
There are many people who are seen as role models, but that doesn't mean those who inspire others can cause mischief.
And while some bad choices warrant reprimanding, there are other instances where yelling is not really necessary.
Curious to hear examples in which people were berated for inconsequential reasons, Redditor Ratzink asked:
"What is the stupidest thing you've ever been yelled at for?"

Students being disciplined at school is expected. However, there are exceptions.
No Phone Zone
"I was in 8th grade waiting to be picked up from school. I didn't see my mother after awhile, so I got my cell phone out (it was a nokia block phone) and was about to call her to see if she parked somewhere."
"This older woman came over and got in my face. She yelled at me to put my phone away or she would confiscate it, and if I had to make a call, I would have to cross the street and do it."
"A really congested street full of cars with no crosswalk nearby; I would have to leave the pickup zone by myself."
– SarahTheJuneBug
"It was WELL past 3 pm (school was out and I was not breaking any rules) and this hag got pissed by just seeing a block phone that barely did anything beyond calls. I just put my phone away and waited for her to leave."
"Thankfully, Mom showed up not long after that. She was angry when I told her what that lady said. She told me she was a b*tch and that I did nothing wrong, and added that if anyone actually ever confiscated my phone for trying to get in contact with her after school was over that she'd deal with it for me. I also asked a teacher about it the following day; she was just as baffled as I was and agreed I wasn't breaking any rules."
– SarahTheJuneBug
Bitter About The Funeral
"I told my Math teacher I was leaving class in 15 mins to go to a funeral, my friend had just died."
"She said no, and I was like 'thats fine, but I'm still going... its my friends funeral.'"
"And then her face went so red and she shouted in front of the class 'I watched my mother and father die right in front of me, what makes you so special.'"
"I was like woah. The whole class was like woah. The teacher must have been having a bad day but she screamed so loud, and her parents dying was not relevant to me going to a funeral. Was super weird."
– [deleted]
Playing With Food
"I once measured a Fruit by the Foot with a ruler when I was in third grade. Lunch lady accused me of playing with my food and I got in trouble. I genuinely really wanted to just measure it to see if it was actually three feet long."
– TheRealOcsiban
Looking For A Place To Sit
"In 5th grade, I got sent to the principal's office for the first time. I asked the secretary where I could sit and I immediately got scolded, telling me I'm wasting her time for even asking her that question. She even brought the principal over and told me to repeat my question just to further lecture me on how stupid of a question it was and how much it wasted her time. Yea."
– MrJerhomie
People got all in a tizzy with these work-related issues.
The Deal Breaker
"I was dating this girl. She had been looking for jobs for a while with no luck, and I was looking too. My friend offered to pass my resume to their boss for a job in my field after they got one that paid better. I ended up interviewing, then getting the job."
"The first thing that happened after I told the ex was her she yelling at me for getting the job. 'Why did I have to accept a job?' 'Why did you have to take the easy route by getting a job through a friend?' 'Why did you have to apply there?' 'You lied because you didn't want to work with friend.'"
"And no the relationship didn't last much longer after that."
– Responsible_Yak832
Mad Customer
"My absolute favorite: I was working at a bakery, helping out a dude who I could tell was about two seconds away from losing his entire sh*t."
"Nothing due to anything I or the bread were doing; he looked to just be having one of those days and was only barely keeping it contained. After handling the entire interaction like a ticking explosive, I finally ring him out, hand him his stuff, and offer the customer service standard, 'Have a nice day!'"
Which was apparently the thing that sent him over, as he spat out, 'I will NOT!"' spun on his heels, and stomped away like a petulant toddler."
– mus_maximus
People need to be clear about who did what before accusations fly.
Who Hit Who?
"When I was 11, my mother started yelling at me for hitting my 5yo brother. That's understandable, if I had hit him. He had hit me. Literally walked up to me, slapped me in the face, and ran away laughing. Turns out he had run to our mom after fake crying and told her that I hit him. She thought I was lying about it until she realised he had started laughing."
– Hot_Interaction7245
Mistaken For A Menace
"On my local summer swim team when I was maybe 8 years old I had the same first name as some other kid who was a total menace. He’d splash water in girls’ faces and pull on their bathing suits thinking it was flirting, etc."
"One day at practice we’re all hanging out on the edge of the pool and I’m talking to my buddy, and there’s a girl on the other side of me. Suddenly her mom, let’s call her Karen, comes rushing over and says 'HEY! WHAT’S YOUR NAME?' I’m confused and look around me to see if she’s talking to someone else and she says 'YEA YOU!' So I say 'uuuuh… {my name}. Why?'”
"She then grabs my arm yanking me halfway out of the pool and starts yelling at me and I don’t really remember what all she said but it was some mix of 'YOU NEED TO STAY AWAY FROM MY DAUGHTER' (the girl who happened to be next to me) and 'WHERE ARE YOUR PARENTS??' all while spitting as she yelled."
"And I was just a terrified, confused kid who’d been assaulted for no reason by this crazy lady and was trying to ask what she was talking about, who her daughter was, what I had apparently accidentally done, but she wouldn’t let me get a word in."
"Finally her daughter got her attention yelling 'Mom… MOM… MOM!!'”
“WHAT!?!”
“That’s the wrong boy…”
"She dropped me pretty quickly and looked super embarrassed but was probably still just red from yelling. She gave me a quick 'oh sorry' and just walked away."
"When I got picked up and my mom asked how practice was I just said 'fine… some crazy lady yelled at me but it was a mistake.' My mom looked confused, took me home, and that was it."
– DunderMifflinPaper
Embarrassingly, I was the idiot who yelled at someone for a stupid reason.
Years ago, I felt water sprinkles periodically hit my face while watching Jurassic Park in a packed movie theater.
I may have imagined it but I thought I heard giggling following every splash of water I felt. I was so convinced some kid had a water gun and was targeting me throughout the movie.
During the climactic T-Rex scene–where the tension is amplified without a score to accompany the encounter–I snapped and filled the silence with my wrath.
"Knock it off!" I yelled behind me, generally addressing the audience.
The kid sitting next to me leaned over and whispered in my ear, "It's the ceiling. It's leaking from the bad AC unit."
As soon as the credits started rolling I bee-lined it out of there before anyone could match the face to the temperamental, but very daft, moviegoer.
HOAs look good on paper, but they come with rules and unspecified cult like ownership.
They never seem to explain the depth of their involvement in your life in the paperwork.
But once you let your grass grow one centimeter too high... then the letters and lawsuits start piling up.
This is why people will pay anything to live free!
RedditorGlam_SpaceTimewanted to hear about the times the HOA has driven everyone crazy.
I have been able to avoid HOAs for awhile... but for how long?
Trashed
"HOA sued us for leaving out garbage bin out a day past garbage day… a total of five times in the three years we’ve lived here."
boardcertified*itch
"I live in a neighborhood with no HOA and do you know what my neighbors do if I happen to leave out my empty trash bins? They have the audacity to pull them in for me and I have to thank them next time I see them."
emailaddressforemail
Additions
"They wouldn’t let me add an acre of land onto my property. My neighbor owned 100 acres of land and was letting me buy an acre from him to add onto the 4 acres of land I already had. Since you can not build anything on 1 acre the HOA was refusing the purchase. However, when some lawyer said it was ok they let me buy the acre. I think they just wanted to waste our time."
TheCactusClub
Secrets
"HOA attempted to hold a 'secret' community meeting, where they'd vote on turning the large field and walking path everyone used for recreation into an RV park. It was 'secret' because they basically told no one and put up the required notice in a place where no one would see. As you can probably guess, most of the board owned RVs. Thankfully a few neighbors took notice and started knocking on doors. A crowd showed up and the proposal was starkly shot down. Freaking dirtbags."
CloudsOntheBrain
Enforcement
"HOA tried to enforce a rule that many houses in the community didn't comply with. I did some checking and it turns out that (at least in our state) if an HOA doesn't enforce a rule on everyone, then they can't enforce the time on anyone."
mypoliticalvoice
"Well that is kind of the point of a rule. If it's just used to abuse people the board don't like, it shouldn't be enforceable at all."
Painting_Agency
Useless
"One of my coworkers got a warning from his HOA saying that he had too many boxes inside his garage. They claimed that he couldn't use his garage for storage."
BirdSh*tPie
Who makes up these rules? Why are they evil?
No Good
"We built a new fence around our property and told us to take it down since the other fences looked old. We built a walkway from the door to the driveway, they told us to take it out."
OkraFit3987
Let's Throwdown
"The condo association wanted to renovate the pool and pitched the cost they were moving forward with. There were a lot of developers in the building and they noticed that it was about 4 times the cost it should have been. Association says tough cookies, things get fun. People writing notices of what's going on with the association, the association writing emails about it, lots of sniping back and forth."
"Then one day I'm in the lobby waiting for someone to show up and the head of the association and one of the people calling them out ran into each other and they had to immediately get separated by security because they were about to start throwing punches."
thugloofio
A Feet Away
"HOA of my neighborhood tried to tell me that my house needed to be added onto, because houses need to be at least 1800 sq ft in the neighborhood. My house is 1750 sq ft. HOA was started in 2004. My house was built in 1989. My family took the HOA to court, to make a long story short, HOA had to back down, cuz their rules didn’t exist until AFTER the house was built. So, the HOA rules do not apply to my house."
AmaranthRosenrot
Wake Up!
"I slipped in my driveway and fell and broke my femur near my hip and couldn't get up. I was laying in my driveway calling for help for about 30 minutes and I could hear people walking past but nobody stopped for quite a while. I eventually asked someone to call an ambulance as my phone was in my car out of reach and got taken care of."
"Spent a few days in the hospital and when I got home I had a letter from my HOA saying I was in violation for sleeping in my driveway in the middle of the day. So the people who walked by and definitely heard me call for help and didn't stop were from the HOA or reported me to them."
Zonerdrone
The Punishers
"Everyone had to drag their trash bins down a hill to a curb where the garbage truck would pick it up. People would be slow to get their bins back after pick up. So the HOA went a dragged all the bins to the other side of the neighborhood and threw them in a pile in a random patch of public grass. So we pay these people to be childishly petty and antagonize us? And their 'punishment' only created more of an eyesore than bins uniformly lined up on a curb."
FireteamAccount
Age Old Wood
"A gorgeous vintage wooden sled that has been in our family for at least 100 years was laid out one winter by my family. We received a letter informing us that since firewood is not allowed in front yards, we had to remove the pile from our yard."
Loose-Possession-68
Pay Up...
"My wife and I bought our condo almost 6 years ago and the guy we bought it from had owned it for less than a year. When we closed he said he had never got a key to the neighborhood pool when he bought the place from the previous owner but he was old so didn’t care and was never gonna use it. We said no big deal, we will just ask for a new one."
"Well the HoA wants us to pay $300 for a 'new' key because we had 'lost' our old one and it’s some fraud prevention measure to stop people from selling their pool keys or something. We had told them immediately after moving in we never got a key and after 6 years they refuse to get us a new one."
"We just pick the lock and go anyway but if it was an issue I’d be furious at the ridiculousness of making us pay into the HOA to maintain this pool when we never got access to it even though it wasn’t our fault and probably not even the fault of the guy before us."
Manly_Mangos
The HOA people are worse than the DMV!
History is littered with horror and fright.
And much of it is journaled and cataloged for our reading pleasure.
Which sometimes is reading that can leave one a bit on edge.
That's because some of our best long-dead wordsmiths left some serious echoes.
Now we all do love a good speech.
We're especially entranced when the speaker has that certain... "thing."
But once and awhile when you listen and really dig deep, they are less inspirational and more morbid
Redditor KeyWar8755 wanted to compare notes on the words we can't shake.They asked:
"What’s a quote from history that gives you chills?"
I always listen to famous serial killers. So I've long been tainted.
To the Sea
"'It is only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded and lacerated […] that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation.'"
"General Sherman, from a letter sent in May of 1865 in the midst of his march to the sea."
TTTriplicate
Loss in Life
“'WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.'― Smedley Butler"
ayayaJAMMER
Shoot
"'Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.' -- Dwight D. Eisenhower"
zyygh
Dirty
"'In Germany, the one who complains about the dirt is considered much more dangerous than the one making something dirty.' -Kurt Tucholsky"
"(Not an exact translation, the original quote is in German)"
EsszettOfficial
I'll Find You
"Nobody believed Marco Polo’s stories about travelling through Asia, and on his deathbed someone asked him to admit he had made it all up. His response was 'I have not told half of what I have seen.' That always got my imagination going. I would have liked to have heard his stories straight from him."
mariam67
I've always wondered about Marco Polo's origins.
Dreams
“'All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.' T. E. Lawrence"
Kravashera
Time to Die
"'I've seen things you people wouldn't believe... Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion... I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... Time to die.' — Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner"
cisforcoffee
Send it All...
"'Stop sending people to kill me. We've already captured five of them, one of them with a bomb and another with a rifle… If you don't stop sending killers, I'll send one to Moscow, and I won't have to send another.' - Said by Josip Broz Tito to Joseph Stalin"
ChangKaiShek2
Death
“'I used to have five brothers, now I'm not even a brother' - Kevin Von Erich"
"His older brother died at the age of 6. His younger brother David died suddenly at 25. His three youngest brothers all killed themselves at 33, 23, and 21. Between 1984 and 1993 he went from having four younger brothers to not being a brother."
ToxicBanana69
Remember
"'We will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.' - Martin Luther King, Jr."
RecalledBurger
Power
"'We have the power to make this the best generation of mankind in the history of the world or make it the last.' - John F. Kennedy"
VerdHorizon
These are some powerful words that have stood the test of time.
If you're wondering why I'm single––which I guess you're not, because the average person doesn't look at bylines and assumes articles online spring directly from the void––it's because I'm enjoying my solitude. I also live alone and certainly enjoy it!
Everyone has their reasons; some are more complicated than others, as we saw once these people shared their stories.
People let us know what's up after Redditor SnorkelLord asked the online community,
"Why are you still single?"
"Severe..."
"Severe lack of even trying."
Argonum22
Honestly? People are exhausting. I get it.
"Have not looked..."
"Emotionally closed off, low self esteem, overweight, and work 80 hours / week. Have not looked for anyone and don’t want to."
nokarmaforkittybear
Sorry to hear about your low self esteem. Even if you don't want to date anyone, getting to a place where you are happier with yourself can make all the difference.
"I don't have..."
"I don't have a wide enough social circle. I mostly only hang out with a small group of dudes in similar places in their lives to me. It's a situation I want to work on fixing, but it's been difficult through a pandemic."
Colyer
That would do it. Expanding your social circle is very important if you want to meet anyone regardless of whether you're dating or not.
"Married the love of my life..."
"Married the love of my life and he died... don't think I`ll ever find something that good again, so I dont even bother looking."
sphscl
Sorry for your loss. That is devastating.
"I'm socially awkward..."
"I'm socially awkward, boring, shy and my life isn't really the best to expect another person to enter my life so I just don't try anymore."
[deleted]
Give yourself a little more credit!
"I have no idea..."
"I have no idea how to express interest to any of the women I've ever been interested in, so I just end up becoming friends with them and the crush eventually goes away and I start over at square one."
[deleted]
Putting yourself out there is no small feat! It can be scary for many, in fact.
"I've never been invited..."
"Complete lack of self-confidence, I've never been invited to a social event of any type where it could happen there and past attempts to approach women have failed."
CDJernee
You've never been invited? I'll invite you!
"Because I hate myself..."
"Because I hate myself and people can tell."
cohonan
People can definitely spot when someone isn't particularly self assured.
"It's like giving up."
"I enjoy being single enough that I will not "settle" for somebody I'm not all that into, like I've seen most people in my life do, pairing up just out of fear they can't do any better, and going through the motions of marriage and kids together. That sort of life looks like a living hell. It's like giving up."
TopRoyal6249
Maintain those standards. Too many people make the mistake of getting married to the wrong person and pay for it dearly in the end.
"I'm worried..."
"I'm worried that cancer is too much to bring to any new relationship. Changes to my body such as losing my hair have truly affected my self confidence."
Lauren12269
Living with an illness as severe as cancer can hurt the self confidence of anyone.
Dating can be daunting. Pursuing a long term relationship? Even more so. Plenty of people have their reasons for not being coupled, and that's okay. It's important to remember that being in a relationship should not be the "be all end all."
Have a story of your own to share? Feel free to tell us more in the comments below!
The US is represented in the majority of some of the biggest films recognized worldwide–from iconic movies like American Grafitti to The Color Purple, to recent critically-acclaimed films like Minari and Moonlight.
Even classic American sitcoms like Friends are known the world over as the ultimate example of American comedy.
But there are plenty of misconceptions about American culture seen in some of these entertainment offerings that foreign audiences seem to miss, and it's time to set the record straight.
For starters, an apartment in New York City is not at all spacious like the one that was inhabited by Ross, Rachel, Joey, Phoebe, and Chandler. So there's that.
Curious to hear more examples of what our friends across the Atlantic could stand to learn, Redditor Jazzlike_Fondant_518 asked:
"Americans, what’s something Europeans need to hear?"
American Redditors had a thing or two to say about how we roll here in the States.
Pristine Washrooms
"Free, clean, omnipresent public restrooms are indeed possible."
– tech_probs_help
Vouching For The Myth
"As a British person who now lives in the US I would say public toilets is something the US does really well. They are everywhere, accessible and usually very clean. Europe definitely needs to catch up on this."
– alienintheUS
Driving In Circles
"We have roundabouts here. They exist. Stop claiming we don't."
– MundaneConclusion246
Preconceived notions can be bye-bye.
Nothing Cool About This
"The flavor of America is not cool ranch."
– IronHarvestX
Maintaining Best Indoor Air Quality
"Invest in hvac and soon cause it won't get cheaper or cooler."
– pallysteve
American Temperament
"A large portion of Americans are rational and moderate people, and what you see on the television isn't indicative of every American you meet."
– accidentalexpat
Toxic Malaise
"America isn't the only country with racial issues."
– NicoTheFileClerk
Europeans, take note.
Moving On
"It’s past time you take James Corden back."
– xTHEKILLINGJOKEx
It's A Big Problem
"Europe is getting fat too."
– Advi0001
Kernel Of Truth
"Putting corn on pizza doesn't make it 'American pizza'. It just makes it disgusting."
– Best-User-Name-Ever
Cinematic Trope
"A good looking guy smoking a cigarette is not a movie."
– 0utcast9851
Despite everything in the news happening in the States creating division and leaving people feeling dejected, a good majority of US citizens are not jerks.
There are loads of kind, considerate, empathetic, and well-behaved people living here.
Europeans often don't get to hear this since much of the media focuses on iniquitous behavior.
Humanity is still intact here.
At least that's what I still believe.