It All Started With A Cat

"This is a long one, but I promise it's worth it:"

"A buddy of mine was cat-sitting for a friend of his while the guy was out of town on a vacation. My buddy didn't have a car, so the dude told him that if he needed to go out and pick up more cat food or anything, he could borrow the car."

"At the time, my buddy was living right down the street from this guy, staying at his parents' house. So my buddy was just going over for a few hours each day to feed the cat and keep it company, then going back home."

"Meanwhile, he's also been flirting with this woman online. She lives several states away, but he feels like they seem to be getting pretty serious. So he decides to take some liberties, really push the envelope on where he'll pick up cat food from, and he takes his friend's car on a little multi-state road trip."

"This is insane, right? Just atrociously bad judgement, especially since someone does need to feed the cat. To solve this, he left his parents a note. It read, 'I am camping in the woods behind our house. Please go over to ____'s and feed his cat. I'll let you know when I'm home.'"

"Boom. Problem solved, right?"

"Except that the 'woods behind our house' are about 20 yards deep. It takes less than five minutes to walk through them and come out into the neighboring housing development. So his parents went looking for him, calling out for him, and couldn't find him. They got worried and contacted a family friend, a local police officer. He subsequently got a hold of the fire department. There was a full-on search party combing through about 1/50th of an acre of woods. Unsurprisingly, they were coming up with nothing."

"This was before cell phones were common, so my buddy was completely unaware that his plan had fallen apart. He was cruising along on his 12-hour drive, expecting to get to this girl's house just in time for dinner. Except he didn't have a GPS. So he got lost. Very lost. Like, by the time he turned up at this woman's house, it was almost midnight."

"When he got there, she was crying her eyes out. He assured her that it was okay, he was fine, wasn't hurt or in a wreck or anything, he'd just gotten lost. And she said, 'No, no, I wasn't worried about you. My dad just died in a motorcycle accident.'"

"So he bailed on his cat-sitting duties, stole a car, and inspired his parents to file a missing-persons just so he could awkwardly watch a woman cry for a few hours and then drive back home."

– GavinBelsonsAlexa

The Beekeeper's Nightmare

"I will try to keep it short. I am a beekeeper. My 3rd year of beekeeping, I suddenly developed a severe allergy to bee stings. It was spring and I was installing bees for the beginning of the season. I was up to the last hive, went to install that package of bees and one stung me right in the top of my head."

"I finished up a few minutes after and went up toward the house to do some other things. I started feeling flush and I could feel my heart racing. After I few minutes I realized I was having an anaphylactic reaction."

"If you’ve never had one, aside from the physical symptoms, they also say you will get a feeling of impending doom. That was spot on. I absolutely felt I was going to die and people do die from these reactions."

"So I am now in the house and desperately searching for Benadryl of which I have none. I am also having trouble breathing, my body is going haywire and I feel like I’m going to black out shortly."

"I call my mom, who lives an hour away, to call 911 because I feel like I will be unconscious soon. She says okay, phone rings 30 seconds later. It’s my mom, she goes 'I called 911 but they said you have to call'. This was my first wtf."

"So I call and it’s a very typical 911 call she is trying to keep me talking and I essentially started vomiting and she is still on the line and I am waiting and waiting for this alleged ambulance."

"A full half hour goes by. At this point I am actually coming out of the reaction. So I go to sit at my kitchen counter. I’m still on the line with the 911 dispatcher. I see the ambulance pull up and I say, oh they’re here. She’s like great, are you okay? I’m like yes and then she says goodbye and hangs up."

"I see the EMTs outside but my driveway has a gate so they are just standing there and they ring the bell on my gate and I am just looking at them, dumbfounded. Like I called for an emergency over a half hour ago, and they’re gonna roll up here and ring my bell and wait for me to come out when I more than likely could be unconscious or dead on the floor."

"I literally had to go out and let them in. Then they basically talked me in to going to the hospital to get checked out. Another huge mistake because this took place in the 2 months in my entire life when I didn’t have health insurance. So I ended up paying $4000 for a late ambulance and some IV Benadryl and epinephrine."

"Oh which also reminds me, a paramedic also showed, put the IV in when I agreed to go to the hospital. Then I felt something dripping and turns out he put it in my artery rather than a vein and it was just pushing the fluid out of the IV."

"0/10 would not go through any of that again…but I did 10 years later when I had another anaphylactic reaction due to a bee sting. However this went a lot smoother and I had epi-pens and a responsive ambulance."

– soline

Oil Everywhere

"Arrive home from work, my house reeks of oil."

"Go in the basement, and there's a pool of oil, with my stuff floating in it. The oil filter on my burner rotted out (it was defective and recalled, but the tech never bothered to notify me or replace it). Call up the tech, he throws a new one, charges me the emergency call fee, and advises I call HO insurance before running away (it was his fault, I didn't know it yet)."

"This was February in NY, about 13F out, and obviously the burner wasn't on while sitting in a pool of oil. But, they get there pretty quickly soak it up, and get things running so my pipes don't freeze."

"Only way to get the smell out is to dry clean everything I own, then shampoo all the carpets, run deodorizers, etc. Takes weeks. Had a headache the whole time."

"Turns out, my basement has cracks, most of it leaked through. They had to cut out my foundation and dig out the contaminated soil."

"Oil in soil means DEC gets involved. Whole new can of worms as they now had to monitor the process, test at every step. Big enough deal I have a spill number in their database."

"A 20 yard dumpster, with 20 yards of oil soaked sand, is so heavy that it broke through my driveway, destroying it. They did that twice, took out my entire driveway."

"Remember how I said this was in February? March brought the COVID shutdown."

"I spent over a year with my basement in shambles, holes in my driveway, plastic sheets taped up, no washer/dryer, and all sorts of equipment kicking around."

"The next spring, they're back and working, and screwed everything up. Not going to get into every detail, but after a big fight, I managed to get rid of them and bring in a new company to fix their screwups and finish the job. Old crew got very difficult when the new crew requested permits and reports. Turns out, they never bothered. Had to do all that before they could start working again."

"New company dropped a storage crate on my yard to store my stuff while working, destroyed my grass, took out a sprinkler, took out my neighbor's driveway curb, got concrete all over my brickwork, but at least the nightmare was finally over."

– MyNameIsRay

The Depressed Employee

"I worked with a guy who had previously dealt with 999/911 calls. He got very stressed out by it, so ended up getting a job spending a year looking after the ground for some gentry estate in Scotland to get over it."

"After that he came to work for us in it support for a while. He was really nice, really friendly, but he got stressed by everything remotely negative. If he couldn't solve a problem straight away it would throw him for a loop. He needed a smoke break every hour. We gave him the support we could as an employer, time outs, pretty much what we could within reason but he wasn't really with it."

"Eventually he quit. I saw him a few times after that, always shaking, scared to cross the road even. His partner left him."

"The last I recall seeing him was him walking up the other side of the street. I called out but he didn't reply."

"And then he threw himself in front of a train."

– ASK_IF_IM_PENGUIN

In Deep Grief

"My dad was cheating on my mom with a woman a year younger than me (22) when he was mid 40's."

"Christmas time, he's sitting in church next to my mom crying, but won't tell her why."

"Younger brother knows dad is cheating and thinks maybe the side piece broke up with him and so confronts him."

"Turns out girl died in a car crash."

– Business_Loquat5658

The Seance Gone Wrong

"A work friend told me about a party where some of his friends decided to prank a mate of his. The target was one of the underdogs in the group, and he was often the butt of their japes."

"In advance of the party the pranksters jig-sawed a hole in the top of a coffee table that was going to be thrown out. With a cloth thrown over it the coffee table looked fine."

"Anyway, when the party was well and truly underway at one point the host suggested they hold a seance. Everyone who was in on the prank agreed, and a large group of guests clustered round the coffee table where, unbeknownst to the intended victim, one of the guests was hiding, concealed under the table and the cloth."

"So the seance started and the host started intoning spookily, something like...'Eddie...!...I hear a VOICE, Eddie! It's someone who knows YOU, Eddie!'"

"The guy at this point is white and starting to tremble while the room is chuckling behind their hands."

"The voice wants you to go closer to the table so you can hear their voice, Eddie! Closer! Closer!"

"Eddie is wide-eyed with terror at this point and goes close to the table - at a signal, the guy hidden underneath the table stuck his arm up through the hole in the top of the coffee table as if a spooky form was rising up from the table surface under the sheet."

"Eddie flipped. I mean, Eddie FREAKED. While the room laughed he collapsed in tears, hyperventilating, screaming, sobbing, thrashing around. He was past inconsolable, it seemed like he'd lapsed into absolute psychological breakdown, and it didn't at all help when the prank was revealed to him."

"As he lay on the floor hysterical and literally inconsolable, one of the guests finally made the decision to call his mother - who was furious when she heard about the prank, because Eddie's father had passed away a few days before, and he hadn't told anyone."

"In the end it seems they had to call 999 and a medic arrived who sedated him. I don't know if he went in for observation or was allowed home, but you can bet that the hosts got grounded and ass-kicked by parents left, right, and centre after word got round."

– MagicSPA

These Redditors have been dealt with some major blows.

People who say that things will always get better, are partially right. Things do come around, eventually.

But you never know how many curve balls life has to throw at you until there's a resolution.