Why is it, that it seems most of life's biggest consequences are birthed from the tiniest of actions, often without intention? So many of us fight, struggle, plot and methodically plan for certain outcomes for many things in life but to no avail. Then suddenly like a Julia Roberts movie you turn a corner and BOOM.... everything changes. Heck, it makes you nervous to go outside, but then maybe staying in will lead to the biggest BOOM. Oof, I can't decide. It's all a coin toss.
Redditor u/Homelss_Emperor wanted to hear from people who are still trying to decipher how they unintentionally played a part in some major dramas by asking.... Butterfly effect. what is that trivial thing you did that caused a serious chaos later on?It was a whole thing.
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Broke a glass and spilled juice all over the floor when I was 8. We we are at our uncle's house. It got under of a quite heavy cabinet. It was sticky and my father move the cabinet a little so my uncle's wife can clean it. Behind the cabinet, there was a small box and inside that small box, a cellphone. So that's how my uncle's wife found out he had a second phone and was cheating for a long time. It was a whole thing. They ended up getting a divorce.
Fill the hole...
Kinda a long story so I'll sum it up. When i was in high school I had to dig up a dead tree in our yard. I lazily didn't fill in the hole like my dad requested because I was exhausted after moving everything left it for a couple days and my mom ended up breaking her ankle after taking a nasty fall from that same hole. She went to the hospital where they did surgery on her ankle and she caught gangrene.
No big deal it was treatable at first they did some minor amputations and gave antibiotics. Nothing they gave her did anything but slow it down. So when they finally found one that worked well for her what they didn't realize is that in a weeks time she would have several heart failures a day because of it and eventually it got to the point we had to let her go.
The Help Desk.
Not exactly chaos, but it had a big impact. After I graduated college, before I could land a full time job, I was doing temp work. I'd just finished a weeklong temp assignment as a receptionist at an office. It was Friday, but they called me and asked if I could come back for one more day since their receptionist was still out.
I did, thinking nothing of it.
Turns out that my husband was starting his first day at the company working Help Desk, and his first ticket was to install a new printer at the receptionist desk. If I hadn't agreed to one more day of work, I never would have met him.
Second Life....
In 2007, I played an online game called Second Life. My avatar bumped into another and because of lag, I moved him. We joked about it and somehow that night I said to him "yes, but I'm not taking your name in marriage." We've been married for 12 years. A lot has happened.
One More Minute....
Not a bad kind of chaos, but showing up for a final exam at the wrong time lead to a shitload of cascading events that result in me meeting my wife and having a successful life.
i was on academic probation my junior year of college because i liked partying more than studying, and refused to learn my lesson. I pulled all-nighters for my final exams, and needed a 2.0 or better to stay in school.... part of being sleep deprived meant that i mixed up the times of my last exam.
It was at noon, but i thought it was 5pm. So I show up to a now-darkened building, freaking out. I was scrolling through my contacts hoping to call anyone i knew from the class when i bumped into my professor, knocking the stuff out of his bands. He was packing up the last load of his things, as he was heading back home to Canada for the winter break, and had me marked as a 0. I needed a 75% or better on his final to stay in school.
He gave me 20 minutes to take this test, which i was able to get a B on, which let me stay in school, graduate, get a professional job (after a year of min wage bullshit), move to a city with my friend where i met my wife... If i was literally one minute later rounding that corner in that lecture hall 9 years ago I wouldn't have had the life i have now.
The Riot Starter
A few years ago I brought yellow slime crystals to school, I left them under a desk because I didn't want them anymore. I was in a pretty bad school so all the teachers assumed it was a form of cocaine. Which led to a whole drug search of the school, which turned up all sorts of knives, drugs, cigarettes, alcohol, and stolen goods. Next thing I know 100 kids were suspended/expelled. Now, I was the culprit who accidentally started this.
When all the kids got back, people were getting jumped left and right of being suspected of the drug search. They were all looking for me, and only my closest friend knew that it was me. The security tightened around the school, but kids were even getting jumped at their homes, because of all the contraband. So yeah. I basically started a riot because of yellow slime crystals. :/
Me + 6....
I made an impulsive decision to drop an Administrative Law class with a world-renown professor to take an advanced Constitutional Law seminar that had been added during the summer break after our Law Faculty had poached an up-and-coming professor from another university.
I was having second thoughts on law as a career and figured I might as well take a class I like as opposed to a class people said I needed. There were only 6 other people registered in the seminar, including the man I ended up marrying. He was a foreign student that semester and I'd never have met him otherwise.
Ended up with a career in administrative law, of all things, too.
Shirt Off. Guns Out.
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Drunk too much one night. Seen myself shirtless. The next day decided to hit the gym for the first time in my life. 2 years on, currently studying Exercise science & nutrition. Got my own studio in the city. Steady job. Couldn't be happier. My drunk mind tends to see things from a new perspective. Sober OP may have been complacent but drunk OP may have been like "what the hell is this crap?"
127 Jobs...
I've been waiting on this question for a long time!
I missed the train to work one day by one minute about 6 years ago I'm a head chef so this sh!t matters, because I was an hour late my team screwed up a table that was a critic and her family they had strict dietary restrictions that my team didn't take into account without me.
The review came out it was really freaking bad, so bad that people stopped coming to our place and the company went under. I firmly believe that if I didn't get stuck in traffic that day I would have saved over 127 jobs. It still keeps me up at night!
Teenage Dream....
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In high school I had a crush on girl A and my friends figured it out. Embarrassed, I claimed they were wrong, I couldn't like girl A because I like girl B. They all chime in, then go for it! She'd totally date you.
Turns out girl B was wonderful, it lasted 4 years and it was one of the best relationships I ever had. We eventually had to break up but we are still on good terms.
I was such a dumb high schooler.
The Infected
Best I can think of is in senior year of high school, I went to school and had a slight stomach ache and I was like it's nothing probably just hunger or something I ate, and next morning full blown stomach bug in which I spent the whole day throwing up. I recovered by evening and I was able to return to school the next day, which the school had one of the lowest attendance rates where it almost reached the level in which school would've been forced to shut down because too few people showed up. One day I infected almost 60-70% of everyone at the school with the stomach bug.
in the woods.....
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I was at a hotel on a family vacation, sneaked outside to smoke a joint late at night, I must have left the door to the hallway ajar or something, later on a full blown community of raccoons come charging into the joint, man did they run wild.
EDIT : it was a mountain resort hotel. ( in the woods ).
Simba Forever....
When I was seven, two friends and I walked to a dumpster to retrieve my Simba plush. Their asshole neighbors stole it from me and threw it in there.
Five minutes after we got my Simba back, the dumpster suddenly caught on fire and five of the buttheads went to the hospital with serious burns.
Whenever I tell this story, I always start with,"Hey, my friends and I set a dumpster on fire when we were seven."
Life Moves Forward
Was talking about a cute boy that walked into the restaurant my best friend and I were at. He was wearing headphones but not listening to anything. We get to talking, exchange phone numbers, etc. I was stuck in a >2 year LDR with an abusive fool (though I didn't realize it at the time). Fell in love with boy from the restaurant, realized how crappy my situation was, tried to get out. (Now ex) BF at the time went ballistic, cut my name into his arm and sent me pictures, harassed me and my friends, threatened to kill himself if I left.
I left, he checked himself into a mental hospital after continued abuse over the phone. Now I live with the boy from the restaurant, we have three cats, and we're currently brainstorming ideas for our wedding (not engaged yet... but he's horrible at surprises so I know it'll be soon). It's a good feeling to love and be loved. I'm realizing now that this story may not be entirely relevant but I'm on mobile and already typed this out.
To the Border....
Well, while not chaotic, this does remind me of when my mom decided to run away with me and my siblings, (she didn't and still does not have custody) she wanted to cross the border into Mexico. I complained and she was somehow convinced to hide out in the deserts in California.
If had I not complained, things would have been different. My mom would still try to illegally cross the border with us and either we would gave been caught and I would not have spent 6 months in what was effectively prison, or I would be an illegal immigrant in Mexico.
The Rando Love
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Took my car to the shop and ended up needing a ride to my running club. A random guy offered. Our 6th anniversary is in October and we have a house and 3 dogs together.
Frat-tastic jungle juice....
I lived in Miami in my early 20's. This was the height of my party days. Even though I rolled with a big group of high-achieving recent college grads, we were young enough to treat every weekend like Spring Break.
I had this "bit" where I'd dump a bunch of of 5-hour energy's into the jungle juice we made to pe-game every Friday night. It was a well-known thing in my circle of friends.
I did it yet again this one Friday night. But that same night, this guy who had just started casually dating a girl in our group decided to come out and party with us. He drank a bunch of the jungle juice. Nobody thought to warn him that it was essentially a vat of bootleg 4-Loko.
An hour or two into the night, he starts freaking out b/c his heart is beating so fast. I realize why, I tell him he's just stupid caffeinated, and my friend/his sweet, very drunk kinda-gf takes him home early. They have a fun, if drunken and messy, hook up that night.
A month later she's pregnant. Soon enough, my gal pal is a new mom. A year after that, they're married. Now they've got a multiple kids together and live in a border town in TX b/c he's in the military. My dumb butt, frat-tastic jungle juice started a freakin' family. But it seems to be a happy one, so... meh.
I'm Sorry
Soooooo.... One time on a night out many, many years ago. A guy I knew said he had a friends mums phone number as his friend had lost their phone and was using their mums. He said, "Shall I text her pretending I'm a guy that's in love with her" or something like that. I laughed and said yeah, not thinking too much about it.
Anyways, years later I find out that this friend's dad had seen the message and attempted to kill himself in his garage. I felt awful! I still do.
A Long Story
My wife and I were almost adopted siblings. Not what I did, but when my Mom got pregnant in High School, she confided in a high school friend.
THAT high school friend spoke to her next door neighbor about potentially adopting me since she had just found out she wouldn't be able to have more kids after giving birth to a daughter.
She decided against adopting me, the unborn baby.
Well anyways, Mom had me and kept me and 18 years later I dated and later married that woman's daughter. So, by deciding not to adopt me, she set in motion a series of events that led to me marrying her daughter.
A Quick 5....
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Leaving five minutes earlier than I should had which caused us to be in the right spot at the right time to get T-boned. Now, we are piecing our Jeep back together after three weeks of insurance stuff.
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