I have never understood the fascination with running around the wilderness. The wilderness is dirty.
There are bugs and snakes and wild animals that will eat you alive. I've been asked many times to spend the night in a tent.
On the floor. Laying on the hard soil. Does that sound sexy? I think not.
The wilderness is a dangerous place.
There are actually serial killers who take advantage of the forests of the world to hunt humans. Just look up the documentaries on Netflix. Which is safer than hanging out in the trees.
And that is just the tip of the riverbed.
Redditor u/cherrylbombshell wanted hear about all the secrets and dangers that lie in the wild, by asking:
Campers of reddit, what's the creepiest thing that happened to you in the wilderness/ at the campsite?
I won't even glamp. I don 't want to hangout in a cabin with a so-so wifi connection. I'm getting hives just thinking about it. There are better ways to die than to succumb to the darkness of the forest.
Demons...
max von sydow priest GIFGiphy"Possum fight in the tree above my tent. Thought all the demons were coming for me."
MOOOOO!!!
"When I was camping I heard lots of rustling and noise during the night. I was alone in my tent but there was 100% something moving outside. I was terrified and I saw silhouettes of an animal in the distance moving. All of a sudden I heard the biggest and deepest MOO you've ever heard. A herd of free-range cows had found their way to me. One cow almost took down my tent but it was all good. They were really chill."
In British Columbia...
"Some random guy was shuffling through my stuff at night. I was many hours into wilderness in British Columbia. I stayed absolutely quiet and terrified in my sleeping bag in my tent and he left after like 5 minutes. I had my pocket knife out in case he tried coming into my tent. I didn't sleep all night. In the morning I got out and checked what was stolen. Mostly food and batteries so I thought that he might just be doing this because he ran out of supplies but he also took my $600 camera so I guess not."
On the Move
"I used to camp pretty often at a wilderness spot that was a flat ridge on top of a big steep hill. One section had a trail that was steep but manageable, but the rest of this hill is almost vertical and would be impossible to climb without ropes and a bunch of climbing gear."
"Even though the top was flat, it was a heavily wooded area, thick pine trees. Lots of underbrush. Great views of the area, and far enough off the road we never saw other people. That particular trip, my girlfriend and best friend came along, so 3 of us spread out in 2 tents. Sometime in the middle of the night a storm blew through and dropped about an inch of snow on our tents."
"It was a calm night without any wind, and really peaceful all zipped up in our sleeping bags. When we woke up at first light there was a distinct trail of human footprints in the snow that went all the way across the ridge, through our camp, and came about 2 feet from our tents."
"The crazy thing was the footprints started from an area that would be impossible to climb up, and ended at another area that would be impossible to climb down. Let alone in the dark with snow making the rocks slippery. We measured the foot prints and they were smaller than my friend and I's boots, too big to be my girlfriend's."
"Could never figure out how someone climbed up that section in the middle of the night, moved through the thick forest without making a sound, and came so close to our tents without anyone knowing. Creepy enough we packed up pretty fast and got out of there!"
Sacrifices
Scared The Launch GIF by CTVGiphy"I was on a Search and Rescue training weekend. We specialized in locating downed private planes so we were seriously in the middle of nowhere. Hours into the woods, we found an old abandoned lookout tower. The inside was covered in huge graphic paintings of animal sacrifices. The middle of the room had a pile of animal bones. The whole thing was unbelievably creepy."
So far, hell no. Bears, possums, downed planes. I'd rather just read about it in a survivor's autobiography. The closest I've come to camping was passing out in my car. That was more than enough. But wait, there's more...
Uglies...
pig sniffing GIFGiphy"A herd of Javelinas came into our campsite in the middle of the night. As quick as we could we made a run for it to the van and slept there. They didn't do much of anything, but they're big ugly pigs."
Wild Horses
"This was upstate NY along the Canadian border. I wasn't camping, but I was out fly fishing one evening... It was right about that time when you look into the woods, it's pitch black, outside of the bush you could see relatively well. I was at my favorite spot, about half way in the river when on the opposite side, in the woods I could hear something walking."
"It was slow, somewhat methodical, and it just kept getting closer to me. I started hearing it about 100 feet away, and within 10 minutes it had slowly advanced up to a set of rocks and shrubs right next to the river. All the while, if I heard a particularly loud stick break or leaf crunch, the steps/sounds would stop for a bit."
"At this point, I'd call out a few times, hoping it might be someone but no response... Just this creepy feeling of being stared at. Being alone, unarmed, having recently seen a mountain lion a couple kilometers away (no joke) I was a little on edge so I backed out of the water (never turning my back), fishing was good so I high tailed it about half a kilometer down the river and went back to fishing."
"Wasn't long before I had the same eerie sounds of foot steps in the woods working their way up to me. At this point I got the f**k out of there as quickly as possible. Hell I didn't even change out of my waders at the parking lot, I jumped in the truck drove a few miles down the road to a parking lot in town and changed there. About a week later, local papers reported a horse which had been attacked and suffered serious damage from what the vet described as an attack by a very "large cat" at a farm next to where I had been fishing."
Wild Camper
"A few years ago, I loaded a bunch of camping gear onto my bicycle and spent the better part of the next seven months riding 5,300 miles (8,500 km) around the US. Most often I preferred to wild camp. An hour or so before dark, I'd start looking for somewhere to disappear into the woods for the night, somewhere people were unlikely to find me and even less likely to care that I was there."
"A remote forest makes for far from a silent night's sleep. Think of all the crickets in a suburban neighborhood on a summer night, and amplify that by about a thousand. There were always so many crickets and toads, and even the slightest breeze would stir music out of the tree leaves."
"Maybe I'd camp near a babbling creek. And it was always a highlight of the night —though not particularly uncommon— to hear the yips and howls of distant coyotes. I can recall one night where I fell asleep to the sound of two nearby owls, one on either end of my tent, calling back and forth."
"One night in late September or early October, I was camping somewhere in the mountains of western Montana. And it was dead silent. There was not the slightest sound to be heard, not a single cricket, no nearby river or faraway coyotes. The dry leaves of autumn surely wouldn't've required a strong wind to stir their song. And yet, there was only silence."
"It was terrifying. I can only describe it as the loudest silence I've ever heard. It felt as though the entire forest was hiding from an equally silent predator. Suddenly the occasional snapping of a twig —a common sound normally lost in the cacophony of the forest— was like a gunshot. I slept terribly that night, and morning could not come soon enough."
Spawning Season
"I was camping in British Columbia just across the boarder to Washington. We set up camp next to a river had dinner and went to bed, while trying to sleep I could hear splashing in the river on and off, sounded like something trying to drown another thing and we'd hear this every couple of minutes but didn't go and check as it was terrifying and pitch black. Well morning comes and we go check outside the tent and we realise we'd just heard the salmon working their way up steam for spawning season."
Wile E?
wile e coyote GIFGiphy"Coyotes. Coyotes surrounding my tent while I was 2 hours away from any sign of civilization."
How many people are wondering around the woods robbing people? Goodness, there are more thieves than bears. And I know for a fact real coyotes are not as funny in person as Wile E. I'm telling you, just watch the cartoons.
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Companies are typically in business for profit, and very few have the goal of keeping the customer's interests in mind.
But some corporations go even further to get more out of their customer in exchange for their "quality services" and as a result, the line between general business and scam becomes blurred.
Redditor jwwin asked:
"What is a predatory business that shouldn't be legal, but is?"
Students paying an exorbitant amount in tuition in order to seek higher learning should be warned there are additional expenses to cover for.
A Textbook Example
"College textbooks, they will release an 'updated' edition every semester but the information doesn't change. And then after you spent a fortune on the books the places that buy textbooks will give you like 5% of what you paid for the book."
– teethalarm
A "Double Whammy"
"Former Prof here. I talked with a book rep about this once and learned a lot. It is a bit complicated but worth understanding. Book publishers rely on large quantity sales to make any money on a book because the cost of production is so high up front (author, editors, printing, etc.). So, for a book to be profitable, it has to sell a lot of copies to spread the cost of production across all the books. A paperback in the fiction section might sell 100,000 or more. A textbook might sell as few as 1,000. So, the publisher needs everyone to buy the book to break even."
"Now add colleges into the mix. Somewhere in the 1980s (give or take), colleges saw publishers selling books and making larger profits on them than the college bookstore was making per book. So they got the bright idea to start buying used texts and reselling them. Before that, a text would come out and 97% (making the number up but it was close to that) of the students would buy the book in year one, 85% in year two, 75% in year three, 60% in year four and 50% in year five. A $50 dollar book would cost $25 to make (again, making the numbers up), sell to the bookstore for $40 ($15 publisher profit), and be sold to the student for $50 ($10 bookstore profit). Across the five years, the producer would make a profit."
"Then, college bookstores began offering students $25 for a used book and selling it for $40 ($15 profit - $5 higher than that of a new book). Students would then prefer the $40 used book over the $50 new book. But that cut the publisher's sales from 97% to 50% in the first year. Because they could not sell as many books they had to do two things: (1) raise the initial price of the text to cover the production cost in 1-2 years rather than 4-5 years, and (2) cut the cycle down from 4-5 years to 1-2 years to ensure that they got sales of the book. That is a double whammy. Texts that used to cost $50 now cost $300 or more. And they have a new version out every 18 months or so. Students refuse to pay that price and that cuts the sales numbers even further forcing the price up again. And, with new editions out so frequently, it is harder to sell them back to the bookstore."
"That's why you see so many 'course packs' now - where a professor will pick a few pages from a book to give to the students. I went from having nearly every student purchasing a text in my early career to having zero students with a text late in my career. Your professor probably dislikes the state of affairs as much as you do. I cut down what books I would select because I could not justify students paying that much for what they were getting. I would also recommend students look for older editions on Amazon and the like which got me in trouble with my administration because I was not supporting the bookstore. But, it was difficult to teach from a text that no one had or had access to. The University's desire to generate revenue from texts truly was killing the chicken because it was not producing enough eggs."
"So look for an older edition on Chegg, Amazon, or the like and match it up with what your professor is teaching from the new edition. You are right, it probably has not changed. Be careful for the problems at the end of the chapter - that is often where the changes are."
– BewnieBound
These businesses parade as services but they are notorious for taking more than what you're willing to pay for.
For A Future Owner
"Rent to Own (furniture, appliances, TVs, video game systems, etc.) The mark up on the interest over time ends up costing 4 times the purchase - or more."
– PartyAlarmed3796
"Well the trick is to not pay (seems to be what a lot of people do)."
– Expensive_Ad2695
"Which is why those places are so expensive and why they're actually kinda necessary for some people."
"They're taking a pretty big risk on people with no credit, and if a person with shi*ty credit needs a refrigerator or other necessary appliance, there's usually nobody else willing to work with them. Also, most of them report to credit agencies so you can build your credit through them."
"I'm not a fan by any means and I hate that people are buying video game systems and couches through them, but I still think they're filling a need."
– Pitiful-Pension-6535
Money Sucker
"Payday loan companies – they're like financial vampires, sucking the life out of people with high-interest rates."
– neonliolia
"And yet most of them are owned by major banks... hmmmm."
"Bank of America, Wells Fargo, US Bank, JP Morgan/Chase collectively all own the largest payday lender companies."
– Bramtyre
"In Canada, there is an effort to turn Canada Post into a kind of bank that offers basic banking services to the most vulnerable. Not sure what happened to that, but it was an alternative to check cashing and payday loan rackets."
– hobbitlover
Greedy Event Vendor
"Ticket Master."
– LTVOLT
"Agreed. We went to a preseason hockey game the other week. Tickets were $5 each but there was around $8 of Ticketmaster fees for each one and you had to use their app to get in the door because the barcodes change like every 30 seconds or something. It's ridiculous."
– darfus1895
Where can citizens turn to receive genuine care without drying up their financial resources?
Big Pharma
"Health Insurance and over priced perscription drugs."
"Wife is type 1 diabetic. Her pump is over $1000 a month WITH 50% coverage. $177 for just the sensor pack. We have the best coverage we can afford."
– Dukeboys_
"US pays the middle man for health care coverage. The middle man and the health care provider come up with "health packages" you can buy into, just in case you get sick. It's just sick how they funnel money from the middle class into this."
– dcoolidge
"Healthcare insurance industry. They can straight up reject claims you should be covered for and make you jump through near endless hoops to get them to pay for the service that is part of your plan."
– ColdHardPocketChange
All Out To Get Ya
"Homeopathic 'medicine' sellers."
"Psychics"
"Domain search engine registration scams (fake emails or physical mail that shows up saying 'your domain search registration is about to expire' and look exactly like warnings that your domain name is about to expire)"
"Fake homeowner warranty/car warranty scams loaded with so many limitations and exclusions they’ll basically never pay out."
"Multilevel marketing systems like Amway."
– 4wqrewtety
Losing Sight Of Kids' Well-Being
"From my experience working in group homes for youth are awful. The owners only want money and the more kids in care the more money."
– OddReputation3765
Going Nowhere Fast
"Car insurance."
"You get penalized for using it. Even just once in some cases."
– Effective_Sundae_839
"1000% agree. I was rear ended by a hit and run driver while i was stopped at a stop sign. Literally came to a stop for 3 seconds max and got destroyed. Car insurance wanted to give me 4k and shut me up. It’s called the nuisance fee. I eventually lawyered up and got 25k out of it. But like wtf. B*tch that’s what we PAY FOR, following renewal of my policy it increased hundreds of dollars a month and that was even after i switched to a different company. 'A claim is a claim regardless who is at fault.'”
– HitBackZach
Businesses taking advantage of their customers should be a crime, yet here we are.
What companies can you think of that legally continue to look after their own profitable interests above providing a decent service?
