We're all weirdos in our own right, but sometimes you catch someone doing something that REALLY has you doing a double-take. These people share stories of the weirdest thing they've ever caught someone else doing.
1/30. Walked in on my roommates injecting a syringe (no needle) of vodka into each other's butts. Open front door. Pants around one's ankles. Other one was forcing the syringe in. Deer in headlights look for both.
2/30. I was at a house party and we all crashed in the living room afterwards. I woke up early in the AM to get some water and as I am walking back to my couch I see my friend pissing on his wife as she sleeps on a recliner. She wakes up and says "Did you piss on me? Not again! You can't do this in someone else's house!"
3/30. A man on the subway casually took a halved lime out of his sock, squeezed the juice into his hands, rubbed it on his face and neck, and then put the half back in his sock as if nothing has happened.
4/30. I once saw a guy, with a camping grill in the passenger seat, making pancakes while driving his little Pontiac as fast as it could muster down a busy highway.
5/30. In middle school, I was kind of a nerd. I had a lot of clout with the teachers, and would often get handed their keys without supervision because they knew I wasn't going to cause trouble.
8th grade, after school, I needed to get into the science storage room for something. I couldn't find the teacher that normally had the keys anywhere - Mr. V. Anyway, I went up to the office and one of the ladies gave me the key.
I made my way back to the science room, and then to the back of the room where the storage room door was. I thought I heard giggling. I figured it was nothing, so I opened the door with the key. What I saw was the most bizarre display... I couldn't make it up if I tried.
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There was Mr. V, between the steel wire shelves, with his pants around his ankles, an Erlenmeyer Flask on his erect penis, and a test tube up to his forehead like a unicorn. He turned around and saw me, dropped the test tube (which shattered), and hopped to the back of the room, yelling "SHUT THE DOOR!!"
Needless to say I shut the door.
He resigned at the end of that semester. I don't know what the f*ck he was doing, but that image will be forever burned in my mind.
6/30. My friend used to like the smell of pencils. But not just plain pencils, pencils that had been in the oven for a while. It would be weird to walk into a room and he'd be sniffing hot pencils.
7/30. I was walking up to a friends place, and looked through the window and saw his roommate, sitting alone in the semi-darkness, chugging ranch dressing from the bottle. He saw me see him drinking it.
He put it down very quickly, and I went and knocked. The roommate answered the door, and I just pretended I hadn't seen him and never said anything about it to him to this day.
8/30. I walked into the bathroom at a bar and a guy was getting a bj while sitting in the urinal. Bare ass in the urinal.
9/30. I once saw an elderly woman at our storage unit. She walked in with a handful of letters and when she opened her locker there was nothing inside but a heap of unopened letters that was almost as tall as she was. We left before she did and she apparently had parked next to us, because there was a car that had the interior completely filled with mail. There was literally only a small space for the driver everything else all the way to the ceiling was mail.
10/30. I used to play with this one kid in my apartment building, and one time, I came by his place at the usual time, only to find him sniffing something/ dipping his fingers in and licking something in an old Ponds cold cream jar.
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I ask him what he's doing only to find his mouth covered in literal sh*t. This kid was pooping in the jar and then eating it. Safe to say I told his rather negligent mom and never hung out with him again. I was 8 years old and still get grossed out thinking about it 23 years later...
11/30. In college, I walked in on my roommate in the bathroom giving himself a nipple piercing with a paper clip.
12/30. My father saw this, but he worked at some Amish cheese factory or somethin', but one day he just saw a guy pick up some cheese and f*ck it. He just f*cked it like there was no tomorrow.
My dad refuses to eat any cheese. It's been 23 years since that happened.
13/30. I was the one who got caught... I was listening to a lot of DMX at the time and was practicing barking like him and practicing his raspy voice in what I thought was an empty room in my office. My coworker pokes his head around the corner and says "are you...barking?"
I was.
14/30. Park ranger here. Part of my responsibilities are to lock bathrooms after the parks close. Walked into a single stall bathroom to find a small, approximately 50 year old man in this bathroom. He was 100% naked, staring into the mirror, vigorously beating off. As soon as I walked into the room, he turned around, looked at me, then turned back to the mirror and continued.
Had no idea what to do. They don't train you for this sh*t.
15/30. I used to deliver pizza in Seattle, downtown. Cool job, got to know the whole city. As you probably know, it rains here often.
There's a stretch of old highway 99, aka Aurora Ave, just barely North of downtown where the road starts to change from a highway into a city street. Old hotel there that has too many stories for comfort. Also, importantly, a dip in the road over by the curb where rainwater would pool during heavy precipitation.
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Puddle Man would stand right there, on the corner, in the rain. Right next to the fast moving highway and the large pool of rainwater on the road. We saw him all the time. Puddle Man wore a yellow rain slicker with the hood up. Sometimes he was under an umbrella. You know, because he didn't want to get rained on. Pretty sensible. Oh, except he forgot to button the rain slicker up. And he forgot to wear pants.
Puddle Man would stand right there for hours, in the perfect spot to get COMPLETELY SOAKED by the huge bow waves of water that would be splashed up by all the cars driving past. Calmly, facing the street, no expression on his face, rain bouncing from his hood or umbrella. Just letting the waves wash over him as car after car fwoomed through his puddle.It was weird, but it was awesome. It looked fun! I and the other pizza drivers would swerve toward him a little, just to get deeper into the dip and make a bigger wave. I almost knocked him off his feet during one particularly heavy downpour. I like to think that he appreciated that. He never seemed to get tired of it.
16/30. I was caught by one of my employees at work... eating a bag of cheetos with chopsticks. I thought the lack of orange fingers was brilliant...
17/30. I was waiting in my car to pick up my boyfriend from campus and a guy was making his way across the otherwise empty sidewalk gesticulating wildly while conversing angrily with a squirrel.
The squirrel was following him and every few feet he turned around to yell at it. It would stop and listen but every time he tried to walk off the squirrel resumed following him and the whole cycle would start over. It was amazing. I'll never forget it.
18/30. A little girl in tears was screaming at an owl to bring her mommy back.
19/30. I walked in on my sister completely naked, wearing only flippers and a snorkel. IN WINTER.
20/30. Worked at a factory, was taking a dump, opened the stall door when I was finished and I see this coworker who was kind of a nutty older guy. Anyway we had these big round metal fountain style sinks in the middle of the floor. So he is standing there wearing his work pants and his shirt is off and he is fully lathering up his whole body with soap and water. I'm just looking at him like what the f*ck?
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Finally I say, "We can't shower in here man."
Turns out a hydraulic hose had burst soaking him in fluid. He was just trying to clean it off while someone fetched a company picnic t-shirt from a box in the office that he could wear home.
It was really funny though, I really thought he had finally cracked.
21/30. I was in the bathroom at work when a man maybe in his 30s or 40s entered. While I was washing my hands he cupped his under the automatic soap dispenser, filled them with soap, and put the handful of soap into his mouth. He just kinda swooshed it around before swallowing it, doing that satisfied lip smack thing, and walked out of the bathroom.
22/30. I caught somebody walking in on me masturbating.
23/30. Caught my brother making out with a poster sized photo of Marilyn Monroe.
24/30. 10-11 yr old boy jacking off in the frozen section of a grocery store.
25/30. Not necessarily in the act but scrolling through my amazon fire sticks photos, which all of my families kindles and amazon products are connected, found nude pictures of my brother that he didn't realize got uploaded to the cloud...
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26/30. I work for the fire department and we had to cut off a stick shift handle of a manual transmission car because a girl tried to masturbate on the "T" handle stick shift and got stuck on it. It was real tough to keep a straight face throughout.
27/30. Was at some beach when I was like 10 years old, walked into the change room / toilets to find some naked 60 year old man standing on top of some benches slathering shampoo all over his body. I just 180'd it out of there and told my brother to go inside, he came out with the biggest "WTF" face ever.
28/30. Got an apartment with a guy I knew from high school. I walked in on him painting my bicycle with a paintbrush. "What are you doing with my bike?" I asked. "Oh it's yours? I found it in the back porch.. I was going to sell it." He retorted. "You can't sell my bike!" ----"Don't worry, I'll split the money with you."
29/30. Friend of mine spent the night. He woke me up because he was humping the spare mattress. I acted like it wasn't happening. A year later, he stayed over again. I was playing Star Wars Galaxies and he was on my bed watching 2 Fast 2 Furious. Dude started humping the mattress again. While I was maybe 3 feet away and still awake.
Like I had better movies to hump a mattress too, man.
30/30. Caught my step brother once. Had his ankles by his ears, a**hole in the air. He had caked himself in baby powder and was farting, laughing at the clouds that it made.
He was 15.
One of my favorite books is "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." It was a key element in unlocking what I could see with my imagination. No adolescent should go beyond sixth grade without knowing it. What else?
"ANNOUNCEMENT FOR A LOT OF PEOPLE READING THIS THREAD:"
"MANY OF THE BOOKS MENTIONED HERE ARE IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN AND IN AUDIO BOOK FORM. GO THROUGH YOUTUBE/RANDOMHOUSE/AUDIBLE/OVERDRIVE FOR ALL THE CLASSICAL GOODNESS YOU WANT."
"It almost totally eliminates the financial/time commitment that many will cite for not picking them up. I listen to books on double speed all the damn time. I am working my way through "A Tale of Two Cities" now."
Meaning
wondering simon cowell GIF by X Factor GlobalGiphy"Man's search for meaning - Viktor Frankl."
Oh Milo
"The Phantom Tollbooth."
"Maybe one of my favorite literary moments…"
"Milo: "Many of the things I'm supposed to know seem so useless that I can't see the purpose of learning them at all."
"Princess of Sweet Rhyme: "...what you learn today, for no reason at all, will help you discover the wonderful secrets of tomorrow."
- wort_hog
Johnny
"Johnny's Got His Gun. It's so intense, but it's so good. Metallica's song One is based off this book. Guy has his arms and legs blown off, goes blind and deaf, and is left to live like that. I only read it once, but it's forever engrained into my memory. It hits you like a freight train."
Brothers...
"Surprised I haven't seen it here already so I'll add it... The Brother's Karamazov by Dostoyevsky. In Slaughterhouse 5 Vonnegut said it could teach everything that we needed to know about life, except that wasn't enough anymore."
"If the only thing that book did was make you marvel at how people centuries and oceans removed from you in time and place, could experience the exact same emotions about life as you did, it would be worth the read. There's so much more to it, but Dostoyevsky had such a knack for digging deep into universal human experience. And it's just a hell of a good story too."
Classics
diva read GIFGiphy"Speaking as somebody who isn't religious, the literary value of the Bible (and the Hebrew Bible) is severely underrated."
I took a class on it in college, with a prof who'd once allegedly gotten into a bar fight over Beowulf. We would sometimes spend half a class discussing a single verse or two because there's so much stuff going on under the hood."
- dmillson
I know so many of those. And sadly, I'm already behind in my studies. I love books and I'm always on the path to find more to consume. Let me ready my already lengthy list.
WAR
War Shockwave GIFGiphy"All Quiet on the Western Front. Everyone should have to reckon with the reality of what war actually means."
- BigHern
Thanks Teach...
"Night, by Elie Wiezel. It is absolutely heartwrecking , and I hated every moment of reading it, which is exactly the effect it is supposed to have."
"Came here looking for this one. I had to read it back in high school and it blew me away how moved I was by it. Stories like his need to be remembered for all time, no matter how hard it is to get through (emotionally-speaking; it's actually quite an easy and short read). I'm so grateful that my English teacher assigned it."
West
"The Westing Game."
"A Librarian here, such a terrific book. I have gotten so many kids to read it by hooking them with the fact that the reader can play the game and has all of the clues. And good luck as it is fiendishly clever."
All the Good Crazy
"The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. Such a great book."
"Oh my god yes. I love this book for being the sex, drugs and rock and roll of the classics world. It is lengthy but has revenge, treasure, plots and schemes and drugs. There is nothing stuffy about this classic."
- skundrik
The "Good"
"The Giver- that book made my 9-10 year old mind really think about what was important in society. It was the first time the idea of "good" things having a negative consequence was presented to me. I think what makes it work is that we are learning how this whole society really works along side a character who has lived in it his whole life."
"As the facade of the utopian society begins to fall away to show devastating consequences of the "perfect life and society" the reader not only feels their shock but the main character's shock. This was a book I read in school 4 times- once in 5th grade and once in 10th for English and then in both high school and college sociology classes. This book written for 9-13 year olds made for great discussions."
Good and Bad of Life
read ford GIFGiphy"The Grapes of Wrath and/or Of Mice and Men. Both are heartbreaking, but not for the sake of being heartbreaking - instead they provide a glimpse of how freaking hard life can be, but also how beautiful it can be."
That is a lot of good advice. And a lot of great storytelling and advice giving. Did anyone miss anything that should be there? And make sure you read anything by Harlan Coben, he's a fav.
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