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People Share Which Great Inventions Actually Turned Out To Be A Curse

No one really thought this ahead I guess....

People Share Which Great Inventions Actually Turned Out To Be A Curse
Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

Remember when we thought the internet was going to revolutionize the world?

It was going to change our everyday lives.

And it did. Oh, technology... but did it lead us where it should have?

Sometimes invention is a hardship.

Much to our chagrin.

Redditorscrabbleking1966wanted to know which life creations that were meant to bring about innovation actually brought about chaos by asking...

"What great invention has turned out to be a curse?"

Boomer Trouble. 

"Those damn phones - boomers 2019."

WEERDMEMES

"Boomers are on their phones now more than millennials ever were. Every single boomer I know just reads Facebook during dinner and it's absurdly rude."

shadowmask

FB is Death!

Giphy

"My man, the answer to this question is Facebook."

Resolute002

Beep Beep. 

"Cars are a blessing and a curse. So many people die from car wrecks. Yet I cant imagine not having them. Yeah their value is almost immeasurable but they can and often do cause so much death and destruction. I think we forget how much of a death trap they really are or at least they can be."

Lukealloneword

Micro Successes....

"Microtransactions. Before its creation, publishers and developers were able to take their time making amazing games that everyone loved and they only costed 20-60 dollars. They were successful."

"After their creation, developers and publishers suddenly couldn't support themselves and constantly released rushed video games stuffed with microtransactions 'just to stay afloat.' It's not true, but that's what microtransactions do to people. They need more, more MOOOOOOORRRRRREEEE."

"It's a curse."

goody_fyre11

Bad Air.

"The Vape. It was supposed to be a device to help you stopped smoking, instead, it brought more people to do it."

Colonel37Sean

War Materials.

"Nuclear weapons."

Nighttime_traveller

"Even the people in the process of inventing them knew they were a curse."

"'I am become death, destroyer of worlds.' - Oppenheimer upon seeing his theoretical research turned into an enormous ball of plasma and gamma rays."

Reddit

Sips....

Giphy

"Alcoholic beverages."

Piper1105

Revolution!

"Communism."

depshet

"Revolution from the ground up is what is needed, unfortunately it came from the top-down undermining the very rights of the people it aimed to protect."

tomatoaway

Bless Us....

"Religion, it has started way too many wars and caused way too much death. I'm not just thinking about Christianity, Jews aren't blameless they have done some things and Muslims are definitely not blameless at least as a whole because of all their radical members that they have (not all Muslims are radicals) but the people who blow up buildings and commit acts of terror for their god and their religion. Also The holocaust happened mostly out of the hate the nazis and Hitler had for the Jews."

MaVoKG

Cursed Webs.

Giphy

"To everyone saying internet is a curse. Stop it. At its worst the internet is morally neutral and at its best it's a universal database for nearly all the information in the world. The internet isn't a curse. The idiots who use it in bad ways are."

jelly-filled-ham

Big data and Data science.

"Big data and Data science. The early days (90s-early 2000's) were great. You could find anything you wanted to learn, anything you wanted to buy, communicate across he world, and pretty much everyone had the same ads and potential experiences."

"Now big data is being used to track every darn thing you do, and machine learning is being used to increasingly create echo chambers. Even worse, the corp world is using big data and machine learning to automate jobs people actually enjoyed doing, and may be the cause of the next big jobs crisis."

cowanon7

Chlorofluorocarbons.

Giphy

"Chlorofluorocarbons. It was functionally great."

"The cold improved medical science, food preservation, and health in general. Of course it destroyed the ozone layer. Fun fact: one of the core inventors, also invented leaded petroleum. Thomas Midgeley Jr. His final invention was a pulley system to support him due to polio. He ended up being strangled in it."

CarNoob1337

The Famine. 

Zyklon A. It started out as a extremely effective pesticide that caused no harm to the plants and had an extremely noticeable smell to let you know to back away because it was toxic. And then in ww2 the Germans took it and removed the smell and turned it into zyklon B the infamous gas used in the gas chambers in concentration camps and death camps. (Side note zyklon A was invented by a Jewish German scientist who also invented the first mass market fertilizer and pretty much saved Europe from a massive famine)."

m8key

Oh the Plastics....

"The plastic."

jkthor_9

"We overuse plastics and suck at recycling. Plastics definitely have a bunch of medical impacts that have advanced society."

"But we have over used plastics and can't clean up after ourselves. And they're finding micro plastics in fish now. The dire consequences of our plastic litter may not even be apparent for a couple more generations. It will cause a disruption of food chains and entire ecosystems."

HairyColonicJr

In Everything! Everywhere! 

"High fructose corn syrup in everything!!"

SithLard

"Sugar in everything. HFCS is a red herring, and virtually no different healthwise than plain old sugar. Plain old sucrose sugar is, by definition, 50% glucose and 50% fructose. Most HFCS is sold as either HFCS 42 or HFCS 55, being 42% fructose and 55% fructose, respectively."

CutterJohn

Cup Logic...

Giphy

"K cups. Because we need more disposable plastics!"

HairyColonicJr

Before the gin....

"The cotton gin. Before the gin, picking the seeds out of cotton and separating the fibers was a labor intensive process that made cotton too expensive for the mass market. When it was invented, demand for cotton boomed as the price started to come down and slavery boomed with it."

"There was a lot more traction for abolition until that happened. Instead slavery increased and we had to fight a war to get rid of it. A time whose social repercussions can still be felt today, to put it mildly."

ahfuq

Interweb Issues...

"The internet. When it became common, it was basically all of human knowledge in one, easily searchable database with instant results. Instant, global information and news. You could write a blog post or tweet and if it went viral, you'd get the same reach as international media conglomerates, overnight."

"Finally, everyone could easily fact-check, learn new things, debate with others. The potential was staggering. Today, the internet exists only to amplify polarizing bull."

'You get online only to find your own personal echo chamber, custom-tailored to suit your own view of the world, regardless of how far from reality that view is, and you'd find others to agree with you and reinforce what you already have decided to be true. Free speech has been weaponized for propaganda and profit."

"Man landed on the moon with a fraction of the computing power found in a twenty-year-old phone, and now that same power helps us argue that the Moon landing was faked and the Earth is flat. We have instant access to the total sum of all human knowledge at our fingertips, and we've never been less informed."

nrtlbwlitw

The MP3.

"The MP3. At first a great format, now a relic of the early 2000's that sounds inferior to CD's and records, yet we still insist on using it despite FLAC being far superior. Led to music being mastered and people dropping proper sound systems. Unlike video, where we thrive to get the sharpest, most dynamic image possible, music seems to content itself to la compressed dynamic range, low end quality sound and tiny speakers."

SiriusXAim

Gas Ways.....

Giphy

"Leaded petrol and CFC gas. Incredibly both invented by the same person."

Cwlcymro

Dark Materials

"Zeppelins, they looked so cool. They are a given landmark in steampunk aesthetic, most recently I saw them in His Dark Materials and honestly I would have liked to see them fly around. But they were pretty useless, they were easily affected by strong winds. Hindenburg disaster was the nail in the coffin. Also they were mostly used for Nazi bombs."

aRkdtk

Progress doesn't always meant improvement.

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We've all made our fair share of mistakes; it's in our nature, honestly.

Sometimes we mess up so badly, it can ruin other things in our lives, like important relationships or our jobs.

But some people have messed up so badly at work that they lost their jobs in record time.

Ready to hear the tea, Redditor mango-chocolate asked:

"What's the quickest way you saw a coworker get fired?"

Check Your Pride

"In my old law office, a firm-wide email was sent out announcing the arrival of a new employee. We will call him Paul."

"So Paul decided to reply-all to let all of us know that he was aware of our recent legal defeats, that many people should be fired for these failures, and that his hiring was the first good thing our firm had done in years."

"The dude was a legal assistant right out of college with no experience."

"A minute after the email went out, I heard a crazy shout and then watched one of the senior partners run past my office towards HR (Human Resources)."

"And five minutes later Paul walked past with the HR manager and a security escort. He lasted less than 45 minutes."

- Left_Apparently

Lotto Fraud

"I worked at a lotteries company. A guy working in testing got access to production data and printed off some test tickets with some unclaimed winning numbers."

"He only did low amounts, like 500 dollars, and claimed three of them in three completely different locations around town."

"Of course, the company was interested in the story of someone who found a six-month-old lottery ticket and claimed it, but they were even more interested to find it was the same person going to three locations."

"Needless to say, when they realized the guy actually worked in the company, he got pulled into a room with cops a-waiting him."

- ThroughTheHoops

Weird Brag

"I worked at a bank, we were robbed at gunpoint. One of the tellers was quick to tweet out, 'Woooo, got the rest of the day off!! Feel free to visit me at work with a gun and ski mask anytime!'"

"They were fired upon walking in the next morning."

- seastrat

Totally Stopped Production

"An id**t pressed the emergency stop for fun on his second day at work."

"The emergency stop that he hit switches off all drives on the 100-meter-long paper machine. This means there is a loss of production for three to four hours for the entire paper mill."

"He was immediately escorted from the factory premises by two colleagues."

- daHawkGR

No Point Taking That Test

"I had a coworker get picked for a random drug test. She went back to her desk to grab her purse, and just left the building, never to return."

- brytewolf

Yes, That's What We Meant

"The boss sat her down to talk about her recent behavior at work."

"She whipped out her phone and started taking a video, saying that it was her right to record for 'when it goes to court.'"

"The boss said, 'Okay, this is the kind of stuff I’m talking about, you’re fired.'"

"This was at a Domino’s Pizza."

- kenb99

New Definition for "Side Hustle"

"Evidently, they robbed a bank on their lunch break."

"They came back like nothing happened, and then the cops showed up and took him down. It was crazy."

- Bob_the_Brewer

Quite the First Impression

"Pulling into the parking lot on the first day, she ran into a light pole that took out electricity to the whole site."

"She wasn't wearing a seat belt and was thrown into the front window."

"When we went out to see what had happened, she reeked of booze and there were empty liquor bottles in the back of the car."

"She never even made it to the front door, got a guest badge, or started her orientation training."

- LowBudgetViking

Haunting Upcharges

"When I was in high school, I used to do seasonal work at haunted houses which I did for four years."

"A new guy that they hired was supposed to help with parking. Now, in the three years that I worked at this haunted house, they never once charged people for parking (it was a very dark parking lot off of a cliff so had to make sure no one drove off of it trying to park)."

"This cheeky son of b***h started charging people five dollars to park."

"It was only found out after someone complained because they didn't have the money to go in with their friends because they had to pay for parking. I think the guy was only there a couple of hours before he got fired."

- rpgmomma8404

Missed the Training

"They got hired and then fell asleep during a meeting their first day and were asked not to come back."

- Snowstorm-3

"Same here. At a tech company, they hired a new developer, and the owner caught him napping at a desk on day one when he was supposed to be reviewing training materials."

"The owner had a chat with him, and told him whatever the reason, it was really bad form to fall asleep on the job on the first day."

"The new hire apologized, understood, and went back to the training materials. Not 20 minutes later, the owner walks by again and the guy is passed out once again, so he walked over, woke him up, and told him he was fired and to get out."

"I don't even think he made it to his fourth hour of employment."

- badtz-maru

Highly Questionable Explorations

"Early in my career I was an engineer at a refinery in the UK, and I was in charge of the QC lab. By law, we had to have external independent testing on the refinery fuel products to confirm they complied with government regulations."

"It seemed getting a job for the testing company was that you had to be an adult and had a driving license. The lab had a lot of very nasty chemicals either being tested or used in the testing or cleaning of the oil products."

"A new young girl turned up for the testing company and was dipping her finger into a chemical called phenol and stating that 'it makes your hand and arm go numb.' Phenol is a severe muscle relaxant (including your heart) and can kill you at very low concentrations."

"One hour into her employment we had paramedics on the scene monitoring her vitals and was released after eight hours. She didn't last the first hour of the first day and the testing company was fined pretty heavily."

- Nerdymcbutthead

AKA: Paid to Advertise

"A guy got hired in the first firm I ever worked for. He turned up for his first morning at work, and within an hour he had emailed the entire company (6,000 people) about his band and their availability for birthdays, weddings, etc."

"He was dismissed by lunchtime."

- BDATriangle001

"So he got paid half a day's wage to advertise his band to 6,000 people?"

"Man's a freaking genius."

- Oakcamp

Not-So-Quiet Quitting

"One day, Tim announced that he wasn’t paid enough and was going to basically sit at his desk doing nothing until he was paid what he wanted."

"20 minutes later, the boss walked in and asked Tim if he could have a word with him."

"Five minutes later, the boss walked back in and announced that Tim no longer worked there and if there were any questions."

"There were no questions."

- Few_Horse4000

Don't Be That Guy

"Interviewed a guy that was replacing someone who was leaving. Offered the job and was supposed to start the next day."

"Just so happened that we were having a going away party for the leaving dude that night so new guy was invited as a chance to 'get to know the team.'"

"The new guy shows up and proceeds to get absolutely s**t-faced and asked the head of HR if she wanted to go back to his place because he 'got a vibe' during the interview process."

"Next day, the new guy was a no-show so we were thinking bullet dodged. He showed up just before lunch clearly hung over making up some excuse for being late."

"The big boss came out and told the guy to get the f**k out."

- tizod

Optional Hours? Optional Employment.

"I fired someone who decided her second day that she was going to go out to lunch and not come back. The next morning she told everyone all about the shopping she did. She seemed confused about the expectations."

- dunwerking

Some of these stories are absolutely worth shaking our heads over, while others are truly shocking.

It's crazy the lengths people will go to in the workplace, despite the expectations that had already been clearly set.

If you view the rules as optional, your boss might view your employment as optional, too.

A doctor
Austin Distel/Unsplash

We all have our bad days that can be completely debilitating.

Some days are worse than others and can lead to mental breakdowns.

For most of us, these moments are fleeting, and we can greet the next day with a fresh start and mindset.

But that luxury doesn't always apply to everyone.

Imagine those who perpetually experience such an extreme frequently, maybe even daily.

Curious to hear of various diagnoses of the mind, Redditor MeepingBad6699 asked:

"Mental professionals of reddit, what is the worst mental condition that you know of?"

There are patients who are convinced they are no longer with us but are still able to articulate it.

Dead But Alive

"Cotard delusion. I'm a nurse and had to take care of a huge man with this condition. He came in with some odd behavior and escalated to Cotard. The delusion makes you think you are actually dead. He would scream he was dead all day and night. Lived in constant terror. He was such a sweetheart, but became so worn down and terrified over time he got quite dangerous and punched a nurse in the face."

– bbourke0626

Unalive Patient

"I had a patient check into the ER with this once but I didn’t know the name, she just kept claiming she was dead. She got baker acted and transferred."

– Dimwit00

Rude Awakening

"Also a nurse. I had a couple patients get ICU delirium that presented with them believing they were dead. Definitely not a fun time."

"I mean it sorta makes sense. Being in the ICU can be comparable to torture with the sleep deprivation, constant beeping and other noises, lots of pain and other physical discomfort, the thirst and hunger (thirst and hunger are very psychological so even if we give someone nutrition through a feeding tube or IV, your brain still freaks out because you're not eating or drinking). And so for some people, if you wake up, don't know where you are and you feel like you're being tortured, reasonable enough to assume you are in hell."

– PaxonGoat

Statistics Say

"Wow. So according to the DSM 5 there have only been 200 cases since this condition was identified (how long ago, I want to say 1800s). Anyway, I just found a new study from 2022 that says that about 1% of patients with schizophrenia are now reporting this delusion. Which, as the authors point out, is a significant increase. I wonder what has changed in the decade since the DSM 5 was published that is driving this uptick?"

"It is especially odd when you consider that people actually used to believe that dead people could come back to life, even designing coffins and burial practices around this belief because it was so commonplace. You’d think if anything the condition would be becoming less frequent and not more. Interesting."

– DarthMomma_PhD

Severe memory loss is one of life's cruelest symptoms.

Losing A Sense Of Self

"Dementias."

"Watching a person, their memories, their personality die but their body remain living and confused, is horrifying..."

– Sacu_Shi_again

"Terrifying Prospect"

"My grandma has dementia (she can barely talk right now, but she's still physically healthy, somewhat) and a lot of my closely related family died due to Alzheimer's. Granted they acquired it / started showing severe symptoms when already quite old (early to late 80s), but it's still a terrifying prospect to know that I'll probably die in such a way. I hope that when the time comes, and it starts to affect me in a significant way, my wishes will be respected and I'll be euthanized. Both to spare me the horrors of it, and to not be a depressing burden to those around me."

– pale_sand

Warning Signs

"My grandma had it and now my dad is constantly complaining that he's forgetting things/can't remember anything. He's not even 60 yet."

– antisocialarmadillo1

Eating disorder was another horrific mental condition Redditors mentioned.

Hosting A Non-Existent Parasite

"Delusional parasitosis comes to mind with this prompt. I’ve watched a patient go to well over a dozen doctors trying to get confirmation that they’re parasite ridden. After countless stool samples, blood work, labs, scans, biopsies, etc., she clearly didn’t have any but remains convinced."

– Blahaj_shonk_lover

Side Effect

"A friend of my mom's ended up with something like this after getting into the wrong kinds of drugs."

"She was convinced that there were little bugs in her face. Absolutely convinced. She'd pick at her face day and night."

"She got clean for a little while, came to her senses, and stopped picking. But the damage was done, her entire face was scarred."

– ShiraCheshire

Alzheimer's hits too close to home.

I've known so many people related to or knowing someone with mental illnesses resulting in severe memory loss and it is heartbreaking.

Now a family member was just diagnosed and it's a lot for me to process it. It's not just the individual suffering. Their loved ones truly suffer too.

What I am learning, however, is to not take the present for granted. It's all we have.

Assortment of various food
Photo by Jimmy Dean on Unsplash

Whenever we go out to eat, be it at a fine dining establishment or a quick service window, some of us tend to wonder what the journey was for the food that we are looking at on our plates or in our take-out bags.

Many have similar thoughts when buying frozen or pre-packaged dinners at supermarkets.

The answers aren't always readily available, often because the food service industry will go to great lengths to keep them under lock and key. Well aware, most of the time, that current or former employees will spill the beans at one point or another.

Redditor Lilyxrx was curious to hear some of the most well guarded secrets of the food industry, leading them to ask:

"What’s a secret the food industry don’t want you to know?"

Next Time Your Craving Bananas Foster...

"The 'natural flavors' are just big jugs of glycerin with hyper concentrated flavoring in it."

"Banana flavoring is fairly flammable."

"Source: Worked in food manufacturing."- irony_in_the_UK·

Cholesterol Be Darned!

"Chef here."

"It’s salt and fat."

"If you have a question about anything it’s salt and fat."- LongRest

For Efficiency's Sake...

"Olive Garden makes all their necessary pastas for the whole day from 8-10am every morning."

"Partially cooked."

"So when an order comes through, they grab a serving of the needed pasta style and flash cook them in hot water."

"Also, it’s just the brand, Barilla."- Deerhunter86

Justin Bieber Food GIFGiphy

Before You Pay The Extra Money...

"Beekeeper checking in."

"There is no such thing as organic honey."

"I do not treat my bees with chemicals, but I have no idea where they get their nectar."

"A bee can fly up to three miles from a hive to get nectar."

"It is virtually impossible to guarantee they have not gotten nectar from a chemically treated source."- toad__warrior·

If You Ever Wonder What Makes It Taste So Good...

"Unless it’s a health conscious food joint you’re eating at, the food we serve is designed for maximum taste."

"It’s either dense with fat and sugar, or fat and salt "

"E.G. Those mashed potatoes you like?"

"Made with cream, butter, and salt."

"The quiche?"

"Made on cream, not milk."

"Etc, etc."- petuniasweetpea

Before You Start Bragging...

"Dragon fruit isn’t an exotic Asian fruit."

"It’s a cactus fruit, and as such are native to the Americas and can even be grown in the US."- ferretmonkey

dragon fruit GIF by Feliks Tomasz KonczakowskiGiphy

In Case You're Wondering why That Taste Is So Familiar...

"A lot of the processed cheese and cream cheese is all the same recipe we just switch the labels and packaging for the different brands we run."

"Source: I work in a cheese factory in a company that services 75% of America's domestic market."- anon5678903276

Another Reason To Have No Guilt Over Take Out...

"Well."

"I work at Dominos, and we are kept afloat by the people who don't coupon and pay full menu price."

"You people are the unsung heroes of labor."- LoweeLL

Unlike Any Chocolate...

"When I worked at a mass production bakery the chocolate for the chocolate covered doughnuts came in giant frozen blocks of 4x4 pieces and contained no actual chocolate what so over."

"When unfrozen it was like some sort of nasty smelling paraffin wax that I would break up with a hammer and place into a melter that would then pour over the doughnuts."- gil_beard

Chocolate Dessert GIF by HuffPostGiphy

What Do Orange Juice And Whiskey Have In Common?

"The reason orange juice tastes consistently the same year round, even though it's a crop harvested once a year, is because citrus oils and citrus flavor are added back to different batches and blended all together."

"Similar to how whiskey is blended from multiple barrels to make it consistent."

"The difference is that even though extra stuff is added back into the OJ, it doesn't need to be labeled because the flavors contain all ingredients from oranges (FTNF-from the named fruit) so the FDA doesn't mandate labeling additional ingredients."- PensiveDoughnut

Does That Explain Their Shape?

"Pringles (and baked Lays/similar) are made of rehydrated and compressed rejected/excess parts of potatoes that go into regular chips."

"I learned that from my dietician at work and thought that was odd."

"I still like them over regular chips."- bluesasaurusrex

A Secret Better Not Known...

"The 11 herbs and spices secret recipe."- NemoTheOneTrueGod

Food Pouring GIF by Great Big StoryGiphy

Just Pop It In The Fryer...

"I was a young lad working at Church's Fried Chicken during the summer, many years ago."

"The owner refused to throw out chicken that had already gone bad; to the point where you'd gag if you smell them."

"Apparently if you batter them bad boys up and deep fry them, the rancid smell goes away."

"His customers never knew they were eating spoiled chicken."- Dirt_E_Harry·

Sweet... But Safe!

"The amount of sugar that goes into Costco bakery products is absurd, especially the apple pie."

"That being said; Costco does not f*ck around when it comes to food safety."

"Every area that is responsible for producing food is most likely cleaner than a white room for producing computer parts."

"There are virtually zero roaches, we found one in the bakery once and shut it down until the exterminator did his thing that very night."

"Someone returned a package of dinner rolls because their child had bit into one and a sharp piece of metal was in it, within less than 2 minutes every manager in the building was doing an investigation that led all the way up to the regional manager and his boss for several hours and determined that it had come off of a piece of machinery before it reached our location."

"We throw away rotisserie chickens if they have left (even for a few minutes) the shelf and someone tries to put it back."- Deathnachos

Costco GIF by hero0fwarGiphy

We'd like to think that everyone who works in the food industry shares the same high standards.

But, as in any industry, there are those out there who will cut corners for speedier results.

On the bright side, it does save you the trouble when deciding what cream cheese to buy...