few weeks later, she showed up at my house begging me to come back!

Saying "no way" and slamming the door in her face was so, so satisfying.

The client let slip how much they were paying for me. I was stunned. In one month, they paid more than my annual salary. I asked my boss for a pay raise and was told there was just no money available. I said I'd give them six weeks to look for it, and she laughed at me as I wasn't, "the type to give ultimatums." That was the last straw.

I secured a better offer from another company and handed in my notice. That was when my boss's boss offered me a 50% raise to stay.

Sources: , 2

I used to have a terrible work schedule. I'd have to wake up at 2:30 am every morning so I could be at work by 4 am. My downstairs neighbors would blare loud music at all hours of the night and I could feel the bass through my mattress. I went downstairs and politely asked them to turn down the music, and they seemed to kindly agree.

As soon as I got back into bed, they turned it up even louder and kept it going until about 1:30 am. They didn't know who they were messing with. Before I left for work at 3:30 am, I turned over my amplifier so that the speaker was facing the floor. I turned the volume up and set my guitar on top of it. I left for my 12-hour shift, and the feedback was still screaming when I came home. The neighbors never blasted their music again.

4bangeranger

We lived in a neighborhood of townhouses. One neighbor let her dogs go #2 all over everyone’s lawn and she never picked it up. We tried asking her to be more considerate, but she didn't listen. We even tried picking the mess up for her and putting it on their doorstep, but she still refused to do it. So, my one neighbor decided to get a piece of it and smear it all over the front of the house. After that, she started picking it up.

CrabPplCrabPpl

My mom's neighbor called the city on my mom to force her to repair the fence that divided their yards. This lady had always been a crabapple for 10-plus years, but this move really ticked my mom off. The fence did need a few mild repairs, and my mom would have done them right away if the neighbor just talked to her about it (she was already in the process of getting quotes).

The city contacted my mom and told her that she needed to maintain her fence. My mom asked if she had to have a fence by law and the person she talked to could already sense where this was going. Turns out, there are rules about maintaining a fence, but she was not required to have one. So my mom paid a contractor to tear it down entirely.

The neighbor came to talk to my mom and asked when the new fence will be built. My mom replied, "If you want a fence, build it yourself!" A couple of weeks later, my mom had a nice new fence, courtesy of her annoying neighbor. A little petty, perhaps, but hilarious nonetheless.

robothouserock

My grandmother had a neighbor who refused to help her repair the fence between their properties. It was still fully functional as a boundary line, but it was falling apart. Any conversation about fixing the fence ended with him saying that it was on her property, so it must be her responsibility to repair it. I guess that was fair.

She took a fall and was hospitalized for a few weeks. Upon her return, she found a new fence built an extra five feet into her property and a bill in the mail from the neighbor. He argued with her for months that she owed him, saying that the original fence was actually on his property and that where it was now was the boundary line.  So my grandmother got a surveyor and...surprise!

The neighbor had taken five feet of her yard. At that point, she was already very old, frail, and tired of fighting her neighbor. But she had an ingenious way to get her revenge. She planted blackberries along the back fence and within two years, it was covered. Every year, she’d walk the fence and throw seeds over it because, of course, it was still her yard.

After five years of fighting, the blackberries had reclaimed her property. She’s been gone for a few years now but the blackberries remain, and it's her way of haunting her neighbor. He’s tried ripping up the ones on his side of the fence on numerous occasions, but the plants reseed themselves and grow back every year from her side.

almost_a_person

My great-grandfather was one of the last people in town to get indoor plumbing, and as such, he had an outhouse in his backyard. Every year on Halloween, the neighborhood kids would come into his yard and knock over the building, exposing the cesspit. He got tired of it. So one year, the night before Halloween, he moved the building forward and covered the fess with burlap, disguising it in leaves and grass clippings.

In the dark, it was almost impossible to tell it was there. On Halloween night, he sat in the outhouse and waited. It wasn’t long after sundown when he heard the wet splat outside as a couple of kids fell into the muck. He lowered a ladder into the cesspit for them and said they could leave, but only if they promised to never mess with his outhouse again.

The kids honored their promise and even spread the word around the neighborhood not to mess with that outhouse anymore.

Lentra888

My dad was talking to our neighbor about what color he should paint the house and he said, as a joke: “Well, I might as well paint the old house blue.” The neighbor became angry and responded, “You can't do that! A blue house? How stupid and annoying! Don't be dumb,” etc. And that’s how I grew up in a blue house.

Stokbakko

I was visiting my aunt a couple of years ago in Arizona. She lives outside of Phoenix. Her next-door neighbors had three or four kids who were super annoying. There was a brick wall dividing their backyards, and such is common for the area. Upon my arrival, I found out that the kids next door were throwing things over the wall for fun.

Not just like harmless objects like twigs and pebbles, but like rocks, toys, garbage, and even knives. My aunt’s family had to keep their trampoline on the other side of the yard so it wouldn’t get stuff thrown into it. I asked my aunt about it and she said she talked to their parents, but they still kept throwing stuff. So that night, I went online and filed a report with their address.

A couple of days later, the neighbors left a note at the front door with a long apology that basically said “it won’t happen again.” It pretty much stopped after that.

Pink-grey24

When I was really young, our neighbor demanded we move our septic tank because he claimed it was partially on his property. He was a complete jerk about it and just kept hounding us to do it. My dad's a really laid-back person, but eventually, even he got annoyed. So one day, he had the property line surveyed. Turns out, not only was our septic tank on our own property, not his, but the corner of the guy's house and part of his driveway was actually on our land as well.

My dad spent the next few months asking him when he was going to move his house off our land.

lovetolearn4ever

My neighbor had a super annoying son. His friends were constantly running over into our yard and breaking stuff. So, we got a dog named Molly. Every time she had to poop, I'd put her on a leash and walk over to the property line so she could drop off some landmines for the kids. They were always on my property so the neighbors couldn't complain about my dog pooping in their yard.

Finally, the bratty kid had his bratty friends over for a bratty birthday party and his parents sent them all outside to play. Of course, they were running over into our yard. I ended up getting three or four of those little jerks with Molly's landmines. After that, they never came into our yard again. Molly got belly rubs and a hamburger that night.

rhett342

My upstairs neighbor was noisy late at night. At like 2 am, he'd blast music and walk around with heavy feet. We had repeated conversations about it, but he blew us off. He bought us earplugs and told us to simply "deal with it." Unfortunately for him, the breaker box for the building was in our unit. After conducting a few tests with his friendly roommates who hated him just as much as we did, we zeroed in on the breaker to his room and an unoccupied area.

Guess who had strange power issues at night while he was being disruptive? He wasn't the brightest bulb in the box and he never suspected us. The landlord was aware of his disruptiveness and he was already on thin ice, so we asked him not to follow up on the guy's complaints and he was on board. After he got aggressive toward one of his roommates over an unrelated incident, he was kicked to the street at the end of his lease.

DarkyHelmety

My grandpa's neighbor's septic tank started leaking into his backyard. He repeatedly asked him to fix the septic tank and clean up the mess in his yard, but he completely brushed him off. So my grandpa took matters into his own hands. He rigged up a "plumbing" system in his yard and installed an upright PVC pipe that pointed at the neighbor's backyard over the fence.

I don't know how the system worked (I was only about eight years old, as this happened in the early 90s), but it was set up to spray the neighbor's own septic waste over the fence and into the neighbor's beautifully polished yard. And just like that, the neighbor fixed his septic tank. They remained enemies until my grandpa died a couple of decades later.

I miss that old crazy man.

lonedandelion

My old boss had a problem with tipsy kids taking his mother's mailbox. He got tired of replacing them, so he told me to go out there and make sure whatever hits it doesn't keep going. I bought a six-foot-long steel post with under three feet sticking out of the ground, then poured concrete around it and installed the mailbox.

The next tipsy kid that hit it never got a chance to take out the rest of the mailboxes on the street.

M33k_Monster_Minis

The rich brats next door were always throwing loud parties whenever my mom and dad went out of town for a few days, which was often. One Sunday morning, I did a quick inspection of the property and found a bunch of litter had been left in the street or thrown into the grass. The worst part is that there was a public bus stop at the corner of our street, so we started getting complaints.

That night around midnight I gloved up, collected a bunch of them, then snuck into the neighbors' yard and scattered them around the pool, the garage, and the back door where mom was sure to see them when she came home. There were no more parties.

TGMcGonigle

Beehives. Putting them up is allowed where I live, and I have had them for over 10 years. They don't bother anyone and most of my neighbors love them as they are good for their gardens and they get free honey. However, one of my neighbors who moved in five years ago does have a problem with them, apparently. She has called the council and the authorities too many times to count, and they say all tell her the same thing:

They're allowed, they're not annoying anyone, and the bees were there first. So, she tried to take matters into her own hands whilst tipsy—she jumped the fence in the middle of the night with a can of fly spray. It was very dark, so she accidentally jumped into my neighbor's yard instead. Their very large guard dogs bailed her up and she pretty much destroyed their gardens, boat, shed, and car windows trying to get away from them.

When officers arrived at the scene, she admitted that she had tried to poison my bees but went into the wrong yard. She tried to sue me, saying: "If I wasn't trying to poison her bees, none of this would have happened." The officers just laughed at her. They threw the book at her and now my neighbors are suing her for all the damage she caused.

She is now beyond broke. The bees are still there. When I hand out free honey around the neighborhood every few months, I always make sure she is around watching me and I intentionally don't give her any. Other neighbors tell me they regularly mention my bees around her just to see her lose her cool.

When I was 10 or so, an old lady yelled at my brother and me for sitting on "her" curb. She could have asked nicely, but she decided to be a jerk instead. So we came up with the most ingenious prank we've ever pulled. We decided to have an estate sale for her. We got up at like 4 am on a Saturday morning and put up homemade cardboard garage sale signs we made with her address on them.

In big, bold letters, we also wrote: "Early birds welcome." We then sat on the curb a little down the street across from her house and watched people bang on the door for an hour or so. The best part is we didn't put a date on the signs, so if she didn't find them all, people would just keep showing up every Saturday.

AlaskanBiologist

I think I was the annoying neighbor. I used to live in a townhome complex where the back "porches" were just slabs of concrete and there was a field that connected all of them together. One night, I had like six friends over and we were on the slab grilling some chicken wings. We weren't too loud (we had no music playing and we weren't trashed), but I imagine we were still audible to the other buildings.

A woman from across the way started hollering at us, threatening to call the authorities. A few of my friends were like, "Screw that lady," but I decided to take a different route. I plated up about eight wings with our scratch-made buffalo sauce and walked it over to the lady on a paper plate. I then apologized for disturbing her, handing over the plate as a sort of peace offering.

She told me she overreacted and was sorry for yelling at us. I told her it was okay, but I also asked her if she was doing alright because she'd probably had a terrible day; yelling at strangers for a little noise at 7 pm on a Friday like that. She ended up confessing that she did have a bad day, and I told her I was sorry. Moving forward, we kept our volume at a reasonable level as a courtesy to her.

A little while later, she yelled back over that they were the best wings she'd ever had, and we gave a little cheer back to her. Never heard from her again. Hope her days are better now.

Wondershock

After all of my siblings moved out for college, my parents changed the basement into a liveable unit and started renting it out. The first two tenants stayed for five years and they were great. We never had an issue with them. The third group of tenants, however, gave us a lot of problems. They stopped paying rent after three months and since it was winter we couldn't evict them.

My parents had to suffer through their parties while not receiving rent that was meant to go to 70% of the mortgage...They almost lost their house because of these jerks. Well, my brothers and I were home for Christmas that year and after hearing about the issues, we decided to take care of it. Since it was my parents' house and the tenants stopped paying rent, we decided to "move in" with them. These people were such jerks, I don't even regret what we did.

We had the keys, so we would come in and out of the apartment as we wanted. A friend needed a place to sleep? No worries, we had a unit downstairs with two beds and two couches. We'd let them stay for as long as they wanted. The bars were closing but we wanted to keep partying? No problem, we had a furnished apartment and we wouldn't be bothering my parents.

I would go there to shower at 2 or 3 in the morning so I didn't wake my parents up. My brother slept in one of the beds for five days. I invited 20 people once and we were all drinking until 5 am, up until one of the tenants left for work in the morning. They did complain about privacy. We told them that according to the law, we were not allowed to throw them out at that moment; but since they stopped paying rent, they lost all privilege over the unit.

They called 9-1-1 the first night they found my brother sleeping there. We explained the situation to the authorities and said that they'd have to take us to court if they wanted us to stop using our apartment. Some other things we've done: We brought our pets (the tenants were allergic, so I borrowed my friend's cat), we used one of the bedrooms as storage for stuff we were supposed to get rid of, we opened all the windows in the middle of winter, and we disconnected the water heater. We told them to take care of it themselves since they weren't "tenants" but squatters.

randomka111

We had neighbors (one girl above us, one girl below us) that were good friends with each other. The one above had two small dogs (we were only allowed one per apartment) and the one below had a bigger dog. We all got along fine, but the girl above us was a bit of a jerk—she would leave her dogs alone for far too long and be very invasive of our lives.

She'd constantly beg to use our internet or drop by and make herself at home. I was sitting in the living room one day and I heard dragging in the hallway. I went to check it out and saw both of the girls moving a mattress upstairs. They told me the girl below was moving in with the girl above us, making the living room her bedroom so she could sublet her apartment to save some money.

This was an old building, so there was not much in the way of soundproofing. That meant that we would have girl #1 still living there, who was loud enough, as well as girl #2 and the three dogs above us. We decided to keep the peace and not say anything....until that first night. They decided to have their own dance party at 3 am, in HEELS, while screaming wildly.

We said "screw it" and called the landlord. The next morning, there was a pounding on my door. I went over and saw that it was the girl above us. She was flipping the heck out. We apparently ruined their lives by revealing to the landlord that the girl who lived below us was subletting her apartment. That's when the serious battles began.

It turned out she had been behind in rent, so the landlord was sick of her and gave her an eviction notice. That led to her going absolutely nuts. She would constantly stomp on her floor, run the hot water in the building for hours so it would run out on everyone else, encourage her dogs to bark, etc. We changed our WiFi password, enraging her more.

We wanted to take the high road, but soon enough, we needed to take action. We were going away for a couple of days and we knew our next-door neighbors quite well, so we mentioned our plan. They thought it was hilarious. Right before we left, we turned on that annoying French nun song, "Dominique." The upstairs girl may or may not have been named Monique. We hit the replay button, cranked it to full volume, and left for two days.

The landlord called us after about 24 hours. We feigned innocence and claimed that it was a simple oversight on our end (but really, he knew what was up). We gave him permission to go into our place and turn off the music. Both the girls ended up leaving by the end of the month. They did not stop being jerks, but it was satisfying to know how much they suffered for at least 24 hours.

ismileicrazy

My friend had a neighbor who put in a very bright yard light that was pointed at her bedroom window. She asked him to re-aim or dim the light, but he just gave her the cold shoulder. Cue theatre stagehands. She put up a parabolic mirror pointed directly at the dude's bedroom, then used an old projector dowser and an old lighting board to program a chase sequence that was put on repeat for hours on end.

The end result was a beam of randomly blinking light aimed at the neighbor's bedroom window. When he complained, she let him know that it was his light source and all he had to do was turn off his yard light.

hippybiker

My parents have an extremely nosey neighbor who would just stand at the fence and watch what we did. I mean, with her nose resting on the top of the fence. This woman was in her 60s and she had kids and grandkids. I found out the other day that my dad was in the garden with a shovel. Turns out, he throws the slugs and snails in their trampoline and on their veggie plot for being annoying every time they aren’t there.

I couldn’t stop laughing at how petty and hilarious this was. Still makes my day.

23Tam56

My neighbor used to insist on mowing his lawn at 5:30 am every Saturday morning. He had to drive on our property to access his back lawn and he would buzz right past my window with the mower deck down. It would always wake me up. I asked him to stop but he brushed me off. One Friday night after working a late second shift, I left my dog's chain in the tall grass on our property between our houses.

5:30 am Saturday came around and I woke up to the sound of the mower sucking the chain up into the mower deck. The next weekend, I got to sleep in.

mdw825

We briefly had a neighbor who was a complete jerk. My personal pet peeve was when he would yell at our kids to "shut up" while they were playing in the backyard. Next to his driveway was a big tree and I noticed he'd throw occasional hissy fits over the birds defecating on his car. One week, he was out of town but his car was still in the driveway.

Each day, I put a heaping pile of berries (blueberries, strawberries, etc.) next to the tree. He returned home to a car absolutely COVERED in technicolor bird poop.

RandoBoomer

My neighbor is a cop and his kids would always come over to my yard and throw rocks at my house, screech loudly, harass my chickens and leave their coop open, etc. I put up a no trespassing sign and they still showed up. I put up some wire fencing and they still showed up. There was nothing I could actually do to get them in trouble because they felt they were “above the law," given that their dad IS the law.

But luckily, last year I worked at a Halloween store, and so I put a rubber pig mask on the light post in my backyard. Needless to say, he doesn’t let his kids over here anymore.

d24602

Our cats did this all by themselves. Our neighbors got a small yappy dog and they would let it go outside. Our cats figured out if they sat on the fence and stared at him, it would drive the dog completely insane. They were completely safe because the dog couldn't jump that high. They would sit there just watching him lose his temper.

The neighbor asked us to please tell our cats to stop torturing their dog, and we said, "Well, they're cats...they're not really gonna listen to us. How about you don't leave your dog outside all the time?" The guy was kind of a jerk anyway, so we didn't have much motivation to stop them anyway. The dog seemed to be on the verge of losing its sanity, so eventually, they just stopped leaving the dog outside all the time.

zerbey

In college, the guy in the dorm room next to mine was apparently a bit insane. He would bang on our shared wall whenever he heard any noise. The first time he did it, I was just talking to a friend in my room at normal volume in the middle of the day. It kept going like this for months. He once banged on our wall for like five minutes because I sneezed. One day we noticed that he had a large pair of panties and a pair of earplugs taped to his door.

There was a note that read: "Put on your big-girl panties and deal with it." Apparently, his neighbors on the other side were sick of him, too. So one weekend, I was leaving the dorm to visit home, and he started banging on the wall because I flushed a toilet. That was the last straw. I ended up putting a Britney Spears song on repeat, with my speakers up against his wall, and I left for the weekend...being sure to lock all the doors behind me.

Luckboy28

I had a girl at my old apartment complex open the washer with my clothes inside, take them out, and put them on the folding table. She did this right in front of me as I was removing my second load into the dryer. I asked what she was doing and she was like, “These have been in here for like 20 minutes,” and I was like, “No, they haven’t."

I used the laundry app and it said it had just finished washing two minutes prior. I was literally about to put them in the dryer, so I told her, "Please don’t touch my clothes like that." She just let out a rude scoff. I went back 45 minutes later to take my clothes out of the dryer and she was in there doing the same thing AGAIN with someone else’s load. She was taking their damp clothes out to put her own load in.

I knew for a fact the clothes were just done because the cycle only goes for 45 minutes. So I decided to teach her a lesson. I threw my half-eaten banana in with her wash.

samcahnruns

In college, our neighbor kept trying to get us evicted because we had too many cars. She also installed cameras to spy on our house. She called a noise complaint on us one day while we were playing basketball in our driveway and my roommate told her to kiss his butt. He then mooned her and she did not like that one bit. She proceeded to call 9-1-1, saying he had been indecent in front of her kid.

The officers who arrived watched the tapes over. Seeing as we did nothing wrong (and my friend only mooned her as a joke), they just told us to ignore her. We ended up hanging a giant sheet of plastic 20 feet up in the trees along the entire property line so they couldn’t see us. It looked trashy as heck, but it actually brought us peace until our lease ended. Unfortunately, we weren't allowed to renew.

Next-Count-7621

My friend John had a neighbor named David who would siphon gas out of everyone’s vehicles. Nearly all of John’s neighbors had cameras, so they knew who it was, but couldn’t get the guy to stop. John went to the store to purchase a locking gas cap and while he was there, he had a bit of a light bulb moment. He decided to buy one for David’s car instead. John waited until David was asleep that night to hatch his plan.

At around 9 pm, he installed the locking gas cap on David’s car. Apparently, David flipped out and went door-to-door asking all of the neighbors he knew had cameras to tell him who did it. Miraculously, everyone’s camera failed to work that day. John said the car sat up for about a week before David was able to remove it. After realizing how much his neighbors hated him, David decided to move.

Justso_Tiny_756

My previous neighbor was the biggest jerk I'd ever lived next to. I got passive revenge one day by deciding to fertilize my yard with that stinky fishy liquid formula when I noticed he was having all his mates over for a barbecue.

Chromattix

Years ago, when you could advertise house sales in the paper without too many pictures, my brother put in an ad for his obnoxious neighbor’s house. He priced it at about $75K under market value as a private sale with the neighbor's phone number. He found out the guy was inundated with calls for weeks.

hank-_-the-_-tank

We did this at our last rental house. The neighbors were constantly fighting and we'd hear it through the walls since we lived in a semi-detached property. They would also get tipsy every weekend and blast loud music until 4 am. Well, one time, the girlfriend went out of town for a week for some work training thing and while she was gone, we saw another girl park outside the house. We also heard the boyfriend and the new girl going at it very loudly.

At their next party, my partner and I both went over to ask them to turn the music down. The boyfriend opened the door and started shouting that we should mind our own business. Then, the girlfriend appeared behind him and said the same. That's when my wife casually asked the most devastating question: "Oh, did you get back together? What about that nice blonde girl who was here all last week?" Then we just went home and enjoyed listening to them throwing everyone out and having their last fight.

Wind_Yer_Neck_In

I have some upstairs neighbors that are obnoxious. Their subwoofer quakes to action movies around midnight. They also have LOUD, bed-breaking intimacy. But the worst thing they do is tan leather in their apartment, which means there is hammering and dragging around of equipment at all hours of the night. Sometimes, I blast my stereo for 30 seconds and they quiet down.

One weekend, I had my kids over and the neighbors were being super loud. Things were being dropped on the floor and people were rolling around. It was like they were wrestling with all the yelling and laughing. I remembered seeing a Bluetooth speaker show up on my devices list when they moved it. It wasn’t secured with a PIN, so anyone could join it. I instantly had an idea—it was evil, but it had to be done.

I waited until the kids were gone and at around 10 pm I connected to their speaker. Then. I found a creepy ASMR video on YouTube where a guy role-plays as a slayer and describes what he will be doing to his victim in detail. I turned it to max volume, then after a few minutes, I turned it off. I heard frantic running around all over the place with doors opening and slamming.

I couldn’t stop chuckling. Dead silence for two glorious weeks.

REHTONA_YRT

My neighbor had a bad habit of parking too many cars in our really small parking lot. There were only enough spots for two cars per apartment, and there were four apartments total. They often had three to five cars parked at any given time. I always had to ask them to vacate our parking spots when we got home. Every day practically.

The neighbor on the other side of me got their Pontiac stuck in the driveway because of the snow. They left it there overnight and the next morning when everyone needed to leave for work and whatnot, it was right in the middle of the driveway. Everybody started yelling at me because I guess they both expected me to fix the situation with my truck.

I told my boyfriend at the time that we were NOT to help either of them. They both went to HIM and asked if my truck could be used to get the car out. My truck. No. I dug out enough of the snowbank to get myself out and let them deal with the rest. Both of the neighbors got in my face, so at that point, I definitely wasn't lending them my truck.

ZombieBunnzoli85

On my last day in my old apartment, I went #1 on a plate and stuck it in the freezer. Then, I waited until it froze, detached the frozen disc from the plate, and slid it under his front door so that it would eventually melt on his carpet. Thanks to three years of loud music at 3 am every night, neighbor.

AussieJimboLives

I decided to fence in my backyard and I asked my neighbor if he would pay for half of it since it also ran along his property line. He declined. So I installed a fence around my backyard a few inches on my side of the property line. My neighbor then tied a new fence into my fence, as well as to our other neighbor's fence on the other side.

So he only paid for about 40 feet of fence altogether and he managed to get his entire yard fenced in. Jerk move! But it wasn't a big deal, even though he got a few extra square feet of backyard space and a free fence on two sides for free. Sometime later, his dog knocked a hole in my fence. He asked me to fix it since his dog could escape.

I declined. I told him to fix it since it was my fence and his dog did the damage. He called code enforcement and the homeowners association. It turned out that if I have a fence, I have to keep it in good repair. I was out of luck—but I knew how to get my revenge. I repaired the fence and then painted the side of my fence that faced his property high liner yellow, blue, green, mixed with slates of black and brown.

According to the bylaws, I get to choose the color of my fence as long as it is in good repair. He complained about it to the HOA but they told him they couldn't do anything. Eventually, he caved and painted over my fence. I had him charged with vandalism and he was fined. He also had to repaint my fence with the original terrible colors.

But he didn't stop there—he then bulk emailed the entire subdivision, asking them to support him in his attempt to get me to paint my fence. Instead, the neighbor to his other side and behind him all painted their fences to match mine. He moved a few months later.

CaptainFlyingsolo

I live in a weekend lakefront community. My neighbor is just a weekender, but when he comes out, he acts as if we all work for him or something. It's like he thinks we owe him—he expects us to be completely silent and be essentially invisible to him. He hates dogs and physically hurts my puppies through the fence. Naturally, the dogs are terrified of him and bark as soon as they see him.

It drives him crazy and it simply makes things worse. I don't let the dogs bark for long, but I refuse to keep them inside all weekend just for his sake. Anyway, the lake flooded a few years ago, and it presented the perfect opportunity to teach him a lesson. I went around securing all my neighbors' boats and kayaks—all but his stuff. I enjoyed watching his boat float away.

dowend

When the house next door was being built, the "new" owners told the builders to use my electricity to build their house. When I said heck no, they put a really big generator on the border of my house and placed boards along the side to force the noise in my direction. Well after three days of that nonsense, they all went home for the weekend.

I went out with my sprinklers from the front and back and I let them run over it until Sunday night. Needless to say, after they walked over to start it on Monday, it sank in about six inches. They tried to tow it out with their truck but it sank too, and they had to call a heavy wrecker to pull themselves out as the truck sank to the doors.

They threatened to sue for damages but couldn't prove anything and all the other neighbors sided with me.

pennypanic1

The street I grew up on was paved to a certain point, and the rest was a dirt road that ran up through a farm. A family lived in a trailer on that dirt road and their son, Gary, would FLY down the road in his '84 Lincoln. We, as kids, were always riding bikes or playing hockey in the street, and pretty much every parent had complained about Gary to his parents.

They didn't care. We had county leaf pick-up, so we could blow all our leaves into a pile near the street and a truck would come by and suck them all up. This was Gary's favorite time of the year as he would drive his car through the leaves with multiple passes to hit both sides of the street. My neighbor across the street was fed up with him and decided to act.

He put cinder blocks in his leaf pile. It was 2 am and the neighborhood was awakened by a loud BOOM followed by people laughing on their front porches as Gary's '84 Lincoln had a cinder block through his grill.

hoots711

I moved to a small rural town where everyone knows everyone. The townspeople love to inject the “will of the Lord” into everything. It’s quite annoying. I was just some random guy nobody knew. Last year was my first time having a garden and I was so proud of my tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers. I told a trusted neighbor to help herself to some of my crops.

When the time came to pick a bunch of tomatoes and peppers, I went to the garden and found it absolutely picked clean from the day before. Knowing that the frail old lady didn’t do this, I set up cameras in the garden to catch the thieves in the act. Over the course of a week, I caught four different fully-grown adults on camera snooping and taking from my garden.

I did some research and found out that all but one of them worked full-time and they were in no need of food or financial assistance. I left the needy family out of this. I went to the community Facebook page with 5,000 members and posted pictures of them stealing from my garden with the caption: “God blessed me with this beautiful bounty and I’m so thankful he led the less fortunate and hungry to my garden to nourish their HONEST souls.”

I sat back, and watched the notifications and hate comments fly. Never again has a tomato been picked without someone asking.

FormerStuff

I have an old neighbor who represents maybe one of five white households in a mixed minority neighborhood. He likes to call code enforcement on everyone for every little thing. He did it once when my trash can lid didn’t close completely. It’s gotten to a point where the code enforcement guy just texts me directly because he’s obligated to respond to every complaint.

I get someone to do a massive trim of my three pecan trees every other spring. This past fall, after an incident in which he contacted the city over my just expired registration, I got a knock on my door from the power company. They were present “on behalf” of my neighbor. They had recently fixed the street lamp dividing our front property which had been out for two years, and a singular large pecan tree branch was preventing light from shining on his driveway.

They couldn’t do anything to force me to trim the branch, but they were still requesting I do so on behalf of my neighbor. So naturally, this year, when it was time to trim my pecan trees, can you guess which branch didn’t get cut?

EvilPilotFish

The woman who lived above our apartment was a psycho when it came to noise. I’m talking just regular, run-of-the-mill, everyday noise. My partner and I are very quiet. This woman could not stand the ceiling fan in our apartment. She said she heard it over her TV at all hours (even though we only ran it in the afternoon when we were in our living room).

Our landlords said she was a nuisance for years about the ceiling fan. They had technicians come in several times and they all said there was no real sound coming off it. Yet, the woman would be so upset over it that she'd throw tantrums, stomping her feet back and forth across her unit whenever it was on. We had no AC, so it was really our only source of air circulation when we used it.

The day we moved out, we knew the apartment wouldn’t be accessed for two weeks. We cranked that ceiling fan up to 11, closed the door, locked it, then dropped the key in the mail back to the landlord who was five states away.

Nightswimm

I deliberately don’t mow my front lawn because it’s seeded with lots of native wildflowers, which makes it a magnet for bees, butterflies, hoverflies, etc. My neighbor complained about it, saying he thought it didn’t fit in with the other manicured lawns and green spaces of the area. Fair enough. But rather than give in to his demands and mow my lawn, I wrote to the local council and suggested a “help the pollinators” wildflower initiative.

The local council doesn’t mow the verges anymore in summer (about half the neighbors don’t either), so all of them resemble my mini “unsightly” wildflower meadow rather than the neighbor’s chemical patch of a lawn. It drives him mad every summer without fail.

Stormaen

Our neighbor hit our car and when we tried to work it out with her, she threatened to kill our cat. We set up cameras at our house and decided to let karma run its course. Sure enough, a few months later, her husband filed for a divorce and she began stalking him. She ended up getting apprehended by the authorities three times due to her unruly behavior.

Every time she had a tantrum, it happened in full glory right in front of our house, so we caught it all on camera. We'd set up chairs with snacks to enjoy the show of her getting placed in the wagon.

Sahellio

I poured salt all over my neighbor's lawn after his kids threw bricks at my dogs. The best part is, he owned one of the largest lawn care companies in my hometown. He lost a tremendous amount of business after his prize-winning lawn turned into a barren wasteland.

HernandezFam2020

Our neighbor was a pain in the butt. He would call the authorities on us even if we were just standing in our yard, minding our own business. He didn't have a mental problem; he was just a jerk who thought calling 9-1-1 would scare us. We would hear him on the phone saying, "They're standing in their yard, talking again."

The officers would often apologize for coming by, explaining that they had no choice but to respond to the complaints. Sometimes, they would just drive by and wave to us while shaking their heads. So one night, we had enough. We bought a thousand-count string of firecrackers, made a makeshift fuse, put it in his garage, and waited. Needless to say, it was super lit.

gambler328

When I was in middle school, our upstairs neighbor made a ton of noise every night around 9 pm. She'd be moving furniture, arguing with her partner at top volume, slamming doors, etc. So my mom always had me practice my tuba under her bedroom before school in the morning. A simple payback.

thejrush13

When my boyfriend was 14, he was living with his mom and sister on a housing estate. It was summer and he liked a bit of light in his upstairs bedroom, so he left the curtains open at all times. That included when he was getting dressed and after having a shower, so if you purposefully stared at his window, you could see him from his waist up (and only his waist up).

Well, their neighbor did not like that one bit. She went pounding on their door, yelling at my mother-in-law that her son was a disgrace, hanging around always naked and exposing himself to her daughter. My mother-in-law told her he had every right to do whatever he wanted in his bedroom, and that if they didn't want to see him all they needed to do was not to look.

A couple of days went by and lo and behold, the authorities showed up at the neighbor’s door. Turned out the neighbor had been filming and taking pictures of my boyfriend to show to the housing people as evidence of his wrongdoing to get them kicked out. Except that the housing office called the authorities on her for taking pictures and videos of an underage kid and kicked her and her family out.

_darksoul89

In our first house, my wife and I had a neighbor who disliked us from the start. Apparently, the people who lived in the property before we did were his family friends—they went through a divorce and ended up selling the house to us. He was petty and mean to my wife, who doesn’t like confrontation, and he'd do annoying things to mess with her.

He'd park across our driveway before she left for work, throw pieces of wood over the fence, let his dog go all over our lawn and not pick any of it up, etc. I tried talking to him a couple of times, but he promptly told me to screw off. That was the last straw—I had to fight back. I knew he loved his lawn because he'd always brag about how it looked to everyone, so the next time it rained, I went out back and threw an entire box of oxo cubes into their backyard and let the rain melt them into the grass.

His dog absolutely destroyed his yard looking for the smell and I would make sure to comment on it every chance I got. We moved shortly after.

Caffinejunkie9

My house is right on the corner of an area where the road turns into a T, and I had issues with people cutting the corner and driving through my yard. One time, someone even nearly hit my dog. So I bought a boulder that was probably 300 or 400 pounds and put it right on the corner. That winter, we had a bad snowstorm.

Someone was coming through in a lifted Dodge and he hit the boulder going about 20 mph. He totaled the truck. Since then, I’ve had zero issues with people.

Prestigious-Yoghurt3

I had a neighbor who won the lottery (about $800k USD after taxes) and he decided that made him God. He also had an addiction problem and would stay up late partying and playing music at all hours of the day and night. I live in a small mountain town and the sound echoes terribly. Well, this guy "Dear John'd" his husband of 8 years and at one point was making violent threats against him.

The authorities got involved and the neighbor got slapped with domestic charges. But that's just the beginning: AFTER the charges were filed, this neighbor decided he would buy a firearm, which was totally not allowed. He had to lie about the pending charges to get it, and then he told his ex that once he got it, he was going to end him. After that, he decided that partying out in Portland was more important than attending his court date, and he subsequently had a bench warrant issued to him.

On the Friday of a St. Patty's weekend, he was blasting his music again, so I called 9-1-1 to register a noise complaint. He likely had a scanner, because every single time, before they came, he turned down the music. They'd arrive not hearing any music, then let me know there was not much they could do. At that point, I let it slip that he had an active warrant. They ended up taking him in.

Because he blew all of his lottery money and alienated himself from every friend he used to have, he spent the whole long weekend behind bars with every other jerk who was there. About three weeks later, he put his house up for sale. A crowning achievement for me.

HBICharles

I had the neighbor's house condemned and torn down. It's kind of a long story, but it was so worth it. So, the property next to me had two houses on it. The owners decided to gut and remodel one of them, and they piled the demolition debris in the front yard...directly next to my house. That stuff stayed there for a full year, with the owners ignoring my every effort to get them to do something about it (they did not live on the property, they were renting it out).

So I eventually checked with the city about their remodel permits and found that not only did they not have permits, but as far as the city was concerned, the house didn't exist. It had been built with no plans or permits filed and tied into the other house utilities. So I talked to the city planner’s office and they came out to put a stop-work order on the house (which was not really necessary since no work had been done in a year).

They also condemned the house. They told the owners they wouldn't be fined or prosecuted if they demolished the property. That sounds drastic, but the house was already gutted with no windows or doors, and they weren't going to let them restore it. So that's how I got someone's house torn down.

McFeely_Smackup

Sources: 1, 2

It should surprise no one that Angelina Jolie comes from a show biz family. Both her dad, Jon Voight, and her mom, Marcheline Bertrand, were actors. Their relationship was, to put it lightly, a total mess.

Voigt and Bertrand met not long after Voight’s first divorce. They got married in 1971—but this was no fairy tale. It was more like a horror story.

After a tragic miscarriage, Voight and Bertrand went on to have two children: James in 1973, and Angelina in 1975. But this happy family broke apart almost immediately.

Soon after Angelina was born, Bertrand separated from Voight. Turns out, Voight wasn’t the dream husband she’d been looking for…

Bertrand outright stated that Voight’s adultery was the reason for their split. Fair play—but what was going to happen to their young family?

Marcheline Bertrand gave up her acting career to raise her children. And where was dad? Nowhere to be found…

Jon Voight wasn’t very far removed from his star-making turn in Midnight Cowboy when his marriage fell apart. He wasn’t about to quit just to spend time with his kids! Clearly, his relationship with Angelina was messed up from the start. But it only got worse as she grew older…

As a little girl, Jolie barely ever saw her father. He was too busy with his career to make time for his family—and when he did see them, it wasn’t much better.

Jon Voight gave his daughter her first-ever film role: Angelina Jolie had a small part in one of Voight's movies when she was just seven years old. But this was no "father-daughter bonding" time...

Jolie has talked about how every time she saw her father when she was young, there just “happened” to be a bunch of press around. Pretty soon, she'd realize the truth…

The 1986 Oscars were yet another one of Voight's photo-ops. Angelina and her brother James attended the ceremony along with their father, who was nominated for an award. But after the glitz and glamour were over, Voight left yet again. There's a pattern here...

Voight only made time for his family when it could help his career. If there were no cameras around, he couldn’t give his kids the time of day. No surprise that this had some horrible effects on his young daughter.

Angelina Jolie did not have a happy childhood. She developed insomnia and struggled with eating disorders. She needed a way to cope…and that sent her to dark places.

Angelia Jolie began to self-harm as a teenager—but that was just her first step down a twisted path.

Next, Jolie turned to drugs. By just 20, she claims to have tried “just about every drug possible.” No surprise, this didn’t solve any of her problems. She just kept spiraling, and her beloved dad was still nowhere to be found.

Jolie's struggles in her youth culminated in two suicide attempts before she was 22. The second time, she even hired a professional to end her life for her. She survived each time, but something clearly had to give.

By the time she was 24 years old, Angelina Jolie had a complete nervous breakdown. She was sent to a psychiatric ward for 72 hours. That marked a turning point in her life, and she started to turn things around. No credit to her father, though...

Voight wasn’t around when Jolie was a kid, so why would he be around once she grew up? But Jolie's star was rising, and on the biggest night of her life, she hinted that it might be time to build a bridge between them. Oh, how she would regret it...

Jolie and Voight’s tense relationship was no secret in Hollywood—so imagine the crowd’s surprise at the Oscars when Jolie accepted her statue for Girl, Interrupted. She looked over to her father and said, “Dad, you're a great actor but you're a better father.” Was it finally time for these two to make up??

Jolie's speech had a serious effect on her dad. Later, she revealed, "He told me that that was one of the...biggest compliments somebody could give him, that it was so important to be a great father." It seems like Voight thought sending a check every month made him a good father...

After years of shaky parenting, it seemed like Angelina was finally coming around to her dear old dad. She even hung his drawings and poems in her house with husband Billy Bob Thornton. It seemed like the rough seas were behind them. It was really just the eye of the storm.

Around the year 2000, Jolie and Voight were maybe the closest they've ever been. She even brought him along with her to an interview at a reporter's house, where Voight fretted over her the entire time. Now it was time to take their newfound relationship to the next level.

Jolie had acted alongside her father once before—but that was just a bit part for a little girl new to acting. After her Oscar win, Jolie decided it was time for father and daughter to really share the big screen.

Jolie and Voight teamed up for the first time in their adult lives in 2001’s Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. For better or worse, that production changed both of their lives forever.

Leading up to Tomb Raider, Angelina Jolie was on top of the world. She'd just won an Oscar, she was in the best shape of her life, training for the movie kept her away from her self-destructive habits, and her relationship with her dad had never been better. What better time for everything to fall apart?

Jolie adopted her first child in 2001, a boy from Cambodia named Maddox. Children gave her a newfound purpose in life—but her screw-up of a dad almost ruined everything.

Jolie needed approval before she could adopt Maddox, so she wanted to keep it a secret until it was finalized. Welp, Voight blew that by mentioning the adoption in an interview.

Voight’s big mouth almost stopped the adoption, as Cambodian adoption laws are very strict to prevent trafficking. However, much to Jolie's relief, it eventually went through. But that doesn’t mean he was done flapping his lips.

The world assumed that Jolie and Voight had buried the hatchet after Tomb Raider. The truth was way more complicated than that. Who knows what exactly was going on behind the scenes, but a year after the movie came out, Voight gave an interview to Access Hollywood—and he dropped a bombshell.

Whatever went on between Jolie and Voight during Tomb Raider must have been messy. In 2002, he told the world that Jolie had "mental problems" and desperately needed help. And he didn't even leave it there.

Jon Voight used his newfound closeness with his daughter against her. In his bombshell Access Hollywood interview, he said his daughter suffered from "serious emotional problems that I have witnessed very closely." He'd been back in Jolie's life for all of a couple years, and already he'd betrayed her. Jolie was furious.

Easy come, easy go. Jolie and Voight reunited after decades of estrangement for Tomb Raider—and after that interview, Jolie once again cut off all contact with her dad. But it was too late to stop the damage that he'd done.

In hindsight, we all know that Angelina Jolie is a lot more trustworthy than Jon Voight, but the media picked up his interview and ran with it. Public opinion shifted and everyone began to assume that Jolie, with her tattoos and crazy marriages, was unwell—and she's still fighting off those rumors today. Thanks a lot, Jon...

Jolie was extremely secretive when asked about her father after she cut off contact. She simply said, "I don't want to make public the reasons for my bad relationship with my father." All she would say was that it was "not healthy" for her to be around Voight. You could say that again...

Angelina originally took the screen name "Jolie" because she didn't want people to think she was just another spoiled child of a movie star. After his bombshell interview, she decided to make it official.

Everyone knew her as Angelina Jolie anyway, but after Voight's claim that she had "mental problems," Jolie wanted to get rid of any connection to him. She had her name legally changed to Angelina Jolie—and later, when asked why she did it, she didn't exactly pull any punches.

When the host of The Hollywood Reporter's podcast Awards Chatter asked Jolie why she changed her name, the reason was simple: "I didn't feel that close to my father. I felt more of my mother's daughter when I was a child." Can you blame her?

Jolie has been extremely cagey when it comes to her feud with her father, but she has revealed some nuggets. When asked why she cut him out of her life, she said, "The amount of tears shed growing up, and the amount of screaming matches, and the amount of insecurities seen [impacting] on my mother and my brother because of fights and things said, is simply not healthy."

If you had to give one reason for why Angelina cut off her dad, it would be her children: "I have to be strong for my son, and I don't want to have in his environment something that upsets me and makes his mother not as strong. So it's simple—no negative feelings, it is just not healthy for me to have that contact with my father." But would they ever make up?

For Angelina Jolie, her mother was everything Voight wasn't. The two remained incredibly close right up until Bertrand's passing from cancer in 2007. It was a devastating blow—and the reason for the first time Jolie contacted her father in years.

Jolie broke her silent treatment to tell Voight about Bertrand's passing, but it wasn't easy. She hadn't spoken to him in years, and she was in mourning, but she knew she had to do something...

It had been six years since Angelina had spoken to her father. She debated breaking the news in a letter, but she finally gave in and picked up the phone. But if you were expecting a tearful, heartwarming reunion, think again...

After not speaking for six years, Jolie talked with Voight...for all of two minutes. As she put it, "I wasn't calling to take care of him. I was calling to pass on information." The wounds in their relationship were too deep to heal just like that. With her mother at the forefront of her mind, Jolie couldn't help but remember the pain he'd caused...

Throughout their estrangement, Voight kept trying to contact Jolie. In 2008, he said, "I'm always trying to reach her and send my love," but Jolie did not feel the same way. It took Brad Pitt to get her to give him a chance.

Though losing her mother did little to convince Jolie that she should reconnect with Voight, the people in her life felt differently. Brad Pitt began to urge her to contact her father for one specific reason.

Even Brad Pitt saw that Voight and Jolie's relationship wasn't healthy, but he was thinking of his children, who almost never saw their grandfather.

By 2010, Jolie was ready to admit publicly that she was at least trying to fix her relationship with her father. But Jolie had been hurt too many times to just jump back in...

Jolie began taking baby steps toward seeing her father again. First, they simply spoke on the phone. It wasn't much, but it was a start. And, against all odds, Voight didn't screw it up!

Voight had Brad Pitt in his corner, but that doesn't mean it was enough to get him invited to the wedding. When Jolie and Pitt married in 2014, Voight did not make the guest list. To be fair, only 22 people did...but Brad's parents were there and we'll leave it at that. Still, time heals all wounds, as they say...

It was a big step when Voight met Jolie's children. They were still far cry from one big happy family, but they were getting there. At least Voight was saying the right things this time around...

Since reconnecting with his daughter, Voight can't gush enough about her: "She’s very strong. And that persona is very rare...She’s like one of those people like Bogart or Katharine Hepburn. She’s one of those guys.” For an aging actor like Voight, that's high praise indeed—and not a single mention of mental problems!

The kids are definitely what brought Voight and Jolie back together. By all accounts, Voight loves being a grandfather a whole lot more than he ever loved being a father. But just because Voight is back in Jolie's life doesn't mean he doesn't have a few ground rules.

No surprise, after their roller-coaster relationship, that Jolie keeps Voight in check around her kids: "He knows kind of the rule—don’t make them play with you. Just be a cool grandpa who’s creative, and hang out and tell stories and read a book in the library." And it seems like, against all odds, Voight has actually been following the rules. Good thing, too, because for the first time in a long time, his daughter actually needed him.

Most of Jolie and Voight reconnecting took place away from prying eyes, so paparazzi had a field day in 2017 when they spotted Voight, Jolie, and four of her kids out having dinner together like a normal family! So what gives? Well, anyone watching the tabloids would know that not everything was going great in Jolie's life at that time...

Jolie's contentious split from Brad Pitt gave Voight the chance he'd been waiting years for. As Jolie navigated the divorce, she grew closer to Voight than she'd been in decades, saying, "Jon and I have gotten to know each other—through grandchildren now—we're finding a new relationship." Though that doesn't mean her relationship with "Jon" is easy.

Brangelina's split was the tabloid event of the decade—so of course, reporters flocked to Jon Voight's big mouth to try and get a quote. Voight, for the most part, remained cagey and vague—though he couldn't help but stir the pot a little.

Unprompted, Voight said, "[Brad] has had some difficulties with alcohol and I hope that he takes care of things and I pray for the guy.” A subtle dig at Pitt to try and help Angelina in her custody battle? That's what a lot of people assumed. But some people made an even more sinister suggestion.

Some tabloids, citing anonymous "sources," claimed that Angelina only reconciled with her father to give her an edge in her custody battle. Otherwise, her famously loud-mouthed father might throw her under the bus and ruin everything. And, to be fair to those people, the timing was a little fishy...

Gossip hounds couldn't help but notice that Jolie "just so happened" to reconnect with her father right before her split from Pitt. But remember, Jolie had no intention of seeing Voight again until Pitt pushed her to do it. So either she's the most devious mastermind in history, or that tabloid story was bogus.