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People Describe The Weirdest Thing That They Find Attractive

People Describe The Weirdest Thing That They Find Attractive
Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

Everyone has their own little quirks.


If we all had the same tastes, the world wouldn't be a very interesting place. What makes someone uniquely attractive are the individualistic things they do, the things no one else would even take a second to double back at, and that's where the real connections come together. Odds are even you do something that makes your spouse or significant other go crazy without even knowing it.

Reddit user, u/JBStudios1, wanted to hear about the odd things that turn you on when they asked:

What's the weirdest thing you find attractive?

Perhaps the thing you find the most attractive is completely unnoticeable to the average person. As in, if you weren't looking for this one tiny, small, completely negligible thing, you would never notice it.

But these people did.

Whip It Back And Forth

"My wife had shoulder length hair for a while. Once, when I called her name and she did the hair-swish-smile thing, I just about f-cking died from cuteness."

EpicAstarael

Little Stragglies Of Cuteness

"The neck, when a woman has her hair up and those little bits of hair curl around."

forkedtoungue

"Seeing a girl have to stand on her tiptoes to do basically anything, especially to hug or kiss me.

I think it's the cutest thing ever"

Jakov_Salinsky

Then there are those people who find things attractive that, on first viewing, someone else wouldn't see as "Wow, that's a real turn on!" However, you have refined and cultured taste. Of course you'll love it when someone's bones stick out a little bit.

...What?

Wait...Bones?

"Collarbones. Can't even explain it. Just a shirt low enough to show a pronounced collarbone."

Tenalp

"Omgyes! Protruding collarbones and (at least imo) hipbones are crazy hot! It doesn't have to do with them being skinny though! Slightly curvy people can also have really nice defined collar- and hipbones!"

MostlyLurkingEcchi

Controlling A Massive Machine

"My husband reversing the car. He puts his arm around the passenger seat and looks over his shoulder...."

alisong89

"Oh, man, I love watching people drive. The arm-around-the-passenger-seat-while-reversing thing for sure, but also just people driving in general. There's just something about that focus people get when they're behind the wheel; the way their expressions are usually passive, but their eyes are attentive... oh man. I'm with you on this one for sure."

DumpstahKat

Someone Has A Thing For "Teen Wolf"

"Long canines. The teeth, not the species.

Not unnaturally long like vampire fangs, but just enough that they're longer than the rest of the teeth."

PlumbusMarius

"Huh, weirdest compliment I've gotten from a guy before was that he liked my 'pointy teeth.' This was at a bar and it made my coworker do a double take."

michisanti

Then there's these, which you may not have known did it for you, but after reading these there's no going back. You're hooked, now, and that's okay. Embrace the weirdness.

I See You Are Also An Individual Of Class And Substance

"Chokers, f-ck those things stir up something primal in me"

whateverisnttaken22

"Ah I see you also grew up in the 90s and watched buffy the vampire slayer..."

guitarokx

Wait, That Seems Pretty Obvi-Oh, That's Why...

"Guys who wear glasses.

For some reason I think it's sexy when we're making out and he has to take them off."

not_a_robot_anymore

Seems Like You Like Everything They Do. Which Is Great.

"I like when women have to go pee really bad and do that dance. Yea it's weird.

Or when you successfully feed your girlfriend at the appropriate time of day and she does a little dance or starts humming a song as she's chewing.

I like watching the daily skin care routine as they furiously and rapidly circulate their little raccoon sized hands in various nonsense that I'll never understand"

WanderCurio

Everyone is different. Everyone has different tastes. Everyone has things that speak to them. These are all perfectly acceptable, and steering into them might actually help you along as you continue your search for a viable romantic partner. Don't shy away from the things you find sexy. Embrace them. Be happy.

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Til Disaster Do Us Part: Weddings Gone Wild

Weddings are supposed to be blissful experiences, but let’s be honest: It doesn’t always happen that way. Disaster can strike at any moment in the form of bridezillas, monster-in-laws, or undeserving grooms. These weddings, in particular, got ruined in an instant, and their eyewitnesses lived to tell the tale.


What A Way To Go

a woman in a wedding dress sitting in a carPhoto by lhon karwan on Unsplash

I've been to a few awful weddings, but this one was the worst. I did a dessert table for a wedding at my old country club job once. As I was setting up, people started shuffling in...keep in mind, the actual marriage ceremony was supposed to be going on at that moment, so nothing was fully set up. The couple was nowhere to be found.

It felt more like a funeral than anything else; just people talking quietly amongst themselves. I tracked down the club's wedding photographer since I knew he'd probably have details and I found him chatting with a bridesmaid. Apparently, the couple was super Christian, conservative, and young—like, in their 20s. The groom got sent to a “pray away the gay” place as a high schooler after getting caught with his best friend.

He was there for a year. When he came back, he met this girl and they decided to get married. Well, he ran into the guy he got caught with like two months before the wedding, decided he missed their friendship, and they started hanging out again. As the wedding got closer, he realizes: “What the heck am I doing?” He started freaking out, and the night before the wedding, he went to the guy's house. That's when it got WEIRD.

He called the bride and she refused to accept that he was not showing. So she went through the whole mess of getting ready and he didn't show up. She lost her darn mind on the speakerphone with him at the church where everyone could hear, all while he was yelling, “I'm gay! I like men! I love him, and my parents can't force me anymore! This isn't about you and you'll thank me in the long run!”

That’s Nuts

A co-worker of mine was at his best friend’s wedding. At the reception, there were very specific rules about the food—no nuts was the big one. There were a couple of people there, including the maid of honor, who was severely allergic to them. Well, the venue served something that had nuts, and the maid of honor went anaphylactic. Her Epi-pen wasn’t effective, and she passed on the way to the hospital. Obviously, lawsuits were expected.

No Show Nuptials

I've catered many weddings and there have been some memorable ones. Fights between guests, wedding cakes falling over, things spilled on wedding dresses, the lot. But there was one I’ll never forget. It was an all-day do with a small ceremony of a few close friends and family. There was then a big reception filled with a huge buffet and a free bar.

It was all in the same venue and they had paid for 250 evening guests. But here's the thing—only 30 guests turned up, at most. My heart broke for this couple. A beautifully converted barn, loads of food and drinks, great music—but no guests. At about 10 pm (the venue was licensed until 11 pm), the buffet food had barely been touched.

The few people who were there ate, but it hardly made a dent as it was planned for so many more people. I asked the mother of the bride if she wanted me to cover and refrigerate the untouched food so the new couple could take it home. Her reply made me cringe. She said, "Oh no, there are still a lot of people coming". It was the most awkward I've ever felt in my life.

No more guests showed. There was a flash of car headlights in the distance at about 10:30 pm and the bride BEAMED when she thought it was latecomers arriving. But no, it was just taxis arriving to pick up the few who were there. It's the only event I have ever done where we didn't have to ask people to leave the venue. At 11 pm, the place was empty. Then we found out the whole story.

In a nutshell, the bride’s parents paid for the day, and the happy couple had zero control over their guest list. Her parents invited all their “friends” to the evening function, but in reality, it was just associates they wanted to flex on—resulting in no one caring at all about an invite to a wedding where they didn't know the bride or groom. It was basically just a networking event for the bride’s parents.

A Real Showstopper

men's gray suit jacketPhoto by Scott Webb on Unsplash

This didn't happen at a wedding but at a 30-year wedding anniversary. I was working as a waiter at a hotel and we had ballrooms for private parties and other bigger events. The bride and groom had spared no expense. There were about 100 guests, a five-course meal, an open bar, and a whole day party. We were supposed to close it at 4 in the morning.

It was grand—one of the biggest parties I had waited on so far. After the main course, the husband stood up and gave a speech. A long one. He started out reminiscing about when they had met: their early life together, the hard times they had endured, etc. He then talked at length about how he loved their children and told each of them how proud he was of their accomplishments.

So far, it was one of the better speeches I had ever heard. It was heartfelt, and he had a lot of charisma. He was well-spoken and funny, too. But then it took a dark turn. He looked at his wife again. He told her that he had hated her for the last four years of their life together. He called her a toxic narcissist and said she had made him feel miserable to the point where he contemplated ending it all.

He also her that he knew she had a lover. He pointed him out in the crowd, next to his wife and children. He had evidence and was suing for divorce, intending to take everything. He gave her the divorce papers right then and there. Oh, but it got even better. He then announced to everyone that he had gotten his own apartment. He had hired movers to move all his stuff while they were at the party, and he said he would be leaving shortly.

In the stunned silence that ensued, he tipped all staff, dishwashers, bosses, waiters, and busboys $200 each and left. Needless to say, everyone left within the hour.

In The Dark

I used to do catering work, and this one time, my boss sent me to a remote location in the woods on a beautiful river. I found out while we were loading the truck that the boss wouldn't be going and that I was essentially in charge. My boss promised me that everything was taken care of...Little did I know it would be a complete nightmare.

You can imagine my surprise when I arrived at this remote location and literally nothing was set up. We were only about an hour early, so I frantically started trying to get the tent in order. We needed extension cords to run the coffee and tea, but there were none there. We needed tables to set up the food, but there were none. I somehow whipped up some last-minute fixes for the missing things.

Then, just as the bride and groom are arriving, it got so much worse. We blew the fuse for our only power source and the place was plunged into darkness. We reset the breaker and I moved some stuff around, but the fuse blew again. This delicate dance went on for the entire evening—through speeches, the first dance, everything. I think the worst part of the entire experience was when we went to rinse our dishes before boxing them up and found out that the water pump for the place stopped working and needed to be primed again.

At that point, I said forget about it, we'll take them back dirty, and the crew and I spent several more hours after the long ride home doing them. That was the day I worked a 15-hour shift without a break—and still ruined the wedding. Needless to say, I quit that job.

I’m Like A Bird

I was the best man at my sister-in-law’s wedding. After a whole year of planning, all the bride wanted was a ex release while they said handwritten vows to each other. It was a very small, non-denominational wedding. The day arrived in early summer and all seemed to be going well...except something was off with the bird handlers.

They showed up a bit late and were sourcing help from the wedding party to get everything in line. When the time came to say their vows, I helped the handler carry the chest with the doves in it over to the altar where the bride and groom were standing. Vows were just about wrapping up and the handler gave ME the signal to open the chest. I opened it and witnessed a horrific sight.

I saw 20 to 30 DEAD DOVES IN THE CRATE! I immediately closed it and tried to pretend nothing was wrong. Too late. The look of horror on the bride’s face was all that was needed. We spent the next few hours trying to cheer everyone up, but by the end of the reception, the entire wedding party had organized and filed animal cruelty complaints on the handler. It was all anyone could focus on.

Surprise, Surprise

man wearing black suit jacketPhoto by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash

I used to work at a pretty upscale catering hall in New Jersey back when I was in college, and we had one instance where I witnessed a ruined wedding. We all thought it was weird when a couple of the groomsmen got access to the reception room during cocktail hour. It was for “decorating,” they said. Not something we normally saw the men do.

In any case, we got through the main courses just fine, and then one thing became VERY clear to us staff. The bride’s side of the family was VERY conservative. They didn’t drink, they barely danced, and they watched wide-eyed as the groom’s side of the party went wild. Anyway, it came time for the speeches, and about halfway through his speech, the best man stood up.

He said something like, “Hey, bride’s family—I know you think your girl is so sweet and innocent, but if you want to see what they’re REALLY like, look under your seat! That's when things got insane. Well, taped under EVERY chair was a picture of the bride and groom caught in the act. The groom’s family and friends roared with laughter, but the bride’s side was MORTIFIED.

There were so many fights that broke out that night. Did I mention this was in New Jersey? The wedding was pretty much over at that point.

Too Much Fun

I worked on a tropical island off the coast of Queensland, Australia, and loads of weddings happened there. Most days, there’d be one or two. One time, this groom’s party came through my bar. They were on the bucks party thing before the wedding the next day, and they were pretty in their cups by 4 pm. I figured they started early and would finish early, given they had a sunrise ceremony.

About an hour later, they left for another bar on the island. Then, the bride’s party came through, equally sloshed. I finished work at 9 pm, then came back three hours later to work in the nightclub. I got in at midnight and started pouring drinks. It was busy as heck with like 250 people in the club. Around 1 am, the bride, groom, and their wedding parties rolled in absolutely destroyed.

They looked disgusting. I had no idea why security let them in because I wasn’t going to be serving them. They left about 45 minutes later, which means they would roughly arrive back at their hotel rooms around 2 am with the expectation that the bride and her party needed to be up at 4 am for hair and makeup. But they all decided to keep partying. “We’ll just stay up all night and keep drinking until the wedding!”

At that point, they had to have been drinking for 15 to 18 hours. It backfired so badly. Ceremony time rolled around and she couldn’t walk down the aisle in her heels, so she tossed them off. The groom and all his friends were tipsy as heck and could barely stand. They tried to say their vows, but the celebrant couldn’t understand them. This was a huge problem.

She wasn’t allowed to marry them because they were too far gone to consent to marriage. The whole wedding was canned. A simple wedding like the one they had cost $35,000, so they wasted all that money. They did have the reception, though. From what I was told, the bride passed out about an hour in. The groom threw up everywhere.

The mothers of the bride and groom were both crying.

Please RSVP

We attended a wedding for a family member who didn't have a lot of money. It was hosted at an inexpensive venue, but it was still nice. My heart broke when only a third of the people invited showed up. You could see the hurt in the couple’s face. They came up to our table and said, “Do you have any friends in the city?” They had all this food for 100 people but only 30 guests.

They were willing to have complete strangers come down just so their money and food wouldn’t go to waste. We hadn’t handed over our card with cash inside yet, so my husband hit the ATM and added another $100.

I’m Gonna Getcha

man in gray button up shirtPhoto by Ludovic Migneault on Unsplash

I was dating this girl who asked me to go to her ex’s wedding. We dated for a few months prior, but asking me to go to a wedding together felt like a serious commitment...I still accepted. I planned for the week off work and we went all out for this wedding. Half the time, I was trying to make the most of our time together, but she always went missing.

Fast forward to the reception. She made a scene in the most unstable and mentally sick way. In front of the groom, the bride, and everyone else, she said out loud: “I’m still in love with you. We literally have been sleeping together all week and I can't stop thinking about you". She quickly got escorted out after that.

The bride was clearly upset, but everyone tried to go about their business. As soon as I left, my “girlfriend” started completely ruining the hall and all the decorations, just throwing a fit on her way out. It was so embarrassing. I figured she was telling the truth since she was missing the whole time, but I’m pretty sure that everyone during the whole thing assumed this was too crazy to be real.

I definitely regret not seeing her true colors before, but when you work so much and try to date at the same time, you have very little time to get to really know some people. Time sort of flies by and you end up dating for a few months. Fast forward a month or two later...she got together with the groom and I’m pretty sure she has no regrets about wasting my time.

She probably doesn’t even feel bad about using me or even ruining that man’s marriage. This woman is seriously twisted.

The Best Laid Plans

The bride’s father was 45 minutes late to walk his daughter down the aisle. While we were waiting, the air conditioning broke down in the venue. It was over 100 degrees outside and humid like I’d never felt before. Plus, the place was overcrowded. You could barely move without bumping into someone else and in the heat, that was extra miserable.

I guess the air conditioning problem had also affected the refrigeration or something because most of the food was spoiled. The only food on the buffet was salad, spaghetti, and rolls. Not enough to feed even half the guests. Most people left after the first dance, and two of the bride’s aunts fainted. The bride and the wedding planner were crying.

A Dark Turn

I was studying photography and used to act as an assistant to a well-known wedding photographer. One day, we went to a couple's wedding. He shot digital and I shot black and white film. We spent all day with the couple from 9 am through until 2 am the next morning when we left. I could see how genuinely in love they were.

It was only a day, but I got to know them quite well and I really liked them both. The next morning, I got a call from the photographer and his voice was shaky. He hit me with the most gut-wrenching news—he explained that the groom had been killed that night after the reception party. Three guys had broken into their bungalow to steal their wedding gifts. The groom got out of bed to stop them and they executed him in front of the bride. I was in shock for about two weeks.

The next weekend, the photographer and I went to the bride's house to present her with the photos. We'd worked together to get the job massively accelerated so she had the photos of her husband. We did it at our own expense and didn't charge her a penny for the day or all the prints and album. It was sort of the least we could do.

Because my photos didn't matter as much, I'd been able to simply capture those natural moments between them, rather than the staged wedding photos. So they had the normal album pictures but also about 150 snaps of just them being a couple. She was in tears from the moment we arrived until we left a few hours later. She was a shadow of the woman I'd met only a week earlier. That still haunts me.

Wrong And Strong

woman in white top wearing eyeglassesPhoto by RepentAnd SeekChristJesus on Unsplash

My ex-wife's grandmother was in her 90s and in a wheelchair. While we were up at the altar, she wouldn't shut up about the flowers and how they might need water. She was not talking quietly to her neighbor, either—she was yelling in her old lady voice. She didn't have dementia—she was very with it—she just had no volume control or understanding that what she was doing was inappropriate".

THEY LOOK TERRIBLE!" she yelled. One of the cousins, without saying anything, got up and started to just wheel her out. "WHERE ARE WE GOING?!" She yelled. We all got a chuckle at her, then we went on with the ceremony.

For The Birds

A friend of my girlfriend was getting married. The wedding was quite normal—they got married in the local church, then there was a party in a nice restaurant. The photographer asked the bride and her bridesmaids (my girlfriend was one of them) to go outside for some photos. Some minutes later, one of the bridesmaids came back asking for help. The most unexpected thing had happened.

Apparently, there were some swans that attacked the photographer and the majority of the people around him were not doing anything other than laughing. In their defense, it was hard not to—the guy who was running around and screaming.

Stage Fright

It was a big wedding with around 500 people. It was all the wife's doing—she wanted a huge $70,000 wedding. I was a groomsman. Pre-wedding, the groom was nervous as heck. There was a lot of pressure for the day to be perfect, and it was her dream wedding, yadda yadda. At some point, a bottle was pulled out. It went from a few "calm the nerves" shots to finishing the whole bottle.

We gave him water, got him in the shower, and then redressed him. Midway through her vows, he puked all down the front of her dress. It was horrible, but it was great to watch. They're going on eight years strong.

Runaway Bride

a woman in a blue dress sitting on a chairPhoto by Elle Cartier on Unsplash

My mother was a church organist and she attended many weddings. I suppose the story that stands out the most was one where the bride said she couldn't marry the guy because she didn't love him. She then ran out of the church in full Runaway Bride fashion. It was a smallish town, so people found out later that she had met somebody new and fallen hopelessly in love with him.

The Things These Eyes Have Seen

The bride and groom got way in their cups, then eventually started to argue with each other. They were crying, yelling, and screaming, running out into the courtyard and causing a scene. The best man went to check on them and found them rolling on the ground, but not in a sexy way. The best man threw the bride out of the way, slammed the groom’s head into the sidewalk, and pinned him down. The bride then started kicking the groom in the face.

The best man pushed her away while sitting on top of the groom, and the bride finally stormed off with a bridesmaid. Then, the best man let the groom up, who began kicking trees and breaking the posts off the gazebo. That's when he revealed what had been building up inside of him for months: "I'm going to kill myself!" The best man told the bridesmaid to go grab an officer from inside for assistance.

The officer came out and tried to help get the groom to his room since the wedding was at a fancy hotel. The groom proceeded to be disrespectful with the officer and ended up getting detained. The father of the groom then disowned him but also yelled at the bride. The best man and his date ended up taking care of the bride and groom’s child. At least they got to stay in their honeymoon suite for the night.

Source: I was the best man.

Field Trip

My dad has vintage and veteran cars, and when I was younger, he used to do some weddings with them. I loved clearing out the confetti from the car when he'd get home. One week, he arrived back and there was no confetti in the car...The story was wild. Apparently, on the way to the church, the bride changed her mind, and instead of taking her and her father to church, they asked if he could drop them at the local zoo as it was her favorite place.

So he did and he left them there in full wedding attire. They were going to get a taxi home when they were done. It was in the days before mobile phones too, so I'm guessing people were waiting at the church for quite a while. Also, I recently called my dad to ask him if he remembered this and he seems to think that she was only getting married because she was pregnant and thought she had to. It was the early '80s, after all.

This Took A Turn

File:New Year's Wedding.jpg - Wikimedia Commonscommons.wikimedia.org

I went to a co-worker's wedding about 15 years ago and this happened at the reception. It was a beautiful outdoor venue overlooking a lake. Anyway, the groom had planned to sing a song to his new wife and have a fireworks launch as he was singing the last note. Well, that last note came but the fireworks did not. He held that last note for a good 10 seconds before he finally yelled “JESUS” and threw the mic down. He then ran to go fight the fireworks guy.

No fists were thrown, but somebody did end up in the lake. The party kind of broke up after that. They also ended up getting a divorce about a year later after the groom got fired from his job for showing his “package” to his boss’s underage daughter.

All In The Family

A fight broke out between the father of the bride, brother of the bride, and some guy who just happened to be staying at the hotel. In reality, I don’t know how much of a “fight” it was; it was more just the dad and brother assaulting some man. So anyway, they were both detained. Cut to the bride sobbing at breakfast because her dad and brother spent the evening of her wedding in the slammer. They faced assault charges for what they did to that poor man.

Beauty Is Pain

The bride and groom decided to "get a few pictures in" right after the ceremony...except they disappeared for about five hours. We all waited at the venue for them, but since no one got any word from them, the buffet wasn't set and the DJ didn't play any music. After two hours, most guests decided to collect some cash. We talked the manager of the venue into serving the buffet and getting the DJ to play music.

So we basically started the party without the couple. When they finally got back, they were in shock—basically, all food was gone, people were sloshed, and everybody had forgotten that this was their wedding. So the wedding itself wasn't ruined, but everything around it, well...at least the guests had a great time when we took things into our own hands.

For what it’s worth, they did actually take pictures during that time. The photographer did his best but to be honest, the couple wasn't that good-looking and they thought he could simply work some voodoo magic on the spot to make them look good. He was angry, to say the least, and actually tried to talk them into going back to their party several times.

Truth Hurts

a woman singing into a microphone on stagePhoto by Marco Lastella on Unsplash

I was a guest of a friend of the bride, and I did not know anyone attending. It was a very expensive, over-the-top place, and there were several hundred guests at this very Italian wedding. The maid of honor grabbed the mic at the cocktail hour and began her speech, rambling and clearly having had a few drinks. It quickly devolved into her stating that the recently deceased mother of the bride was against the wedding and that was what ended her.

She also said that “Vinny,” the groom, will never give up his sidepieces. The maid was tackled by several people and dragged away. The happy couple separated and divorced within a year.

Safe And Not-So Sound

This was around 2009 in Tenerife. On the second day of the wedding, the bride went swimming in the ocean. She swam out too far and was basically “lost at sea” for nine hours or so. She eventually found her way back but was in bad shape. Everyone was panicked the whole day and thought she drowned. By the time she got back, there was a twisted development.

Her husband found her phone and read a bunch of messages supposedly from her aunt, but it was clear from the content it wasn’t her aunt at all. She had been having an affair with the best man for years. They got an annulment shortly after. $60,000 down the drain. It was one of the most opulent weddings I’ve ever been to.

All’s Well That Ends Badly

It was a big wedding with an open bar, and most of the attendees (including the wedding party) were apparently gussied up white trash. The ceremony itself went on without any issue, but the reception became a big, messy party. It then started to run late, so the catering manager told the father of the bride that they'd exceeded their time and needed to start shutting down.

This led to an argument involving several members of the wedding party. "Do you know how much I paid?!" They eventually complied, but it stirred the inner white trash. The party then spilled out to the hotel bar where people continued drinking. Members of the wedding party were still stewing about the reception getting shut down and tempers were short.

Finally, something triggers the groom and he takes a swing at someone. That person swung back. Then the groomsmen started swinging. Now, it was a full-on donnybrook. The hotel staff managed to get them out of the bar and the fight spilled out into the front entrance of the hotel. The authorities showed up and tried to break up the fight, but the groom then tried to take a swing at an officer and proceeded to get the tar beat out of him.

The bride, at this point, was just standing on the sidelines screaming in support of her hubby. But a few minutes later, she said to herself, "Well, I guess we're doing this". She walked up to a female officer and took a swing at her. She chose the wrong female officer though because this woman was apparently way more yoked than she appeared to be and she took the bride to the ground.

The bride’s face hit a planter on the way down and she busted her nose. She started bleeding all over her wedding dress. By that point, the wagon showed up. Several people were handcuffed and loaded up, including the bride and groom.

Bad Reputation

peach, yellow, and white flowersPhoto by Alexandra Gornago on Unsplash

My best friend's mom got remarried and had an expensive, beautiful wedding; but for some reason, she didn't hire a DJ. Last-minute, her mom asked me to manage the CD and gave me a list along with verbal instructions of when to play each song. I tried to warn her that I simply did not follow what she was trying to say, but she told me she had confidence in me.

Apparently, all her life, she wanted to walk down the aisle to some specific song, but I just couldn't figure it out. They had to get walking to match the sunset, so she went ahead down the aisle while I flipped through a series of incorrect songs to the horror and amusement of the crowd. For years afterward, when I called my friend's house and her stepdad answered, he'd say, "Is this the guy who screwed up my wedding? How are ya?"

Childish Behavior

I was invited to the reception of one of my good friends. They had been courthouse married for months and were living happily. When I arrived at the location and saw the big crowd, I knew something was wrong. My friend's wife is prone to panic attacks and is extremely agoraphobic to the point of breaking down if she is overwhelmed.

I immediately called my friend and ask what was going on and if everything was okay. It turned out, out my friend's parents invited everyone possible to be there without my friend knowing. After I sent him a picture of the crowd, he and his wife thought it would be better to go on a second honeymoon than have a reception. He sent a message apologizing to everyone and told them to leave without telling his parents. His parents had a meltdown as we left.

Young And Dumb

I was invited to a wedding of a friend’s friend because she didn‘t have enough of her own people to get the reception as big as she wanted it to be. Also, the bride and groom were super young—she got pregnant three months after hooking up with him and were marrying for all the wrong reasons. When the party started, the whole atmosphere was forced and strained.

Everybody knew the whole thing was fake in a way, so I decided to spend my time outside instead. I was having a wonderful time…until I heard screaming inside. The bride then ran past us very Hollywood-style, all teary and dramatic. It turned out that the ice cake wasn‘t stored properly, so it melted and came out a little lopsided. The bride didn‘t come back, even though the cake was still really nice. The couple got divorced nine months later...

Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off

empty white chairs beside trees near body of waterPhoto by Luigi Pozzoli on Unsplash

A couple of years back, I was waitressing at this function lounge that was hosting a reception. The music started but nobody came in for a solid 30 seconds, so the DJ cuts the music. Everyone then heard loud arguing in the foyer for about a minute, and two men later came stumbling into the hall fighting each other bloody. It was the groom and the bride’s brother.

Turns out, the groom's side of the family didn’t want him marrying the girl, and the groom decided at the reception that he agreed with his family. Long story short, more people got involved with the fighting, and officers were called. The bride was, understandably, a crying mess. Still, she decided that if she spent so much money on the event, then they were going to have a party with or without the groom.

Honestly, she was so much stronger than I could have ever been, so good on her for that…but the whole thing was an absolute mess.

Head Games

This was one I worked at. After the ceremony, right at the start of the reception, the photographer was taking “jumping” photos of the bride and bridesmaids, so they were all jumping in the air while wearing heels. The bride landed and dislocated her knee, then passed out and kept going in and out of consciousness. We called an ambulance, who turned up and fixed her knee, but she wanted to continue with the wedding.

She then had the first course of the meal and threw up down her dress, and had to sit with her mother in another room while everyone else danced, etc. I felt so bad for her as she spent the rest of the evening crying.

Not A Good Look

The groom got so sloshed the night before that he couldn't make it to the altar at the ceremony. They still had the ceremony with only the bride and her party, plus one of the groomsmen, who apparently didn't get wasted. Everyone was shaking their heads the entire time. The groom did make one singular appearance for a few seconds at the reception.

He looked like a zombie and was wearing street clothes, which made things worse as it was no trashy wedding. The bride was a professional dancer for a major label pop star, so that gives you an idea of the type of people that were in attendance. 200 plus people were at the ceremony alone, and probably double that was at the reception. They divorced within six months.

Grin And Bear It

woman wearing white wedding dress with veilPhoto by Samantha Gades on Unsplash

The bride and groom planned a wedding at a Caribbean island resort, and their friends and family booked their trips. Well, everything turned upside down right before the wedding—the groom got caught with some other woman, so the whole ceremony was called off. It was too late to cancel the trips or get refunds, so mostly everyone, including the bride, went to the Caribbean island resort anyway.

The groom did not go, but his family and friends did, and they supported the bride. Everyone put on a brave face, trying to have a good time, but there was obviously an air of sadness about the whole thing behind the fake smiles. Looking back at the group pictures that were taken, it’s heartbreaking. The bride stopped nearly all contact with her friends and family after the trip. I think a part of her just couldn’t come back from the experience.

A House Divided

I went outside for some fresh air at a reception and I saw the groom's dad sitting in the back of his SUV drinking Knob Creek from the bottle. I was friends with the groom's family and knew the father well, so I went up and asked him what was going on. We all knew the bride was an entitled, spoiled brat, but she cranked it up to 11 that night.

Everything about the reception was wrong according to her. The food, the centerpieces, the decor, the DJ...everything. Even though everything was prepared exactly the way she wanted. Her behavior was not surprising, since her whole extended family was a bunch of entitled, spoiled brats too. They all gladly jumped on the hate bandwagon. The groom's family was slipping out the nearest door while the bride's family was berating every person they made eye contact with.

I think the only reason the dad was still there was in case his son had an epiphany and ran for it. He was poised to play getaway driver. I ended up sitting with dad until it was over. No way in heck was I walking back into that. My wife and their daughter were close friends (that's how we knew the family) and we had a front-row seat.

The daughter was sloshed and ready to throw hands, and the mom was all over the place too. They just hated this bride and her family so much. My wife basically became their wrangler, with a couple of other levelheaded females associated with the groom's family, to keep them from kicking the bride's butt. These are all upper-middle-class folks on both sides, by the way.

International Relations

An English guy was marrying an Irish girl in Ireland. The wedding guests were comprised mostly of her family, including people from Northern Ireland (the Republican areas) and England. The wedding was fine—it was all very romantic and the ceremony was nice. But then at the reception, during the speeches, everything went downhill.

It was all because of the best man speech. The best man was a particularly red-faced, Brexit-voting English man. He proceeded to make the most insensitive offensive speech, filled with “jokes” about re-colonizing Ireland one woman at a time, and how the stag party had been on Good Friday, but the hangover was so bad it led to a Bloody Sunday.

You get the idea. He ended up the speech by making a comment about how the speeches had gone on so long that it was like the guests were on a hunger strike. Throughout all of this, the English groom and his friends and family were laughing. They thought it was funny. Her Irish family was all fuming. I was there as a plus-one of the bride’s older cousin. It was aggressively awkward, and a lot of her cousins and uncles just refused to mingle with the groom’s family at all.

I'm no longer in touch with the guy who took me, so I don't know how the marriage is going. The bride was very kind, and despite his best man's speech, the groom seemed like a nice enough guy.

Surprise Ending

woman in white wedding gown holding bouquet of flowersPhoto by Blake Cheek on Unsplash

I went to a really weird wedding last year. The bridal party had different, fancier meals than the guests and they were all drinking free champagne, while we had to pay for lesser stuff with drink tickets (cash-only, no ATM). There weren’t enough tables to sit at, either—I guess the goal was to mingle and stand to eat—and there was definitely not enough food.

People were hogging the buffet stations and going back for thirds before some people had eaten at all. The bride and groom, who were friends of my partner’s, were really stand-offish and just took photos with their photographer all night. Later on, a fight among the two families broke out in the parking lot and the authorities were called.

We decided to leave, order a pizza, and have drinks in a park. When we went back to our hotel room, someone was passed out in our bed. Ah, New Jersey.

Stairway From Heaven

I'm a wedding photographer. I was at one really fancy event a couple of years ago. It was a typical outdoor deal at a swanky location in the middle of nowhere. The place was really nice—it had a large concrete stairway flanked by water fountains that led down to the altar area, so the bride could be seen by all like she was ascending from heaven.

The ceremony began and the bridal party came down to take their places. Then the bride appeared with her father. She took three or four steps down the concrete steps,then disaster hit. Her shoe twisted on her and she tumbled down a good 12 feet or more. She busted out the majority of her front teeth in the fall, and there was so much blood all over her.

With the place being so isolated, it took a good 40 minutes for the ambulance to arrive and she was in intense pain. Ultimately, she was OK and I got an email from them weeks later with the reschedule date. This time, there were no stairs anywhere in sight.

Money Can’t Buy Class

I was a caterer at a really expensive wedding overlooking the Rockefeller center during the holiday season. It was between two prominent New York Jewish families. The bride and groom had way too much to drink and started physically fighting in front of everyone on the dance floor while screaming in each other's faces. Like, the bride was literally trying to throw punches and the groom kept shoving her. But that's not even the worst part.

The groom's mother was also pretty blasted and had come back into the kitchen to blame us (the kitchen staff) for "ruining her baby's big day". Apparently one of the hors d'oeuvres came out a few minutes too late and this was to blame for them starting a public fistfight. I actually had permission to dip early from that shift and was getting into the elevator right as the groom was screaming. He had to be held back by multiple members of the wedding party.

I had to try really hard not to laugh about earlier when his mother screamed in my face about how we should feel ashamed and how she "wasn't going to pay a penny," as though hiring a team of 15 back-end chefs, five up-front-party chefs, two catering managers, and a team of wait-staff was something she could totally pay for after everyone already ate.

I don't know what happened after I left, but I was pleased to leave when I did.

Can’t Stay Away From Each Other

woman in white wedding gown standing on brown wooden stairsPhoto by Camila Cordeiro on Unsplash

This was a hilarious moment. It was a Christian wedding where the pastor refused to say the phrase, "You may now kiss the bride". The bride knew this going in but insisted that he say it anyway on the day. She had herself convinced the pastor would change his mind and ultimately say the phrase. Well, he didn't say it at the end of the ceremony.

The bride had a few drinks prior to walking down the aisle and proceeded to grab her new husband by the face and make out for what felt like a solid three minutes. At first, everyone was clapping and cheering for them, but eventually, the clapping petered out and we were left with two people just SUPER making out, in absolute silence, tongue and all, in front of 300 people.

I was a groomsman, so I got to see the stunned reaction of the entire crowd. Her grandparents and the older people were incredibly uncomfortable.

It’s A Bust

I worked at a wedding in upstate New York as part of the catering company. For context, this was at a summer camp-type place, with a ceremony on the lake and a reception in what could be described as a mess hall. It was in September, so I assume the camp was trying to make extra money after kids went back to school. The ceremony went off fine.

During the reception, however, disaster struck—the owners of the camp realized there was a building fire across the lake. It was a building from the 1800s, and it completely burned down. At the same time, the father of the bride slipped on the dance floor and split his head open. The ambulance got called, and he went to the hospital and ended up with stitches.

The place was a mess with fire trucks, ambulances, etc. The bride and groom then got in a massive fight, and the DJ packed up and left around 8:30. That marked the end of the wedding. I proceeded to drink my weight in Yuenglings and sleep in my car. Made good tips, though.

What Was She Thinking?

I worked as a wedding decorator for five years. Two years ago, we did the decor for a really pretty ceremony, and halfway through the day, we found out it was a "surprise wedding". The reality is even worse than that sounds. Basically, they were not engaged, but the bride planned the whole thing and the groom showed up at the golf course thinking he was just playing a regular round of golf. Nope.

He walked into his own wedding, saw her standing at the altar, and peaced the heck out. As he should have. Truly one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever seen in all my years of doing weddings, and I’ve seen A LOT.

What A Waste

two people standing on brown wooden floorPhoto by Marc A. Sporys on Unsplash

50% of the people who RSVPed to my wedding didn't come. My brother-in-law who volunteered to DJ didn't actually bring any DJ equipment, so our reception was powered by Pandora. He also said he would capture the ceremony and create a video of the highlights of the reception, but didn't bring his video camera. The florist also forgot to deliver about 50% of the flowers. That was already bad enough, but things just kept getting worse.

The reception venue took everything we discussed and then decided to do the opposite. There weren’t enough tables and no dance floor, among other things. When we tried to get it fixed, the man who was sent to change out the tables stood outside the window of the reception hall angrily drinking from a bottle. It was an absolute mess and no one seemed to care.

I later spoke with a friend who had worked with that man, and he explained that that sort of behavior happens pretty much any time he is asked to do anything, so...We made a CD with a couple of songs on it for my brother-in-law to play before the ceremony began. He insisted that he had something better. It was two songs played on repeat for about an hour.

My immediate family was late to the wedding, including my sister who was a bridesmaid, and my mother and father. They had originally offered to help set up everything that morning, but I guess they just got a late start. My veil got lost the night before the wedding. It still has not resurfaced. After everyone was done eating and the cake had been cut, I dimmed the lights in the reception hall to change the atmosphere to more fun, party vibe and get people dancing. Everyone got up and left.

It didn't go great, but my husband and I ended up married and we're still very happy together. I guess that's the most important thing. Still, I wish I'd saved the money from the whole thing and gotten married at the county clerk instead.

Evil Stepmother

My father-in-law’s wife at the time attempted to ruin our wedding. The week before our wedding, she sent my mother an email saying that I, the bride, was too good for her stepson. She then messaged me that she had decided not to wear the dress that we had picked out together. She refused to come to the wedding rehearsal, then showed up on the day of in a garish, skimpy outfit.

She wouldn't speak to anyone and just sat there with her arms crossed for the whole day. We just ignored her, even when she threw away all the leftovers from the post-ceremony brunch that my husband and his best guys catered (they're all chefs). My father-in-law divorced her the following year.

The Big Grift

My cousin attended a wedding where the bride and groom got scammed by the wedding organizer. One hour before the wedding event, there was nothing in the room—no food, no decorations, just a few tables, and basically an unused ballroom. The bride and groom realized the wedding organizer hoodwinked them and took the money to buy a big ol' house.

You End How You Start

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It started with the best man just absolutely roasting the bride and her parents. Basically, he called them gold diggers in front of several hundred family and friends. Then they cut the cake. Apparently, the groom was told under no uncertain terms not to shove cake in her face. Well, he did it anyway and she stormed off, not to be seen for 20 minutes. The chaos didn't end there, either.

The reception went on as planned, but she got wasted and passed out that night in the middle of the street while still in her wedding dress. Pure class. They’re divorced now.

In It To Win It

My own wedding was a disaster. It rained so it was cold, and no one bothered to turn the lights on. The few pictures I have are dark and grainy. My parents divorced earlier that year, so my dad hated seeing my mom at the wedding and didn’t stick around to get a picture with me. My husband’s mom didn’t even take off work to attend.

The good news is that we just celebrated our 49th wedding anniversary.

The Real Deal

I went to a wedding where the bride and groom bought the wedding package on Groupon...which is fine; like, why spend a fortune for one day? But I guess the venue thought they could cut some corners, so they did the worst thing they could have done—they stuck us in a room that smelled so strongly of cat urine that some people immediately left. The only drinks were those from a vending machine.

It was next to an airport, so every time a plane took off, the ceremony had to be paused because you couldn’t hear anything. And the day after the event, every single one of us had food poisoning.

Loose Lips…

man holding black glide cam and black Canon DSLR cameraPhoto by KAL VISUALS on Unsplash

I attended a wedding reception and was seated near the cameraman. An aunt of mine was sitting closer to the camera and spent the evening commenting and gossiping about everyone. Much of it came out on the video. The cameraman was great, he did two copies—one edited and the other no holds barred. The unedited version is the stuff of legend.

Double The Trouble

It was a big wedding with over 300 people. Except, it turned out the bride had a dirty little secret—she had been having an affair with her cousin’s husband. The cousin had known for a little bit but waited until the wedding to go table to table, letting everyone know the bride was sleeping with her husband. The poor groom was blindsided. The worst part was his father-in-law was well-off and opened up a restaurant for him. Well, he lost his wife and his restaurant.

One Bad Idea

The wedding was held at a state park that's famous for its giant gorge and waterfall. I don't know whose idea this was, but someone suggested a photo overlooking this gorge and everybody was game. The wedding party went around a stone security barrier and the maid of honor literally fell off the cliff to her end. It was like 500+ feet.

Take A Picture, It’ll Last Longer

two man's hands wearing gold-colored wedding ringsPhoto by Nick Karvounis on Unsplash

My friend is a wedding photographer. While he was waiting at the altar to take photos, the best man gave a shocking announcement. He told everyone that the groom was coming out as gay and that the wedding was canceled. Everyone laughed like it was a best man joke, but no, it was very serious. The bride was on the way in the car, and she was not happy.

All the guests had to wait while they sorted their lives out. In the end, they split the reception room into two and each family had their own dinners. Needless to say, they didn't want the photos.

Top Secret

The bride gave explicit wedding instructions beforehand through various channels. One rule was that there were to be no posts on social media before the bride gave the OK, and certainly no posts before she posted herself. Anyway, a few hours before the wedding, someone posted something, saying that they were at the wedding or whatever.

Absolutely nothing malicious, just a generic statement. The bride saw this and everyone could tell she was about to blow up. At the end of the vows, the bride turned to the congregation and said, "Can you all please unfriend Jennifer as I gave out explicit instructions that there are to be no social posts until I give the OK, and she has broken that rule today".

Just imagine—she literally just finished her vows and she finally has a new husband, but that was the first thing on her mind. Everyone awkwardly laughed as if she was joking…nope. She then stormed off, with her new husband awkwardly following behind. There was a weird atmosphere after that and everyone started making excuses to go home.

I'm talking proper fake emergency stuff here: "I have to get back because I need to err, my erm, yeah bye.".. Everyone left much earlier than usual. No one wanted to be there and have awkward conversations with the bride.

There are some wild medical conditions out there, and sometimes, I feel like we're never done learning about them.

It was just a few years ago that my brother told me about Cotard's delusion, a rare psychological disorder in which the person afflicted believes they are dead, immortal, or don't exist.

I didn't even believe him at first, but when I looked it up, it turned out to be a real thing (and I even based an entire short story around it).

A lot of crazy medical conditions sound like they are not real, but it turns out, they are. Redditors know this all too well and are ready to share the craziest medical conditions they've ever heard of.

It all started when Redditor TweekerAllWeeker asked:

"What is the craziest medical condition you've ever heard of?"

Frozen

"Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva (FOP) is a rare muskuloskeletal condition where, after birth and progressively through life, muscles and tendons are gradually transformed into bone (a process called ossification). This creates a second “skeleton” of extra bone, which makes movement impossible."

– yParticle

"Idk if it's real, but I heard people with FOP have to chose, at some point, the position they want to spend the rest of their life in, standing sitting or laying down."

– aoi4eg

"I saw a show about this when I was a kid and the whole idea still f**ks with me."

– Jaway66

You Thinking What I'm Thinking?

"There are conjoined twins (the Hogan sisters) who are attached at the head and their brains are attached. Each one can see through her sister's eyes. Each one can taste the food the other one is eating."

– Fun_in_Space

Fragility

"I met a guy who practically had eggshells for bones. He broke them about 50 times or so doing simple things like just sitting on a couch or brushing his teeth."

– Odd-Package-4713

"That'd be osteogenesis imperfecta type 3."

– crimpytoses

"My nephew has osteogenesis imperfecta and is almost 8yrs old. CPS got involved when he was a baby and hadn’t been diagnosed yet, thinking there was abuse, which was so sad for my family. They later found out what it was and have made medical accommodations. Man, he’s such a sweet, happy boy despite his condition. He hasn’t known anything other than this his entire life, so for him pain is normal (which makes me so sad), but he is bright, engaging, and so very amazing in every way that I get pissed the f**k off that he’s dealing with this."

– Purse_Whiskey

Life Span

"That disease that ages people at an insane rate that often kills it’s sufferers before they turn 16. I think it’s called progeria."

– MascotGuy2077

"That is a wild one, also the girl that looks 8 but is in her 20's, it's crazy as f**k."

– IThinkMyLegsAreBroke

"At my old place, two of the kids in the community had progeria. I'd only ever see them once a week at most, but they always seemed happy when I came across them; their family made a real effort to make their time count. I've always wondered how they grapple with the reality of their situation at their young age, though. How do you even bring that kind of subject up as a parent?"

– miniman03

Invasion Of The Body Snatchers

"The Capgras delusion: the person becomes inalterably convinced that someone close to them has been replaced by an imposter who has disguised him/herself so cleverly that they look identical to the replaced person."

""Yes, this woman looks and acts just like my wife and knows everything my wife would know. ...But she is an imposter disguised to fool me and I will have nothing to do with her.""

"It's funny to think about in some ways but would be absolutely terrifying to have."

– dr3rdeye

Facial Blindness

"This reminds me of a condition where people lose the ability to see faces. Their eyes work, they can see anything, but if it is or resembles a human face it gets turned in an undeterminable blur."

– random_sh*tter

"Faceblind. I have this. Brad Pitt has this. The worst part is when I wake up in the morning, look in the mirror, think "oh that's what I look like," then promptly forget my face 5 seconds later. I cannot point myself out in family photos."

– GodsCasino

"Prosopagnosia. It comes in varying degrees of severity. I have it. I have a lot of trouble recognizing people in unfamiliar contexts, like seeing your teacher at the grocery store. I have to see somebody a lot of times before I can recognize their face, unless they have some distinguishing feature (like my friend with a long beard). My friends tend to be people who look or dress distinctively, because it’s so much easier for me to recognize them."

– linuxgeekmama

Cut It Off!

"Body integrity disphoria: people who desperately want to cut off a part of their body, a limb for instance. They have always been thought of as insane until someone decided to have a look at their brains and realised that the limb in question isn't registering in their brain. To them, it feels like an alien appendage was sewn to their body. I find that so fascinating."

– Deleted User

Is It Still There?

"Or the other way around, phantom limb syndrome. When one loses their limb but still feels itchiness or pain on that non-existent limb. They use mirror therapy which is quite interesting as well."

– trickydaze

Strange Immunity

"Knew a woman who couldn’t conceive with her husband."

"He could theoretically get another woman pregnant, and she could theoretically get pregnant from another man, they just couldn’t conceive together."

"He donated blood (maybe marrow) to her while she was being treated for cancer. This somehow made her body immune to his sperm."

"They wound up adopting a couple of kids."

– ShaolinDave79

Anti-Hydration

"Allergy to water. It's extremely rare, last I researched it I believe there were less than 10 documented cases. And yes, they are allergic to themselves. They can't drink straight water, typical hygiene is a huge no go, and even humidity can trigger bad reactions."

– KaliCalamity

"How do these poor people live…"

– Crackheadwithabrain

"Not well, and on a lot of antihistamines"

– KaliCalamity

"I knew one of those kids who has the disorder. His twin brother was diabetic, and I didn't believe him, but his parents confirmed it. His skin was constantly cracked and sloughing off. Poor kid. I felt so bad for him."

– arcticnerd

"How do they stay.... Hydrated? Do they have to drink insanely alkaline water? What about their blood? Like wtaf???"

– Grouchy-Place7327

"They can have small amounts of water, but at least in the documentary I saw, the couple of people it focused on usually stuck to things like juices and milk, as they're less reactive. The major danger is skin contact."

– KaliCalamity

Seeing Things

"My nephew had PFAPA (periodic fever, aphthous stomatitis, pharyngitis, adenitis). Basically he would get a very high fever every 3-4 weeks with no other symptoms other than the fever alone. One night when he was maybe 5 years old, he was going through an episode and called his mom (my sister) into his room. He told her that he was really scared because his bedroom was covered in bees. I guess the hallucinations aren’t always fun."

"He had his tonsils and adenoids removed and that was the cure!"

– emjayholla

A Whole Different Perspective

"Synesthesia. A condition where your brain mixes up sensory signals."

"With this condition, one might be able to taste words, or certain numbers will always appear a specific color, or you might literally see music or smell something and feel as though you're being touched."

– ChaoTiKPranXter

"I can hear color. Sounds have different colors to me. This is especially true of people’s voices. Barbra Streisand, for example, has a light amber voice."

– IoSonCalaf

"I have that! For a while I thought everyone did."

– RenegadeRabbit

It's surprising how many of these I've actually heard of (thanks to Grey's Anatomy) but that last one is completely new!

These Jerks Are Their Own Worst Enemies
Photo by Paul Jai on Unsplash

Sometimes, we can destroy our enemies without ever lifting a finger. Why? Because they destroy themselves.

A Bumpy Road To Justice

black convertible coupe parked near housePhoto by Anastase Maragos on Unsplash

My neighbor accused me of reversing my drive and hitting his car. He gave me the date and time I had allegedly done it and pointed to a (small) scrape on my car that supposedly matched perfectly the location of the dent on his.

This was 7 weeks after the alleged event, by the way. I said it wasn't me but told him to contact his insurance and we'd see what they said. A few weeks later, I get a letter from my insurance asking what had happened. That’s when I revealed everything. I responded with the date I had bought my car and updated my insurance—which was two weeks after the supposed bump.

He never spoke to me again, but I used to give him a cheery wave every time I saw him glowering at his window.

Practice Makes Perfect Revenge

Years ago, I worked extremely hard on preparing a presentation for a tech conference. It would be my first speaking gig. I was nervous all get out. I practiced. I refined. I got advice. I practiced some more. My manager was generally a nasty woman, but she was supportive of this even though she never once saw or heard my presentation.

So we travel to Vegas. It turns out there was a far greater demand for our talk than they expected, so they moved us to the main stage room. There were expecting about 500 plus walk-ins. I was now 10x more nervous than I had ever been before.

Well, immediately pbeforethe start, my manager noticed a very well-known media person and their photographer sitting in the front row. She got all excited and insisted that she was going to co-deliver the speech. She even went so far as to put her name on tthe itle slide.

I of course was fuming. We go on stage and she does a decent intro and then I start in. She keeps interrupting, so I just let her run with it. It reminded me of a morning show. A bunch of people with overwhelmingly fake smiles talking over each other.

This was a deeply ttechnicaltopic with a live demo. She fumbled each slide worse than the next. Then it happened. She got to the "Live Demo" slide and...froze. I had the wherewithal to let her sit there. It was gloriously brutal.

We had a, let's say, confrontation after. I left within 2-3 months. She got fired shortly after.

Oh, and the media people she was prancing for left immediately before the start. I think they were just sitting there from the prior session. Perfect.

Double-Cross Examine

When I practiced family law, I saw this kind of thing often on the stand. Turns out if your opponent is crazy, most of the time all you need to do to reveal that is give them a microphone and mildly question their story. The best, however, was in Motion to Withdraw hearings.

For context, I hated these hearings. I dreaded them. I already felt like a failure for having to withdraw from a case, 95% of the time this was because the client couldn’t or wouldn’t pay me, but sometimes it was because they turned out to be uncooperative and/or combative with me.

They were not difficult to win, however. Inevitably if I simply asked the (ex-)client when and how they intended to right their retainer, they’d start listing off excuses about how they don’t and never will have the money to do so. It’s heartbreaking, but it also proves my point.

TThe uncooperative clients however, were the best. I’d read off a list of times they cursed me out, ignored my advice, and threatened me and my staff, then just wait. You could watch their blood boil on the stand, followed by completely unhinged justification as to why no lawyer could reasonably work with this person.

“Mr .Jones, can you explain why you threatened to ‘shove a phone up my paralegal’s butt’ if she called you again?”

“She calls me every WEEK with ANOTHER THING that I have to do! You’re supposed to be handling my case! It’s why I hired you! I don’t have time to be searching through my emails and getting bank records and bringing you papers eeveryday! And every time my retainer is empty for like a day, she calls to remind me to refill it! I’ve got other things to pay for, like the darned child support you put on me when I left! How rude can you be, right? Right? I swear if I have to hear her voice one more time I’m going to drive over there and run her over!”

“Your honor, I rest my case”.

A Stake In This Game

woman signing on white printer paper beside woman about to touch the documentsPhoto by Gabrielle Henderson on Unsplash

I was in a meeting with my project manager, who had not been in the office or worked a proper full day for MONTHS. I was about to answer a question for our stakeholders, and she snapped at me to let her speak one sentence and then she will let me have my bit.

I did as I was told, and she told the stakeholder a completely wrong thing about the system we were handling and made a complete fool out of herself. She got sacked this month.

Life Comes At You Fast

A co-worker who I hated got fired a few weeks after I decided to stop fixing his mistakes even if it impacted a client.

One Too Many

At my current job, part of my duties aisto do trailer audits, which means I make sure people are unloading/loading safely. I was training a new member for the position to do the job. After a few weeks, it turns out that the other person wasn't doing ANY aspects of the job.

Instead, they were just mingling like it was a cocktail party. When asked why they weren't doing anything, they said it was because they were never trained. Well, turns out that due to past complaints about this particular person, management put them on a specific plan where if they got any type of training they were to have a piece of paper documenting what kind of training it was, who trained them, etc.

The management would then sign off, with all parties’ signatures. When they pulled the file that said they were indeed trained in all duties of the job, they just sat there silent and got fired.

They were fired because they pulled the same stunt in every department of the building, and mine was their last chance.

You Come Into MY Court?

architectural photography of trial court interior viewPhoto by David Veksler on Unsplash

I was prosecuted in the local magistrate’s court in the UK. The defendant had paid for some fancy lawyer from London to come up to defend. The chair of the magistrates, who were all lay people, was a frail-looking senior lady and he tried to snowball her.

He came perilously close to calling her "dear" while talking down to her. What we locals knew, however, was that she was a terrifying Harridan with a mind like a steel trap and a tongue like a razor, and she ate him alive.

She tore apart his arguments, lambasted him for bringing complex arguments to court without prior warning to the clerk, and picked apart his understanding of the rules of evidence. Never saw him again.

Let’s Go To The Tape

I let the lady who changed lanes into me run her mouth about how I rear-ended her…before pulling the officer aside to show him my dashcam footage.

Do-It-Yourself

This wasn’t an enemy, but in retrospect ,they should have been. I work as a teacher and we had an ex-manager guy who decided to get into teaching late. He had lots of pretty horrible habits like eating other people's lunches, perving on the female teachers, and squeezing people's shoulders painfully hard as a “friendly” gesture.

But the habit that this story is about is how he tried to use incompetence to get people to do his tasks for him. None of it was really important; he just seemed to enjoy talking people into doing things for him.

So he comes up to me one day with a USB data stick in his hand. He had a copy of a previous year's exam that it was his responsibility to update and edit. He'd taken the file home and his daughter had done the update...Yeah, the dude really roped in his own family into doing his paid government job for him.

He wanted me to copy the file from the USB back into the server, replacing the original file he'd copied. It was click and drag between the USB and the file server. I flat-outrefused, saying it was part of his responsibility and that I was too busy with my own tasks. His response floored me.

He proceeds to loudly and publicly proclaim to the entire staffroom that I didn't understand how difficult it was for people of his generation to learn computer technology and that I reeded to help him out. He said that he was currently doing a computer course but this (dragging a file between two folders) was too difficult for him to sort out.

I let him go on for about a good 5 minutes about how horrible I was for not helping the poor helpless old man out,until I just as loudly asked him "How the heck did you get the original file from the server onto the USB in the first place?"

You could have heard a pin drop in that staffroom. He walked off and copied his oile.

Outfit Repeater

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My roommate's ex abandoned his vehicle in front of my house. I tell him to please move it or I will have it towed. The vehicle suddenly has two flat tires, and the ex files a report claiming my roommate and I had slashed his tires.

I waited until the ex made his statement about how we had slashed his tires and that is why he couldn't move his vehicle. He then filed a claim against us in small claims court. I knew just what to do. I provided the authorities and the court copies of my and our neighbor’s door cam footage, showing the ex arriving in the middle of the night to slash his oires.

The cherry on top? The ex shows up in court wearing the same shirt as in the videos.

No…Don’t Go…

10 years ago, I had a co-worker who everyone found pretty annoying. She was an idiot who thought she knew better than everyone else and would get offended at every opportunity. She took something I said the wrong way one day and got upset.

Well, I just didn’t say anything. I would not indulge her insanity. So, she quit. Grabbed her stuff and walked out on a job she’d had for years. No one spoke a word to stop her.

Code Red

I was a lead developer in a small company producing IT devices. My manager hired his friend from his previous company who was super arrogant and thought he knew everything better.

Theoretically, my opinion on the development of the project should have taken priority, but neither my manager nor his buddy cared about it.

I tried to talk to the manager about the problems with the new colleague, but he brushed me off. The new guy—being so brilliant—was given one important component of the system to do. Of course, he made it clear that he didn't need any help from me. Weeks and months passed. In the meetings, his component was always in the last phase of testing. But I had access to the git repository, and I saw how messy it was.

No one asked me for my opinion, so I didn't say anything. I waited. The deadline came with the supposed release of the product. And of course, nothing works. The higher-up management became interested in the case, and my manager could only avoid being fired in one way—he fired his buddy.

A few weeks later, I left the company. That was over a year ago, and as far as I know, the product still hasn't hit the market.

Clock’s A-Tickin’

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During my very long and exhausting divorce, my ex-husband kept insisting he was ready to settle. We would schedule a conference with my lawyer and then push papers around the table for 2 hours. He would just argue over petty details rather than aiscussing anything.

This happened a few times. I was incredibly frustrated because I genuinely walked into this wanting to compromise so it would be over quickly. But that was never an option. Note that I hired a lawyer and he did not—he was convinced he could do it on his own better.

So after a few rounds of this, I had a dark idea. I got the impression that he was trying to waste my money until I could no longer retain my lawyer, and then he thought he would have the upper hand. I made less than half of what he did at the time and my lawyer's retainer fee wiped out my entire savings, so it was a very real concern.

My suspicions were confirmed when one day as we were walking out of my lawyer's office, he told me this, word for word while chuckling. I passed this on to my lawyer, and it was then that I learned that we were 6 months out from being married 10 years. At that point, I would be entitled to a sizable part of his pension upon retirement.

She let him play his games for 6 more months without saying a word, and then finally took our case before a judge 5 days after our 10-year anniversary. Not only did I get part of his pension, but she also got the judge to order him to pay almost all of my lawyer fees.

The beauty of it was that it was 100% his fault for playing games.

A New Lease On Life

I used to live in an apartment that had a very old lease. College students bassed this place’s lease down like inheritance until it came to us. Legally, the landlord could only increase the rent yearly by a small fraction of the current lease’s rent.

The exceptions to this were if the apartment was being renovated (in which case it would be her responsibility to accommodate us while renovating) or if it had been vacant for a year between leases. She knew our lease’s rent was extremely low, and so wanted to get rid of us and jack up the rent on a new tenant.

She sent us a letter about 2 weeks before our lease would be renewed saying she was renovating and we’d have to leave. Well, it happened my roommate was not just a college student, but a law student. And he happened to know she had to give us a lot more notice than that.

We pold her we weren’t leaving and she’d be welcome to take us to court. Which, she did. She told the judge she wanted to renovate, and the judge asked her for the new floor plan and a cost estimate of the proposed renovation. She had none of those things.

When the judge asked why, she said she’d only decided to renovate a week prior. When the judge asked why she’d made this decision so quickly and not given the mandated deadline of 6 months’ notice, she said she was only renovating so she could start a new lease on the property.

The judge facepalmed at her response, dismissed the case, and renewed our lease with no rent increase for the year, since she hadn’t presented us a new one with enough delay to contest it. We were just sitting there with our mouths open, bewildered that she could have been dumb enough to say the quiet part out loud straight to the judge.

What Goes Up Must Come Down

My ex-boss was a complete jerk in every aspect. We worked as surveyors using drones to scan and survey large areas, and he would go out of his way to get the cheapest and least reliable drones to do the job.

One of those drones was this god-awful fixed wing (shaped like a plane with only one propeller) that you launched using this horrible slingshot system that had a 50% chance of just launching the thing nose-down into the ground.

I told him it was horrible. I even recorded my launches with it so he could see this thing was a piece of trash, but he insisted I was just a “bad pilot who couldn't take off a drone to save my life". After three crashes, two rolls of duct tape ,and a few arguments, he decides to come with tus o the next big job we have and just do it himself.

Now, the turnover times for these jobs were insane. The man had zero concept fofhow long things take, so he'd promise the clients the data the very next day. WThismeant that EVERYTHING would have to go perfectly the day of the flight, with zero delays, so I could process the data overnight and have it ready for them the next day.

No room for errors, no second chances, every morning it was make or break. So we get to the site in the early morning, and I'm completely hands-off. Normally I'd pack a second drone for when this one inevitably kamikazes into the earth, but this time, I decide he needs a slice of humble pie.

I watch as he sets up the drone, runs through the checks, loads it onto that god-awful slingshot ,and gets ready to pull the trigger. I take a few steps back, take out my phone to record, and watch the fireworks. It was better than I could have imagined. He pulled the lever and the bungee cord released. It whipped the drone ten feet into the air at Mach 2, before the thing nose-dived right into the ground, breaking off one of the wings.

After about 2 seconds of teetering on the ground, the drone’s autopilot thought to itself "Hey, that was a launch, wasn't it?" It then automatically kicked the propeller into high gear, shattering it against the cold, unforgiving ground.

He just watched the whole thing happen with an absent look in his eyes. Once the drone settled down and dying throes stopped, he picked up the drone, walked back to us, and said "wWell darn”.

The 4-hour drive back to the office was completely silent, and our boss had to call the client and explain why we wouldn't be delivering the data to them on time. We had another job we had to do the next day, so they'd only have it next week.

I could hear the client screaming to him over the phone from the next room. Needless to say, we never used that drone again. He never stopped buying cheap drones, but now when I told him they were trash, he believed me.

Her Day In Court

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Several years ago, my older brother was fighting for custody of his son with his ex-wife. As the first custody hearing date approached, they were exchanging [un]pleasantries over text and my brother ended up saying something along the lines of, "I'm not continuing this conversation. I will see you on the 15th”.

The ex-wife told him, "The hearing is on the 25th, idiot”. So of course instead of correcting her, my brother just allowed her to keep thinking it was the wrong date, and she missed the first hearing entirely.

It became the first of many mistakes she made in the court system that eventually led to my brother and the woman who is now his second wife winning full custody of his son.

They Get By With A Little Help From Their Friends

I once worked for a project in a call center and we constantly had the management on us about call quality. They would review every call and send the report to you and your supervisor, who would sign off on it tand hen send it back.

If you got two reports under 90%, there'd be a warning and you'd be fired after four. Now, this was all done via email, so I'd save all my reports just in case. MIn myfirst couple weeks, I got dinged with a warning but efor verything after that I maintained at least 95% or above according to the reports I was getting.

One week I noticed a few agents were getting let go, agents, I always thought were good. At the time, the project was looking for supervisors and these were the guys you would want. I found out they had all been hit with bad reports, which led to the firings.

Then one day HR calls me and lets me know I'm fired for several reports saying I scored insanely low scores. Just one problem. I had the reports saying those were all over 90% and I told HR I had them. The HR rep asks me to forward all of them to review and I do so.

A couple of hours later I get another call from HR saying I'm being reassigned to another project with better pay. Turned out the higher-ups were fudging the reports AFTER the supervisors signed off on select agents because they had certain agents they were friends with and wanted them to get the management positions.

Even worse, everyone in management knew and didn't care. The project got shut down and the fired agents were all brought back and placed in bbetter-payingprojects like I was.

Embarrassment Is The Same In Any Language

I was doing a mortgage for a French guy in Miami Beach who had a French realtor. Even though both people were completely fluent in English, she frequently did asides in French, having no idea I spoke the language.

When they settled on a property and we were riding the elevator down from the condo, she told him that look, these guys are scumbags and they're going to screw you over. I have a much better person that you can work with.

Towards the end of the ride, I say to the guy in fluent French that we would be happy to compare our proposal with whatever her people could come up with and it's his choice, but certainly, we would like to work with him on this and any future investments.

He starts laughing his butt off and she was completely mortified. He went with us and fired her as his agent. On the spot.

All Going To Plan

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I'm working on a job site and the architect is there one day. I've been given some light fixtures for the sconces in a leasing office lobby. The fixtures are meant to be hung from a ceiling, and they can't be installed on a wall.

I attempt to convey this to the architect, but he brushes me off and just tells me to follow the prints. I turn to the apprentice and say, well you heard the man, put them up. A bit later, we hear the crashing of glass.

The architect asks what was that? I said your light fixture.

Some Humble Pie

When I was a teenager, a cousin of mine, Jenny, fought with her mom, Jackie. The fight was so intense that Jackie BEAT Jenny severely, so she called my mom and dad, asking for help, and asked to live with us for a while.

At the time that sounded horrifying, but we quickly learned the horrible truth. Jenny was full of hot air. Jenny was a drama queen, loved to stir up trouble, lied constantly about basically everything, and Jackie never laid a hand on her. We had heard rumors but dismissed them and believed her…until one incident.

My mom always kept a few frozen pies in the freezer, just in case company came over. Jenny took a pie from the freezer one day, ate the entire thing, and when mMomcame home, she got angry because those pies were for company. She asked Jenny who ate the pie and she said I did.

My mom yells for me, I come into the kitchen, and she asks if I ate the pie, I said no, and I get yelled at for eating the pie. Jenny then proceeds to launch into telling this overly elaborate tale about how I took the pie and ate it just to get her in trouble.

She went on for like 3 minutes and mMomjust kept getting angrier and angrier at me. All the while, I couldn't help but grin like a madman. 3 minutes later she finishes her story and I point something out.

It was a coconut cream pie she ate. I DESPISE coconut. I hate it and will never eat it. My mom KNEW this, and the realization hits her. Jenny gets a look of horror on her face. She got grounded for a month. The look of both of them is seared in my mind. Makes me smile when I think of it.

The funny thing is, she tried it again 2 months later, this time eating a chocolate cream pie, but mMomdidn't believe her.

Whisper Network

I was working as a cub reporter in a small town and had done a piece on a stray dog menace in an area, as plenty of dogs had gone after kids within a short while. The dog lovers of the town took that piece as an “I hate all dogs" article.

They shared it in their WhatsApp group and started talking trash about me. What they did not know was that the administrator of the group ran a dog shelter and a few months back, I had done a piece on the shelter, so I was in the group too.

At one point, they began scheming that they'd cook up stories about me lying in the story and complain to the publication. Mind you, these are “upstanding” citizens—doctors, lawyers, sand enior executives.

So their word weighted a rookie reporter. I just showed the chat to the editor. He had a good laugh about it. Never knew what happened after that but hours later, they stopped complaining about me. The administrator of the group aapologizedto me separately (he didn’t need to) but never did tell them that I was a part of it.

This Comes From The Top

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I worked in a country-wide company and needed something done by a peer in another office. She was very uncooperative and was arguing with me that she should not do what I was asking because it was not the correct procedure.

It was, in fact, the correct procedure as per my boss (who was her boss' boss), but before I could tell her where I had gotten my instructions, she took it upon herself to send me a very condescending email, CCing her boss and mine. She was trying to put me on the spot for being wrong.

I just waited until both her boss and mine told her that I was right, and I was just sitting there thinking "Why are you making this so hard on yourself girl".

It Goes Both Ways

As I was being fired from a job, the district manager requested we record the conversation. He thought I was going to be very upset, so I obliged. Then, when he started to tell me why I was being fired he started with, “You are going to be graduating college soon, and we want to make sure we get ahead of you leaving us”.

I very calmly asked that he send me the recording right after he said that. Then later that day I called a lawyer. I now have no student loan debt. I was able to win litigation due to a breach of contract.

Step Off The Soap Box

This happened at a local electoral district association meeting. It was expected to be a largely pro-forma re-nomination of the previous candidate (my boss) when a former candidate decides to throw his hat in the ring.

He starts giving this long diatribe about how much support he has locally (he didn’t) and starts rambling. Do you know when someone starts talking faster instead of making a point? It was that.

My boss texts me to say “You can feel free to interrupt and move for a vote”.

I reply “One sec, I have a feeling he’s gonna say something stupid”. Right then, he lets slip a horrible name about my boss’s race. Needless to say, once he realized what had happened, he made the smart choice and withdrew.

Money Talks

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Decades ago, I worked for a small, luxury furniture store. Part of it was managing the paperwork, and part of it was programming the software. I wanted a raise, so I asked the new office manager for one.

He was a real piece of work, roundly despised, and later fired for harassment. He explained to me that I deserved a raise, but because we had so many outstanding accounts receivable (unpaid bills), he couldn't afford it.

"So if I can get it down there's money to pay me?" He agreed...but I had to get it down to zero and I had three months. Darn. So, I became a debt collector. This was a luxury furniture store, so our clients had money.

It turns out that the reason so many had outstanding bills is that no one was willing to ask the rich people for money. I did and they paid. However, not all of them did. I was permitted to contract with a debt collection service.

Any debts passed to them were no longer reflected in our accounts. That cleared quite a few debts. A few others were written off when they threatened to sue over the old bill (those went straight to the owner and he didn't want bad publicity).

At the end of three months, I had a meeting with the office manager. He was looking over the accounts receivable and told me he was very impressed. I knew what was coming. I let him ramble on. I had pulled in a ton of money for the company. He was happy about that.

He'd love for me to permanently add collections to my responsibilities. I was doing great work.

"But there's just one problem, we aren’t at zero. There are still thousands outstanding. I can't give you that raise”.

I pointed to the accounts still outstanding. "If you check the unpaid accounts, you'll see that almost all of them are members of the owner's family. I can send them to collections if you like. That will reduce it to below zero”.

He was angry and quickly told me to forget about it. I got the raise.

Tight Quarters

I was making a delivery in the downtown area of a small city. I worked for an event rental service—tents, tables, chairs, that kind of stuff. We made deliveries using large box trucks with hydraulic llift gateson the back.

For those who don't know, a lift-gate is a heavy metal mini-elevator that fits underneath the back bumper of large trucks and folds out a few feet behind the truck whenever you need to use it.

Finding parking downtown in a big truck can already be a huge inconvenience, but we found a spot right outside of the venue we were delivering to. It was a very busy street, so that was crazy lucky.

We didn't have a ton of space to work with, but we had enough room to fold out the llift gatebehind the truck, and a bit of ground to work with behind that. I had 2 other people working with me; one would stay up in the truck and and another would take turns running the gate and carrying the stuff inside.

This is when an older woman in a nice BMW SUV decided that she was going to parallel park right behind us and take the little working space behind the truck that we had. Sure it's annoying and inconsiderate, but hey it's a city and people need to park, I get it.

Now, our guy up in the truck was readying the next load of stuff to come down to the ground, so the lift-gate was lifted up—about 5 feet in the air. The lady in the SUV backs up, cuts her wheel, and slices the absolute heck out of her Beamer right into our steel lliftgate She finished the park job, but her SUV is cosmetically screwed.

The passenger fender/headlight area is annihilated, and naturally, our big hunk of steel is unscathed. She gets out and starts screaming at us that it's somehow our fault, and this is where nature takes its course. She lays into all 3 of us for a solid 2 or 3 minutes and eventually loses a little steam.

I give her a chance and tell her that she's fighting a losing battle and that we aren't at fault. Of course, she immediately fires back up like a lunatic and calls the authorities. I shrug at her, we complete the rest of our delivery, and officers show up a few minutes later.

When they pull up, this lady has full 180s. "Oh officers, I'm so glad you're here—that's them over there”. No joke, literally pointing. They ask what's going on, and we don't even have to open our mouths. This lady tells the whole story about how she crunched her BMW into our parked truck.

The officer looks over to me, and I just give them an exhausted head shake. "Well ma'am…” they explain that she is at fault, and the ccherry on topis the citation she received for running into us.

The Writing On The Wall

I have always done my paperwork in a distinctive blue Pilot G2 pen. At one of my previous jobs, I had just gotten my machine-making product ready for packing. The only problem was the outer lip diameter was just too big.

Nothing I did could get the diameter down. It was decided, and hoped, the product would further shrink in storage as it continued to cool and set. So quality tech signed off approving the variance.

Several months down the line, a couple of customers complain the lids aren’t fitting right sometimes (we later found out only with hot foods or in hot environments). They ended up refunding anyone who bought a product made by me.

I get called into the front office for a final warning, a big quality alert, and a copy of the quality paperwork. The quality tech is saying she never approved me running that product with the quality variance and has a copy of my paperwork “proving” it.

I waited until everyone had spoken their piece. I then pulled out my pen, flipped the write-up over, and wrote, “I refuse to sign this write up because I do not deserve it”. I then told them to go pull every quality sheet, every training signoff, and even my job application and job offer and notice I write in very identifiable blue ink.

The quality sheet in front of me is a photocopy because all my writing is in black, not blue. The plant manager threw the write-up into the shredder and told me to go home for the day (I had already worked a 12-hour shift before this) and forget about this happening.

He did not look amused. There was a new quality tech the next night I went in. If you work in any field that requires regular paperwork, use a blue pen.

Not Quite A Slam-Dunk Case

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I was on a jury hearing on an intent-to-sell case. The prosecution had the detective on direct examination to establish the defendant's MO. Apparently, the defendant would sit in his car in front of his house, and a customer would pull up and request a product.

The defendant would take the cash, go into his house where his grandmother (yes, grandmother) would exchange cash for the product, and the defendant would go back outside to deliver the product. Apparently, the defendant felt that since he never directly exchanged money for the stuff, he was safe from prosecution.

Anyway, the detectives bought products several times to build an airtight case, then returned days later with a bunch of squads and nabbed everyone. The defendant took the stand while his attorney attempted to establish a simple case of mistaken identity on the part of the detectives.

Lawyer: "So in your neighborhood, is it common for young men your age to dress similarly and sit in or hang around their cars at the curb most every evening?"
Defendant: "No”.
Lawyer: *splutters* "Er, what I meant was...”.
Prosecution: "Objection. Asked and answered”.
Judge: "Sustained. It wasn't the answer you wanted, but it was an answer. Move on”.

Guilty on all counts. Roll credits.

Scratch My Back, I Won’t Scratch Yours

My ex-co-worker was a piece of trash. He was using "I have a baby so I need certain shifts more” a lot, yet would routinely drop them if he randomly decided to party the night before. He would call me in the middle of the night to cover his morning shift, etc.

I would cover his shift, and yet when I needed him to cover my shift (which I would ask him days or even weeks in advance) he would also pull the “I have a baby” card. Christmas season comes and I ask him if I can take the 31st of December morning shift so I can spend New Year’s evening with my boyfriend, go somewhere, celebrate, etc.

He got almost mad because I asked. His words were "No, no, I have a baby, it's his first New Year’s eEve I have to spend it with him and my wife”. Fine, whatever. But it didn’t take long for his comeuppance to come. The night of the 30th comes. I was awake at 2 am, gaming or watching Netflix.

I felt my phone go off and look who it is, my co-worker who is out somewhere and needs his morning shift covered. I put my phone on “Do Not Disturb” and in my drawer. I didn't answer.

The next morning, I had 50 missed calls from him, a few from other co-workers, and 10ish from my boss.

He didn't show up for work. He got fired that day. Our work environment became so much healthier.

Fast And Furious

Back when speed camera vans were common in my area, I was running some errands one time and noticed the van on the side of a fairly busy road. It was situated on a bend so if you were northbound you likely wouldn’t notice it until you were in the curve.

I had a bit of back-and-forth running around that I had to do and noticed it was still there an hour or so later when I passed it in the opposite direction. Later in the day, I was still taking care of things and was headed north again on the same road.

There was a real aggressive jerk in traffic this time, speeding when he could, weaving in the lanes to try to get ahead even though it was now rush hour and no real progress would be made, gunning his engine, etc. I could see after a couple of stoplights that this guy was peeved at the audacity all these other people had at being on the road at the same time as him.

He wound up at a stoplight next to me and one car behind, following someone who didn’t pull away at the green quite as fast as I did, so he cut somebody off to get over to my lane. Now he’s tailgating me on the northbound stretch, and I wondered if the speed trap was still set up.

Because I’d gone a little quicker than the guy next to me, a gap started to open in the left lane, but he was still on my butt because it hadn’t yet widened out to full car length.

As we started nearing the curve where I had seen the trap earlier, I speed up a little to increase the gap, then took my foot off the gas going into the turn. Mr. Aggro Driver did what I predicted he would and punched it to overtake me on the outside…right as the camera van became visible.

The pop of the flash, when he passed the van, did put a grin on my face.

What About Bob?

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The space shuttle Challenger engineer, Bob Ebeling, knew it would explode. He repeatedly said the cold weather would cause a failure despite pressure from the NASA administration.

Then, in what he described as making the best decision of his life, he refused to sign the paper indicating he approved of the launch, forcing his boss to do it. At the governmental inquiry after the disaster, NASA said "tTheengineers signed a paper approving the launch that day”. Which, yeah, that’s true, but worded as deceptively as can be.

Bob then stood up, walked to the hearing, and said that he refused the launch but was overruled. He said this to the stunned members of the hearing. The government fired the NASA executives and made Bob head of the investigation.

“You’ve Got The Right Man!”

Years ago, at the end of high school, I had a "friend" who was working at a Shop-Ko. He was stealing from the till whenever he was put on a check-out. Eventually, he is caught on camera pocketing cash and the authorities are called to detain him in the store when he showed up for his next shift.

As he is getting handcuffed and led out of the building, he yells, "You guys are idiots! I've been stealing from you for years!" Yeah...it didn't go well.

Making Up The Grade

Before I changed careers, I was working in an office and had a team of 4 employees I was managing. My boss, who was incredibly dumb, wanted to see what grade I gave to my employees as part of their annual evaluation.

I had 4 great employees who were working hard, and I could even show them some stuff past their "level," since it could be useful experience if they wanted to later get a higher-paying job at a higher level.

Needless to say, their results were much higher than expected, especially for 2 of them. So I gave two of them an A and the two others a B. My boss disagreed with me and told me how their work has to be especially amazing to deserve such grades.

She talks to me about the normal distribution and how there should be X amount of A, B, and C. I let her go on talking. I take back the sheets with their evaluation grades and everything I wrote about them. I ask her what exactly makes them not deserving. She rambles.

I ask her what their day-to-day looks like. She rambles some more, getting a bit angry. I ask her what so and so’s last names are. She doesn't even know! I told her if she doesn't know anything about that, she has no clue how they are performing and therefore can't tell me to change it.

I asked her what she'd do if the majority of the employees performed well, will she give out D and E grades just to follow normal distribution? She tells me, no, it would be ridiculous. I told her doing the same for A and B would be ridiculous too.

I told her if she wants, she can give me an E, but she won't change the evaluations of my employees and as soon as I'd leave her office, I'd show them their grades so they know she's the one who changed them if it happened to change.

Turns out, they kept their A and B. I got a C. I didn't care, left soon after, and changed my career. Never looked back. What a moron.

True Colors

person holding clear glass bottlePhoto by Paul Einerhand on Unsplash

Our friend group had one guy I had personally cut off because he was a terrible person when he drank. Another friend of mine was having a cookout and decided to invite the guy I had cut off despite me saying he was going to do some stupid stuff.

Fast forward two hours into the cookout, I was proven right in the worst way. The friend I had cut off from my life got to drinking and decided it'd be funny to sucker punch a guy with Asperger’s. Everyone was telling him what a garbage thing that was to do, but he laughed and shrugged and played it off as no big deal...all as his victim was holding back tears.

I didn't have to do a thing, he showed everyone who he was. Everyone stopped dealing with him after that. Good riddance.

In The Hot Seat

A former co-worker decided to curse at me for having used a company truck typically assigned to him from the night prior. His biggest problem was that I destroyed the seat with my “big butt”.

I calmed down as much as I could and called my supervisor, who rushed over and sat us both in the company office. Except a few head nods and "yes" answers, I let my co-worker dig himself deeper and deeper.

He was a very loud and bombastic character, so it was easy. The supervisor advised him to collect his personal belongings and take a few days off to cool down. He was then fired after 3 days of rest. As for the truck seat, I forgot to reset the lumbar support on the seat. That was it.

Don’t Label Me

I worked at a large vape juice manufacturer printing labels for bottles. We had a particular production manager who thought she was my boss. She wasn't. We were on the same level of the hierarchy.

In any case, she thought her stuff was a priority to me. She could not understand that we had a whole process and knew exactly what needed to be printed in order to fulfill all of our orders. Our actual boss told me to just do my best to work with her and get her what she requested so she'd shut up.

She decided one day to order 150k of each label for two particular lines we had so she would never have to wait for labels again. The was just one big issue. The whole company knew that regulations were changing and requirements on labels were changing.

I tried to explain this to her and I didn't think this was a good plan. She insisted repeatedly. I finally said screw it and started doing it, while having my team do their best to keep up with our actual priorities. I stayed late, and got lots of overtime.

When our boss finally clued into the order, I was 300k labels into 600k of the first line. When asked, I told him that he had told me to do what it takes to make her stop whining and that's what I was doing. He put an instant stop to it. She got written up and those labels were still on a shelf in the corner 3 years later when we shut down.

A House Of Cards

woman in purple dress shirt using laptopPhoto by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

An old boss was awful to me after I took an extra few days of bereavement. She was just not smart, so I emailed her a recap of a meeting we’d had about said days off. She responded by not only confirming what she’d said but throwing in a bunch of insults.

I escalated. I’d been at the company in a different location for 8 years with an outstanding track record, so I had some credibility. 2-3 weeks later my team was called into a last-minute meeting where her early retirement was announced, and my colleague saw her crying in the parking lot later that day.

I don’t hate anyone generally but that made me so happy and looking back I do still hate her.

Stuck In The Middle

My wife was a school teacher with 20 years under her belt. She was paired with a "co-teacher" for the special-education students. My wife and the co-teacher did not get along. It got to the point where she and the co-teacher (and their respective bosses) were sent to mandated mediation.

Near the end of the mediation session, the co-teacher asks the mediator "So what's the next step if this doesn't work?" Turns out, the next step is "The one without tenure gets let go”.

He Couldn’t Manage This One

There was an account manager for a big software vendor that always gave us a hard time. He would constantly nag us about terms in the contract and things like that. One day it was time for contract negotiations and our head lawyer attended.

She also happened to be the wife of the company’s owner. Disaster struck so quickly. When we sat down and she gave him some coffee, he bluntly told her how nice it was that she, as a waitress, was also attending. It didn’t take long for them to find us a new account manager.

A Room Of One’s Own

woman wearing blue denim jacket holding bookPhoto by Element5 Digital on Unsplash

Oh boy, this was college drama. My husband still had a year of college to go after I graduated so I got an apartment in town, but he had his room with some friends on an on-campus apartment. After casually asking around, his roommates were cool with me living there so long as I helped with chores.

Well, halfway through the year a roommate moves out to study abroad and one of the other roommate's girlfriends moves in. She seemed nice and the two of us had a lot in common and ended up friends, or so I thought.

A month in, we get confronted by an RA. There's been a complaint that involves everyone about my stay. This took absolutely everyone by surprise…except the couple. Yeah, they tattled on me to the RA. Never once talked to me. Never brought it up.

Anyway, the meeting happens and the couple is late. They arrive and start revealing themselves. The RA's face went from mild disapproval towards me to downright disbelief and annoyance at the girlfriend as she talked herself in circles about how yes, she knew about me before she agreed to move in and was okay with it but she had feelings you know? Those feelings? Those vague feelings?

She was also paranoid as heck because the RA flat-out asked her if she tried talking to me or my husband about it and she said no, absolutely not. Why? She had one experience in the past with a completely unrelated person so she just couldn't. Because of feelings.

Her idiot boyfriend just sat there silent, only saying once that he never liked the idea but never spoke up because he didn't want to "ruin the apartment vibe" which was ruined by him anyway so...yeah.

All the while I was perfectly calm and even said it was okay, if they had a problem with the arrangements I would have happily just stayed in my apartment with my husband visiting. Everyone else was telling the RA how completely out of the blue this was.

So the RA, who is very fed up with them, tells me that per bylaws I can't be in the apartment unless I'm someone's guest. To which the 3 other roommates immediately say that if my husband isn't home, I can be their guest.

One of them is nearly almost always home. The RA agrees. The couples' faces were honestly hilarious. After that, no one in the apartment liked them. They hid in one room for the rest of the year.

She did attempt to patch things up with me by gaslighting the whole situation, but I just laughed at her and told her she showed her true colors and I wanted nothing to do with her. She was genuinely shocked.

I Did It My Way

A contractor on a project I'm working on was doing a really poor job installing equipment. I found their foreman and attempted to show him what he was doing wrong and what needed to be done to fix it. Some of it was so bad I was worried about it failing.

He wanted nothing to do with me. Then he said the words that did it for me. “I've been doing this for 10 years and have installed 12 of these. I don't need your help. We'll take care of it”. Well, I've been doing this for almost 19 years, and making sure it's done correctly is my full-time job.

Ok. Good talk. A few days later I was onsite and saw that he kept doing it his way and hadn't fixed anything. He had installed more of it poorly. I called a meeting and voiced my concerns and a stop work order was issued until the corrections were made.

His bosses realized his attitude cost them thousands and he was off the job the next day.

Butterfly Effect

One day, my ex decided to try to snatch our kid from his own mother’s care while I was at work. This was after I filed for divorce. He was intoxicated, failed a sobriety check, and I was granted emergency custody.

It was probably one of the single worst decisions that set him up to be in the position he’s in now.

Slow Your Roll

a man wearing a face mask in front of a bust of a manPhoto by signet 976 on Unsplash

I’m an attorney, and several years ago I had to argue a bitterly contested issue for a client against another attorney who was a complete fool. He went first, and I followed for just a few minutes because I could tell he was about to go off the rails in his response.

Which he did. He started throwing out every argument he could think of. The judge was getting annoyed and told him to stop a few times. Even though he was straight-up lying about my client, I decided it was best if I just turned and walked away from the podium we were standing at and let him keep going.

By the end, I was towards the back of the courtroom. After another minute of this nonsense, the bailiff had to come up and put his hand on the back of the attorney and tell him to stop. Still, the only time I’ve ever seen that happen.

Now It’s Personal

I’m a lawyer, and I’m in a jury trial. It's an assault case. My client is pleading self-defense after somebody got whupped. I can't get a bunch of the stuff want into evidence, so I have no choice but to put my client on the stand.

I know this is high risk/high reward. I've prepped the client. We go for it. I get the basics out and let the prosecutor go at him. Well, he got in there and HARANGUED him, mostly about not calling the authorities after the altercation.

The opposing counsel then does a rebuttal. He oputthe officer on the stand to explain how much they don't like my client, don't trust him, wouldn't put anything past him or turn their back on him, etc. It's a small community, they know each other. Reputation evidence, in essence.

I let it go past what I could object to. I was sitting there like "Oh this is too much but go off officer”. It wrote my closing for me. "Why didn't he go to the authorities? The officer told you why he doesn’t”.

Timing Is Everything

I reminded my ex-wife the divorce court was the next day and she told me to screw off. So I went by myself. She failed to appear and angered the judge. He asked what would be my desired outcome for assets and custody of the kids. He wrote down whatever I wanted, and I could practically hear her screams when she read the orders from 3500 km away.

All-Terrain Idiot

person riding yellow and black ATVPhoto by Appic on Unsplash

My co-worker messed up and rolled one of the ATVs we use for work. Nice enough guy, but not a good worker and very immature. Plus, before his he got called out for riding it too hard all the time. A meeting was had, and we were told: “not to lift a tire off the ground when turning”.

Except anyone who has ridden an ATV knows that sometimes, even at low speeds, the rear tire will lift. My boss was just exaggerating for some of the dumber ones in the room. Later on, my other co-worker turns around next to me on the ATV (at a reasonable speed) and the tire lifts a bit.

This original idiot co-worker sees this and snitches on the radio, just to try to get someone else in trouble besides himself. I offhandedly called him a snitch off the radio a few minutes later when I was near him.

He then gets on the radio to our boss AGAIN and throws a fit about what I said and has a meltdown. We all get called into the office, but beforehand, the other two of us involved agreed to just be chill, apologize, and let our idiot co-worker talk his way into getting fired.

The boss understood what happened from the start, and as this guy got worked up about the situation all over again, my boss told the kid if he left the room mid-conversation, he was fired. Which he promptly did.

What Goes Around Comes Around

A guy pilfered a presentation from me 25 years ago. We hated each other. When he started presenting, I realized I had made a huge error in my presentation that he had then repeated, but I didn’t say anything yet. I let him get through it.

I then asked him about the error, and he couldn’t answer. This was in front of the CEO. He got fired, not for just that, he was an overall jerk.

Lost In Translation

In high school Spanish, this stereotypical dumb jock who sat in front of me would turn around and take my paper from me to copy my answers. He knew he could get away with it because I was an awkward pushover. But I knew just what to do. One day, I took two copies of a verb worksheet and purposefully put down wrong answers because this guy was like clockwork.

He took the wrong answer copy like a complete sucker, and the next day when the teacher was passing back papers, his worksheet said 60% and mine was 100%. He turns around extremely angry and says, "You got these wrong!!!”

I showed him my worksheet with a perfect score and said, "I'm flattered that you trust me so much". Take that, Patrick. I still savor picturing the disgust on your face 20 years later.

Read It And Weep

books in glass bookcasePhoto by Clarisse Meyer on Unsplash

I was an attorney. A man sues my client, alleging he missed work for protected reasons, and his termination was wrongful. I look up the plaintiff in the public records database. That’s when I made a slam-dunk discovery. I see that he had court dates on all of the days he missed work.

Instead of immediately confronting the plaintiff before the court and giving him time to change his story, I depose him and have him walk me through every minute of every day he missed work. He leaves out the court part.

A month after the deposition, I send the plaintiff’s lawyer printouts of the court records with the relevant dates highlighted, along with paperwork to voluntarily dismiss the case and a letter stating that any further action in the case will result in a motion against him for bad faith litigation.

Don’t hear a peep from the lawyer, but get the dismissal order from the judge a week later.

Quit Your Bellyaching

When I was an 4th grade, my friend and I would kick leaves into a pile that blew against the fence during recess. Eventually ,this one kid found out and right as we were finishing making the pile, would come over to us.

He was small, but the two biggest kids in 5th grade acted like his enforcers. We could let him jump in the pile, or get beat up. One day I decided that since there was a cut-down tree stump there, I'd just bury the stump under the leaves.

Sure enough ,he comes over and demands he gets first jump. I told him it was a bad idea but he goes and full bellyflops right onto the stump. Never had to deal with him jumping into my leaf pile again.

Perplexed father with his daughter looking at her computer
Photo by sofatutor

Parents lie.

But the older we get, the more we realize parents are not just humans telling little white lies.

They can be villains with malicious intent.

Catching a parent in a lie can be soul-crushing.

But it's a part of growing up.

Hopefully we learn how to be better.

Redditor Hackedfaith wanted to hear about the times people realized their parents were hard-fibbing, so they asked:

"What is the worst lie you caught your parents telling?"

My mom told me anything in life was possible.

And cheaters never win.

Yeah sure. Sell me an igloo an Iceland too.

​Expelled

Andy Samberg Ugh GIF by The Lonely IslandGiphy

"My Dad used to tell me that he learned all of his cool tricks and skills in 'Daddy School.' I'm now 28, married and still have not been enrolled."

AdLive7065

Thief

"That the 2K I earned at my summer job would be safe in my mom's savings account until I wanted to withdraw it later. Never saw that money again."

drillgorg

"I lost money to my mom too. I was a kid, told her I had $50 in change (I don't know where it all came from), and she said I didn't. She counted it and it was gone."

"She stole a good deal of my babysitting money. Hundreds of dollars. She filed my first tax return (without telling me) and kept whatever money I would have got. She told me that the fee to get it done was about as much as I would have gotten back."

Sarhii

A Second Family

"That my mother was schizophrenic. I was 15 and knew she had been battling depression for years. Schizophrenia runs in our family and as an angsty teenager, it was very easy for me to believe... She was completely convinced that my father had a secret second family. She was diagnosed and medicated for years. He did have a second family."

Thationdeas76

"He did have a second family??? That had to have been devastating. 'Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they aren't after you.'"

TwoLittleNeedleMarks

2008

"That they couldn’t afford to pay for college. So I took a job during the day and paid my way through night and weekend school. Turns out I had a decent trust fund from my grandfather. I could have graduated and started working for a higher wage 4 years earlier. I tell myself that graduating in 2008 wouldn’t have been a good idea anyway."

RandomRavenclaw87

Weekends Only

Looney Tunes Rabbit GIFGiphy

"Up until I was 8 years old, they told me that daddy was away at college. We would go see him on weekends. Found out later that he was in prison. I wondered why we could only talk to him behind glass on a telephone."

hhairy

The truth about parents can often to difficult to accept.

That's why there is therapy.

Scandal

Shocked Oh No GIF by Yêu LuGiphy

"Found out when I was 25 I have a sister one year older than me that they gave up for adoption, I'm 37 and have been searching for her for the past 10 years."

Even_Future2580

'Mom! Mom!'

"One night I went downstairs to ask my mother something. My dad was a light sleeper and would get really pissed if anyone woke him up, so I whispered, 'Mom! Mom!' All of a sudden my dad sat up and yelled at me to get lost. They told me I should never sneak up on them because they had a gun and my dad thought I was an intruder and almost shot me."

"They scared the bejeezus out of me. Sometimes when I tried to get to sleep I'd remember how my dad almost shot me. For years. Even after I moved out. Decades later, I mentioned it to my mom. She started laughing and told me they were having sex. There was no gun."

Sapphyrre

Internal Affairs

"My dad went into the ER with stroke-like symptoms. He ended up having a severe brain bleed that required immediate and major surgery. While he was laying in the ICU, my mother, who opened their computer to get insurance info, found messages on his linked-in page, that he’d left open earlier that morning before I took him to the ER, from a woman he was engaged to in college. They had been having an affair for over a year."

ParanrmlGrl

Still Works

"They told me if I was lying there would be bubbles on my tongue. So when they asked me something and they thought I was lying they'd tell me to stick out my tongue. If I knew I was telling the truth, I'd open my mouth confidently and show off my bubble-free tongue. If I was lying, I'd try to scrape the bubbles off with my teeth. I now use it on my son. Still works."

Obst1994

Tilly

"When I was 4 We had a dog called Tilly, my mom said that she gave her away to a boy who couldn't speak and she died while saving him from drowning in a river Years later when I was around 13, my mom was on the phone with her friends and they were talking about their pets that passed away, turns out that tilly died because my mom was drunk and let her out of the house, she ended up getting hit by a car."

Yogurt2022

Bad Bunny

Easter Bunny Dance GIF by SportsManiasGiphy

"When my sibling and I were young, we were tossing toys around that the Easter Bunny had left for us. My mom started yelling at us, 'I did not buy those for you to treat them like that.'"

ExMoIsMyPersonality

Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, Tooth Fairy... the lies are enormous.