'Unintentional Nudes': College Professors Share The Most Memorable Email They've Ever Received From A Student
College can be a crap shoot, sure, but these students took it to the next level. Here, Professors shared their most *ahem* memorable emails from a student. Enjoy!
A few years ago I was teaching a design studio for first-year students in our program. My boss had enacted a tough attendance policy from on-high, as many of the freshmen undergrads often tried to skip studio. Because of this, I frequently received requests to miss class for stupid things like Football games and house parties... and the requests got more and more ridiculous as the semester went on. One day I was checking my work email and noticed a request to miss class that Friday "because I am playing in the Quidditch finals this Saturday in Canada." Since it was Wednesday and our class was about to start, I decided to confront the prankster in class. I get to class and see the students crowding his desk. Well, apparently he knew I wouldn't believe him, so he brought his gear into class along with an album of photos of him playing Quidditch throughout High School. Now, I am a self-proclaimed Harry Potter fan and I felt so shamed that day I just let his absence slide. When he returned to class, he brought photos of his match and even though they lost the game, he seemed grateful that I didn't penalize him.
This is an email chain from a student I don't think I ever actually saw.
"Can I get an extension? "
"You haven't turned anything all year. I'm not even sure if you've been to any classes. It's December. What possible reason could I have you giving you an 'extension'? "
"I paid for the class so I deserve the credit for it."
"You paid for the chance to learn. You chose to not take that chance. I look forward to seeing you next semester. "
[deleted]
A few years back, I was working as a lab TA and I had an older student who really seemed to resent being taught by a 20-something fellow student. In the syllabus for this lab was a rubric all the TAs had agreed on. Part of the grade was always including units on numbers and we'd take off one point per unit missing.
This student handed in a lab report with zero units anywhere so I followed the rubric and took off points. I expected her to come talk to me, since I told them every day to talk to me about any issues and I'd do my best to give back points wherever it could be justified. I try to be nice to my students because it get it - labs suck and you don't have time to do everything perfectly. I didn't hear anything from her until the next lab was due. She emailed it to me and said, "Since it's apparently okay to take off an exorbitant amount of points for something as trivial as missing units, I'm not going to use units anymore."
I have no clue what the heck compels a grown adult to act like a 5 year old. She eventually stopped attending labs and I have no idea what happened to her.
I had a mother show up to contest her daughter's performance, after emailing me several times about it. Yep, here's the story...
I have checked with the organization on campus that is meant to help faculty mediate these kinds of issues, and according to them this is the worst case of helicopter parenting that they have ever witnessed at this University. So I got that going for me, which is nice. Another thing that I must mention is that I was a TA for the class. The actual professor was there for the meeting as well.
The daughter sets up a meeting with me after quite a bit of pestering, and I reluctantly agree. It is a Friday afternoon. I am already a little POed because I usually work from home at this time. I had prepared a speech to give to the daughter to explain to her that the way she was behaving was unacceptable for a student at the university level, especially at this University (a top school). Anyway, I hear a knock at the door, the door swings open, it isn't the student, it is her mother.
My first reaction was, "Okay, this will be unpleasant, but she, even more so than her daughter, has no power to influence this situation." She introduces herself; she's actually very pleasant. She says, "I don't want to talk about grades, just academics." "Ok," I said, not understanding the difference. The next thing she says though proves quite clearly that she is there to start some crap. She comes out and says, "You are the worst teacher to ever be at XXX University." I don't say anything; I try not to laugh, this is clearly super serious, you guys.
She then slams on the table this binder that contains every single email that I have sent to this class. She says, "Now I am a lawyer..." Now this actually make me laugh a bit, not because of the absurdity of this whole thing, but the way she said it reminded me of Tracy Morgan's impression of Star Jones, if anyone is familiar.
She produces an email. "On such and such date, you used the verb 'suck' in an email." This is true, actually. Part of the class was to have students practice evaluating scientific articles, so some of the literature I sent out were meant to be examples of troublesome experiments. Anyways, I was relieved to hear her use that as her opening gambit because it means she really didn't have any reason to complain. The professor tells her that her daughter is an adult and that there is no need to protect her from bad language, and besides, the wording I used was pretty mild to say the least.
Realizing that her ace in the hole went nowhere, she turns up the fury quite a bit. The remaining meeting consisted of about a half hour of just ranting and raving. The next thing she says is that and this is also true (I feel like I need to keep saying this because no one will believe me) it is "irresponsible" for the University to have a class that was as small as this one. It had about 12 students. She cites some non existent, I'm sure, study, that says that small class sizes are actually detrimental to learning. A mound of evidence and the talking points of every college brochure ever produced say otherwise. She sees that this tactic also goes nowhere.
This is another one of my favorite moments...
She goes on to talk about extra credit, and asks why I didn't give her daughter full credit on the assignment. The Professor and I explain to her that extra credit is just that extra and it is to our (and really the professor's) discretion to give it. It can also be taken away. This is another mind blowing point in the story. It echoes something the daughter had sent to me earlier in an email. The daughter tells me that she wrote an extra "essay." I had never assigned it, and I have never even seen it. The mom asks me why I have not rewarded her daughter for this essay. You heard this right. Both mom and daughter have asked me to give credit for a paper that I'm quite certain doesn't even exist. I am stunned at this point at how calm the Professor was during all of this.
She now just grasps at straws. She mentions that she is an anonymous donor to the university and that if this is not "resolved" she is going to withdraw future donation. The professor says, "Well if your donations are anonymous, then how can the University miss them?" Rage intensifies. She does the whole "I pay your salaries" shebang. Professor replies flatly, "no you don't." She is furious now.
She says that the Professor and I are purposely trying to intimidate her and that she is there to have a reasoned conversation (remember that her first words were, "I am the worst teacher ever"). She stands up, says, "Eff you" directly to me, "Eff you" directly to the professor, and claims she is going to go talk to the dean about the situation. I love this moment actually. Prior to the whole thing, I sent an email to the organization on campus that helps teachers with these issues and explained the situation (that the daughter was being insistent on meeting when she had no recourse). I approached the situation very gingerly, because I believe strongly that every student has the right to seek redress if they feel they have been graded unfairly. Anyways I got a forwarded email from them that was basically a single sentence from the dean herself that said the daughter was being a brat, and I should tell her so. If only she showed up, I would have.
The mom walks out the door, never to be heard from again. If anyone is wondering, the student's grade was NOT changed. However, I continue to have nightmares about this incident.
[deleted]
I had a student who was pretty behind in the class. I wasnt faculty at the time but a student-teacher lecturer. Anyway, in the last week before finals she asked me about extra credit. At that point it was already too late. So she emailed me saying that she would do "anything" for a few extra credit points. The implication was pretty clear. I wrote her back and nicely repeated that she was too late and just needed to focus on the final. That was the end of it, but I was glad when the semester was over. In case anyone is wondering, yes she was very attractive, but I was in a committed relationship and would also never do anything that unethical.
I was a T.A. for one semester in college. If anything, it taught me that I never wanted to be a teacher. When your students are the same age as you, they expect you will quickly cave in, and their excuses sound like they are citing references.
That semester I had to fail one girl because she never showed up to the laboratory sessions, which was mandatory. Her excuses started pouring in about three weeks before the class ended. Here is her best line (keep in mind, these are primarily students in the Pre-Med/Pre-Dental Programs).
I have my period every week at the time that lab is scheduled so its been difficult for me to make it because of heavy menstruation. I know that this may not make you happy, but if you dont pass me Im going to have to take this to the head of the department and possibly to a lawyer because you are discriminating against women.
So, I forwarded the E-mail to the Professor teaching the course, he E-mailed it to his boss, it made the rounds, gathered a few chuckles and that was that. I ended up failing the serial menstruater, and told myself Id never teach again.
Menstruater isnt a word? Really? Yes it is.
Freshman composition class: I had a student stop showing up after the first couple weeks of class but she didn't drop the class. About a week before the last possible drop date (towards the middle of the semester) I emailed her telling her that because of how much class and work she had missed there was now no chance of her being able to pass the class and she needed to drop while she still could. She responded with a long plea to please give her a second chance and swearing she could make up the work (by this point she had missed half the work in the class). I reminded her of the attendance policy that did not allow you to miss more than three classes without penalty to your grade and pointed out that she had missed fifteen classes, which was a guaranteed F even if she did all the work but she continued to plead with me well past the last drop date.
I would receive an email every two or three days from her begging for a second chance, telling me that if she failed the class she would be forced to drop out, providing every excuse about how busy she was with work and family and continuing to insist that she was fully capable of making up the work. This went on for six weeks. I finally got so fed up with it that my last message to her told her that if she had put as much work into the class as she had to begging for a second chance she never would have been in this position in the first place, that I was not going to respond to any more messages from her and that she could take it up with the director of composition if she didn't like it (who I had already discussed the issue with and he had my back).
She was still on campus next semester, though I knew from the beginning that she was lying about being forced to drop out if she failed my class.
The moral of the story: if you start to fall behind in a class go to the professor straight away. Most professors are willing to work with you if you're up front about what's going on. Vanishing and then coming back begging for a second chance is not going to put you on any professor's good side.
Student here. We had to post on a website documents of our writings for critiques. I accidentally clicked nude pictures and submitted. For a document it would prompt a cancel screen since it takes a few seconds to upload but due to good internet connection and small file size of the image it was instantaneous. Also the sidebar has a preview of all files uploaded so by scrolling over it you see a nude picture of a woman. Yeah, not great. Also, the professor can only delete image files apparently. I uploaded twenty files just to put the image down at the bottom of the file queue. Then I had to send the awkward email to my Professor. She responded saying it was a mistake no problem and applauded my efforts to minimize the situation and have the courage to explain the situation in a formal manner.
My most outrageous email was from a graduate student who got a zero on a quiz. The quiz was online and available to the students for a full week. The student simply didn't do it by the deadline. She emailed me saying it wasn't fair that she got a zero because she forgot to take the quiz.
I replied that all her fellow students had managed to remember to do it AND I had reminded them in class to do the quiz. Her reply: "You should have sent an email reminder to us."
Although I didn't respond to her, my internal response was, "I'm not your mom. Grow up and take responsibility for your actions."
I'm a student, but I was emailed by another student and it was pretty interesting. In our Information Security class we had just finished the chapter about trojans, malware, and the likes. One of the things that is quite particular to this story is that we had just finished learning about phishing. Now, for those who do not know, phishing is sending bad links in an attempt to get a naive user to the point where they are willing give up their username and password.
Well, two days after our test on these bad files, a phishing attempt started going around the University. It was sent by a supposed student, trying to get people to attach their University accounts to a study site. After you signed up they would email everyone else in your classes about the supposed study session. Well, one of the kids in our Information Security class fell for it and gave them his username and password. One of the people emailed was the teacher. The teacher called him out during the next class for being naive. Pretty sure he failed the test too.
Not a professor but my professor did show us an email that was sent to him by a student about 10 years back and he kept her anonymous. The content of the email was basically she had to skip class and didn't know how to phrase it so she said "sorry I couldn't come to class my vagina is on fire." End of email. This was a Tuesday/Thursday class. She sent the email on Thursday and she sent another email Monday saying "I will be attending class this coming Tuesday, I'm sorry about missing class. But the fire is out."
She was strange.
I was TA for an 80 person class and would proctor exams for my professor. One student would show up 30+ minutes late for every single exam. Then, when time was up she would be the only student left taking the exam, and when I would try to collect it, I'd get "No, I get extra time because I'm a SNAP student." Essentially she had some sort of learning disability, and she was permitted to take the exam in a separate location with extra allotted time if she set it up beforehand. Every time, I would explain this to her, tell her I had places to be, and take her exam away.
Before the final, my professor told me she got an email from the girl's mother, complaining about me not giving the girl adequate time to take the exams. My professor told her that SNAP didn't apply, and if she wanted more time, she should show up to the exam on time. The mom apologized and said she'd talk to her daughter. Sure enough, on the day of the final, the girl shows up an hour late to the three hour exam, and tries that same SNAP excuse again. She failed the course with flying colors.
Not a prof, but was a T.A. for him and we ended up being buddies after I was no longer a student.
He had a girl that blatantly copied an essay. Like, it had that old-time typeface from papers written in 1930. He showed EVERYONE in the department; no one had to even read it to know it wasn't hers. Apparently she was also a sub-par student at best and was in her 40s getting a degree most likely for a promotion - no judgment, just saying the paper wasn't hers at all.
The prof looked and looked and couldn't find it anywhere, so he had no other recourse than to give her a C for the class because he couldn't prove plagiarism. She was livid, and kept insisting it was hers even after being confronted with the evidence... And then stalked him for YEARS. She would call his home, email him, telling him she would ruin him and blah blah blah. Even after changing emails and phone numbers.
Some people's kids, man.
Earlier this semester, a girl at my university made national news when she emailed her professor asking for her absence from the next class to be excused because she was celebrating a religious holiday. The holiday? Beyonce's birthday.
Here's the transcript of the email:
Good Evening Professor, I would like to inform you that I will not be in class today due to this holiday. On September 4, 1981 The Lord blessed us all with the Goddess that is Queen Beyonce Knowels-Carter's birthday. Out of respect, I will not be attending class today, The Lords Day. For any further questions, feel free to contact me. Have a blessed day and remember, Beyonce Loves You so Bow Down.
Apparently the girl meant it as a joke and didn't actually mean to send it but clicked send by accident.
I'm the assistant for a group of theoretical physics professors at a large university, so I get a lot of emails from students or prospective students looking to get in contact with a professor. This one kid emailed me, and then called me multiple times, asking if he could come in and just tell somebody about what he'd been working on. He kept saying, "Everything they know is wrong. What I know will change Physics forever," and had a general hopped-up-on-uppers tone. But, he couldn't tell me anything specific about his research, so I knew we were going nowhere.
Eventually, the way I got him to leave me alone was to say that no one will listen if you don't have a degree, and I pawned him off on admissions. It was annoying, but I also felt bad because it was obvious that he wasn't quite right mentally.
I used to teach when I was doing my PhD, so technically I wasn't a prof, and I'd say this right at the outset. Also, not sure what it said about me or how the University viewed me, but they always wanted me to teach the first year "Computers for non-computer kids" class. I thought I did a decent job at it, and I didn't fool myself into thinking I was doing anything more than being a cheaper replacement over paying full-on faculty to do it.
So end of term comes, and I think this was the last time I taught so it wasn't like I was a rookie and by then I'd figured out how to do a good job, however I got an email from one of the students to the effect of:
Dear Dr (I didn't have a PhD) Billbapapa,
I really enjoyed having you as my Professor (I was not a prof).
I just wanted to tell you that you shouldn't be so nervous (I wasn't nervous) when you teach. Even though you seem young for a Professor (I was not a prof!) everyone still respected you (good I guess? didn't realize that was in question). We know you were trying hard and we're sure with time you'll become a good teacher too (what? I thought I was at least okay). I thought you were a very nice guy, and I hope you are still teaching this course again next semester incase I have to retake it (which probably explained the email).
Have a great day,
J
(and i'm not exaggerating the name, it really was one letter, and the email was from a random hotmail address)
So I have no idea who sent it, or if they were trying to make me feel better or worse or just trying to be funny. But either way memorable.
I had a student in an intro social science class a few years ago that wrote a semester-long string of ridiculous emails that still make me angry when I think about them. She was a freshman and apparently having trouble adjusting to life at a big university. She didn't show up to class for the first 2 or 3 weeks, so I emailed to remind her that she was already hurting her grade and needed to start attending or drop the class. The student replied with a long email explaining that she had started having panic attacks since starting college, and the anxiety, medications, and psych appointments that had resulted were keeping her from attending class. She was worried about her grade and more generally about starting college off on the wrong foot.
Well this story really hit home for me. I am usually a skeptical teacher, having encountered all kinds of bullcrap from students, but I suffered with serious anxiety the semester I started grad school after two decades of being a perfect student, so I felt enormous sympathy for this student. I replied with a long, kind email, suggesting all sorts of accommodations that would require a lot of time from me, like one-on-one meetings to help her catch up on everything she'd missed. I even alluded to having personal experience with similar issues and understanding how hard it could be.
No response from this girl for a couple of weeks. I follow up I with her a couple of times, but no response. I'm mostly concerned about her mental health and making sure she doesn't fall through the cracks or spiral further, but there's only so much I can do (and I did everything I could through the student affairs office).
Then, the first exam rolls around, and she bombs it.
She's suddenly emailing me again, grateful for my help and asking to start meeting right away. We set up a meeting. She doesn't show up and never offers an explanation for her absence. She then emails again a week later, asking for another meeting. I give her a time to meet, ask her to confirm the time, and I don't hear anything. A week later, the student finally returns my email, saying she missed the message, and the meeting, because she was at home visiting her parents for the weekend, and she didn't have email access. Except she emailed me FROM HER PHONE. Which I know because all of her messages ended with "sent from my Blackberry." And I emailed her on a Monday for a meeting that would be taking place the following week.
She didn't ask to meet again after that, and I gave up, realizing that, even if she did have a mental health issue, she was also wasting my time and clearly not very invested in the class.
I thought that would be the end of interactions with my blackberry-using student, and it was, until the day after final exam grades are posted. She sent me and the head professor an email that, in a very bewildered tone, asked why I never replied to her email at the beginning of the semester. She wanted so badly to succeed in this class, but I couldn't be bothered to help her when she was suffering. She wanted extra credit for having had to suffer through the indignity of a TA that wouldn't answer her emails and didn't care about students' welfare.
I replied by asking, as politely as possible, what the bloody heck she was talking about. I then copied and pasted our entire email conversation from the semester. The professor was mad that she had lied and left her grade as it was (D at the highest, though I can't remember for sure).
She eventually replied to my email with: "Oh, sorry. I got confused."
This isn't an email, but it's the most memorable student interaction in my two semesters TA-ing for a 300-person American Literature survey class.
Because of the large class size, the professor had the students sign up for a certain week to turn in their big term paper. So I averaged grading about 30 essays a week. Each week was connected to a specific author that the student had to write about--week 1 Nathaniel Hawthorne, week 2 Walt Whitman. You get the idea.
This one student signed up for the week were they had the option to write about either Harriet Beecher Stowe or Herman Melville. It appeared on the online sign-up page as "week 6: Stowe, Melville."
The student wrote her essay about a person named "Melville Stowe" and I'm pretty sure the biographical details and literature references were a combination of Herman Melville and Walt Whitman.
I used to teach landscape architecture at the American University of Beirut. As an assistant professor.
One day a student sent me her design work to review as I had proposed she could do it (she was falling behind and needed more support than the rest).
She sent it along with a selfie of her in her room in comfortable clothes. It wasn't anything sexual, but it was kind of intimate. I didn't mind it... But had a girlfriend at the time and was being a good guy.
I talked to her about it the next day and we had a laugh, but I knew there was more than just that. However, nothing happened.
Weird.
Comments have been edited for clarity.
CW: Suicide
There is so much to learn in life.
And once you acquire certain things mentally, you regret it.
How much 411 have you come across over time that made you think... "How can I unlearn that?"
Yeah, not possible.
Knowledge is power and sometimes it's a nightmare.
Don't we have enough to keep us up at night?
Damn curiosity.
Well let's do some learning.
Redditor RedBoyFromNewy wanted to shed some light on creepy issues we need to be discussing. They asked:
"What’s a disturbing fact that not a lot of people know of?"
So who is ready to spill, and where do you find the info?
From the Guts
"Without mucus your stomach would digest itself."
Ddubsquizzee
"The reason you body produces more saliva before vomiting is your bodies way if protecting your mouth from the acidity of the vomit before you actually throw up."
-AntiVegan-
Death
"There are more suicides than homicides in the US every year."
tmsanch
"60% of all gun deaths in fact are suicides. It is estimated that someone offs themselves with a firearm every 20 minutes in the US. And 80% of them are males."
hymnsees
"And what's worse (knowing, as my family just went through this.)... 70% of suicides have no note. It's a common misconception that most people leave a note and it just isn't true. Mainly because a lot of people who write notes realize they don't want to go through with it. Those who are 'successful' just do it."
jdward01
After...
"You can give still 'birth' if you die while pregnant. The decomp process will force the baby out. It’s rare but it does happen."
MelissaAthalie
"This is usually what ends up happening when a pregnant woman gets murdered. They usually find the fetus either completely separate (like in the Lacy and Connor Peterson case) or in the same location as the mother, but clearly birthed (like with the case with Shanann Watts). It's something I never knew happened until very recently and I think it's one of the most horrifying aspects of death."
rivlet
Disaster
"The deadliest ship disaster was the MV Wilhelm Gustloff, a ship built during the Nazi Regime. In January 1945, she was evacuating 10,000 German citizens ahead of the soviet Invasion when (albeit ironically) a Soviet Submarine spotted them, and fired three torpedoes. The ship was on the freezing cold Baltic Sea, and the davits (ropes) for the lifeboats had frozen over."
"Not only that, but the ship was only meant to carry 2,000 people normally. These two factors, coupled with the harsh angle the ship was sinking at, meant only half of the lifeboats could be deployed. 9,400 people drowned to death that night, and nobody knows about it."
TheNonbinaryWren
I See You
"Your eyes have a separate immune system than the rest of your body, and if your normal immune system ever learns about your eyes, it will target them and you'll go blind."
hiruko_uchiha
Oh my eye. How do we protect them? As if I don't have enough stress.
Launched
"Penguins can launch their poop out of their butts like 5-6m far."
Bela_hrn
Despair
"Cotard's delusion, also known as walking corpse syndrome, is a neuropsychiatric disorder in which the person is in eternal damnation. They literally believe they are dead or dying [or don't have organs], the amount of despair is unimaginable and simply can't be grasped by people not suffering from it."
SweetTimpaniofLogic
'hard problem'
"It may seem like we know a lot about the human brain, but our standard way of studying brain activity is an fMRI, where a single pixel contains over 3 million neurons. That is more than many vertebrate animals' entire brains. The truth is, we really have no idea how the brain gives rise to consciousness."
"Edit: Even if we somehow perfectly worked out all the neural correlates of consciousness so we could say a mental state happens if and only if some exact pattern of brain activity happens, we would still have the 'hard problem' of consciousness: Why do these physical processes give rise to raw subjective experience, rather than just happening 'in the dark?'"
zeugenie
2 Minutes...
"If your esophagus closes and you cannot swallow, you have about 2 minutes before saliva starts reaching your windpipe. It is not a long time, but it is long enough to panic..."
grat_is_not_nice
"I have Eosiniphillic Oesophagitis and have had food stuck in the oesophagus for up to 24 hours before. And it’s horrible. You don’t realise how much saliva you swallow, to be constantly choking and vomiting that back up isn’t the best experience!"
AwayFollowing554
Get Lucky
"You’ve probably been closer to dying multiple times in your life then you even know. Just got lucky, or unlucky depending on who you are."
GingeBeardManBro
Well that's enough to disrupt sleep for life. Thanks y'all.
If you or someone you know is struggling, you can contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).To find help outside the United States, the International Association for Suicide Prevention has resources available at https://www.iasp.info/resources/Crisis_Centres/
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Never miss another big, odd, funny or heartbreaking moment again.
The best stories are ones with exciting plot twists.
But the next best type of stories are the ones that continue spiraling out of control.
Curious to hear examples of this, Redditor _Mitnix_ asked:
"What's your best 'oh you thought this was bad, it gets worse' story?"
It's story time. You may want to buckle up.
It All Started With A Cat
"This is a long one, but I promise it's worth it:"
"A buddy of mine was cat-sitting for a friend of his while the guy was out of town on a vacation. My buddy didn't have a car, so the dude told him that if he needed to go out and pick up more cat food or anything, he could borrow the car."
"At the time, my buddy was living right down the street from this guy, staying at his parents' house. So my buddy was just going over for a few hours each day to feed the cat and keep it company, then going back home."
"Meanwhile, he's also been flirting with this woman online. She lives several states away, but he feels like they seem to be getting pretty serious. So he decides to take some liberties, really push the envelope on where he'll pick up cat food from, and he takes his friend's car on a little multi-state road trip."
"This is insane, right? Just atrociously bad judgement, especially since someone does need to feed the cat. To solve this, he left his parents a note. It read, 'I am camping in the woods behind our house. Please go over to ____'s and feed his cat. I'll let you know when I'm home.'"
"Boom. Problem solved, right?"
"Except that the 'woods behind our house' are about 20 yards deep. It takes less than five minutes to walk through them and come out into the neighboring housing development. So his parents went looking for him, calling out for him, and couldn't find him. They got worried and contacted a family friend, a local police officer. He subsequently got a hold of the fire department. There was a full-on search party combing through about 1/50th of an acre of woods. Unsurprisingly, they were coming up with nothing."
"This was before cell phones were common, so my buddy was completely unaware that his plan had fallen apart. He was cruising along on his 12-hour drive, expecting to get to this girl's house just in time for dinner. Except he didn't have a GPS. So he got lost. Very lost. Like, by the time he turned up at this woman's house, it was almost midnight."
"When he got there, she was crying her eyes out. He assured her that it was okay, he was fine, wasn't hurt or in a wreck or anything, he'd just gotten lost. And she said, 'No, no, I wasn't worried about you. My dad just died in a motorcycle accident.'"
"So he bailed on his cat-sitting duties, stole a car, and inspired his parents to file a missing-persons just so he could awkwardly watch a woman cry for a few hours and then drive back home."
– GavinBelsonsAlexa
The Beekeeper's Nightmare
"I will try to keep it short. I am a beekeeper. My 3rd year of beekeeping, I suddenly developed a severe allergy to bee stings. It was spring and I was installing bees for the beginning of the season. I was up to the last hive, went to install that package of bees and one stung me right in the top of my head."
"I finished up a few minutes after and went up toward the house to do some other things. I started feeling flush and I could feel my heart racing. After I few minutes I realized I was having an anaphylactic reaction."
"If you’ve never had one, aside from the physical symptoms, they also say you will get a feeling of impending doom. That was spot on. I absolutely felt I was going to die and people do die from these reactions."
"So I am now in the house and desperately searching for Benadryl of which I have none. I am also having trouble breathing, my body is going haywire and I feel like I’m going to black out shortly."
"I call my mom, who lives an hour away, to call 911 because I feel like I will be unconscious soon. She says okay, phone rings 30 seconds later. It’s my mom, she goes 'I called 911 but they said you have to call'. This was my first wtf."
"So I call and it’s a very typical 911 call she is trying to keep me talking and I essentially started vomiting and she is still on the line and I am waiting and waiting for this alleged ambulance."
"A full half hour goes by. At this point I am actually coming out of the reaction. So I go to sit at my kitchen counter. I’m still on the line with the 911 dispatcher. I see the ambulance pull up and I say, oh they’re here. She’s like great, are you okay? I’m like yes and then she says goodbye and hangs up."
"I see the EMTs outside but my driveway has a gate so they are just standing there and they ring the bell on my gate and I am just looking at them, dumbfounded. Like I called for an emergency over a half hour ago, and they’re gonna roll up here and ring my bell and wait for me to come out when I more than likely could be unconscious or dead on the floor."
"I literally had to go out and let them in. Then they basically talked me in to going to the hospital to get checked out. Another huge mistake because this took place in the 2 months in my entire life when I didn’t have health insurance. So I ended up paying $4000 for a late ambulance and some IV Benadryl and epinephrine."
"Oh which also reminds me, a paramedic also showed, put the IV in when I agreed to go to the hospital. Then I felt something dripping and turns out he put it in my artery rather than a vein and it was just pushing the fluid out of the IV."
"0/10 would not go through any of that again…but I did 10 years later when I had another anaphylactic reaction due to a bee sting. However this went a lot smoother and I had epi-pens and a responsive ambulance."
– soline
Oil Everywhere
"Arrive home from work, my house reeks of oil."
"Go in the basement, and there's a pool of oil, with my stuff floating in it. The oil filter on my burner rotted out (it was defective and recalled, but the tech never bothered to notify me or replace it). Call up the tech, he throws a new one, charges me the emergency call fee, and advises I call HO insurance before running away (it was his fault, I didn't know it yet)."
"This was February in NY, about 13F out, and obviously the burner wasn't on while sitting in a pool of oil. But, they get there pretty quickly soak it up, and get things running so my pipes don't freeze."
"Only way to get the smell out is to dry clean everything I own, then shampoo all the carpets, run deodorizers, etc. Takes weeks. Had a headache the whole time."
"Turns out, my basement has cracks, most of it leaked through. They had to cut out my foundation and dig out the contaminated soil."
"Oil in soil means DEC gets involved. Whole new can of worms as they now had to monitor the process, test at every step. Big enough deal I have a spill number in their database."
"A 20 yard dumpster, with 20 yards of oil soaked sand, is so heavy that it broke through my driveway, destroying it. They did that twice, took out my entire driveway."
"Remember how I said this was in February? March brought the COVID shutdown."
"I spent over a year with my basement in shambles, holes in my driveway, plastic sheets taped up, no washer/dryer, and all sorts of equipment kicking around."
"The next spring, they're back and working, and screwed everything up. Not going to get into every detail, but after a big fight, I managed to get rid of them and bring in a new company to fix their screwups and finish the job. Old crew got very difficult when the new crew requested permits and reports. Turns out, they never bothered. Had to do all that before they could start working again."
"New company dropped a storage crate on my yard to store my stuff while working, destroyed my grass, took out a sprinkler, took out my neighbor's driveway curb, got concrete all over my brickwork, but at least the nightmare was finally over."
– MyNameIsRay
These Redditors have been dealt with some major blows.
People who say that things will always get better, are partially right. Things do come around, eventually.
But you never know how many curve balls life has to throw at you until there's a resolution.
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Life is full of disappointments. We lose out on a job opportunity or the one designer article of clothing we really wanted is not available in our size.
But we go on.
But the biggest letdowns are the ones we never see coming but must contend with.
Redditor Frequent-Pilot5243 asked:
"What is a depressing truth you have made peace with?"

No matter how much you prize a friendship, not all of them are for forever.
Here Today, Gone Tomorrow
"A friendship you thought would last forever can end in an instant."
– Febreze4200
The Best Mate Who Quit
"My best mate of 20 years, said that he didn’t want to be my best man and just said he didn’t want to be my friend any more. Hurt like hell."
– Gavindasing
It's Okay To Let Go
"Sometimes people you care deeply about will choose to drop out of your life and all you can really do is have the grace to let them."
"edit. to everyone struggling with being left behind, and to everyone struggling with having to be the one to leave- I hope the pain eases for you soon."
– girlloss
Restarting The Process
"I have a really hard time with this one. Every friendship I've had in my adult life has only lasted a couple years tops. Rarely a falling out or anything, but just drifting apart or sh*t happens type deal. It's hard for me to make friends in the first place because I'm pretty shy, so having to regularly restart that process is really discouraging. Right now I don't really have any friends because I've just kinda given up trying."
– plebeian1523
The harsh reality of losing the people we love hits home for these Redditors.
Grandpa Time
"My grandpa just wanted to get to know me and the man I was becoming during his last year of life. Which I was too young and too selfish to realize."
– MrMunky24
Lost Opportunity
"Yeah, this hits home. I spent 90% of my childhood with my grandparents. I was at their house almost everyday. When I got into my teens and obviously found friends, discovered women, all that stuff and then I just stopped seeing them. They’re both gone now and they died with the memories of me as a child. Although they seen me sometimes while I was older, they didn’t know me because I didn’t give them the chance."
– Loud-Distance-1456
In Grief
"My dad passed away 6 weeks ago and I will NEVER see, hear, chat or get to hug him ever again & that forever is a long time."
– somethinggood19
These sobering facts were huge disappointments.
Truth About CPR
"This is coming from a firefighter:"
"If you have to perform CPR on them, it's most likely over for the patient."
"I'm not sure if I've made peace with it completely, but I've accepted it at least."
– Rukhnul
The After Effects
"I've taken CPR training twice in the past 10 years. The instructors were so completely different... The second one flat out told us 'you're giving them about a 15% chance of living, and even if they live, they will probably have some kind of severe trauma that will dramatically decrease their quality of life.' Wow..."
– DavidAg02
Despite Having Good Intentions...
"No one is coming to help."
– _meddlin_
That Train Has Left The Station
"I'm aging nonstop."
– insaight
Innocence Is Gone
"My childhood is gone, and I have no good memory from that phase of my life."
– anonymoose_mrx
No matter what, life goes on with or without us.
The best that any of us can do while we're passengers on this giant spaceship is to take life as it comes and pick up the pieces the best we can when things don't pan out as we'd hoped.
Sometimes, it's about celebrating the small victories–like finally finding a store that has your shoe size.
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People Describe The Times Someone Mocked Them For Being Wrong But They Were Actually Right
The truth matters.
Something one would think was a given in modern society.
Yet all over the world, there are people so unbelievably stubborn, that they simply refuse to believe the facts.
Sometimes even when presented with evidence.
This could be for something menial, such as refusing to believe that a cotton candy was actually invented by a dentist.
But sometimes, refusing to believe the truth could have serious consequences, up to and including climate change, the effectiveness of masks, and the disproportionate amount of gun violence in the US.
Redditor Lady_Of_The_Water was curious about the many things, both frivolous and serious, people refused to believe were true, leading them to ask:
"Whats something someone thought you were wrong about and ridiculed you for it, but it turns out you were right?"
What's that smell?
"That there really was a gas leak in the apartment building."
"Thankfully, the fire didn't cause much damage."- yamsnavas2.
There's a reason the bill is so high.
"Our water usage at work went up a lot."
"They checked all the toilets, sinks for leaks, couldn't find anything."
"I mentioned that it seemed to coincide with the new water cooler system installation, maybe that should be checked."
"They basically laughed at me."
"That stupid water system never worked good and the guy came in 3 different times and said it was just the filter."
"Every month it needs changed???"
"Didn't seem right."
"Finally a different technician came in and result was it was never installed correctly."
"I asked, 'could that have anything to do with the increased water usage that started when this got installed?'"
" He smiled 'I wondered if anyone caught that, yes the valve was not correct and water has been running'."
"For 5 months!!"
"If only they had listened."
"Total redemption!"- McTee967.
Have you ever looked at a map?
"I had a coworker doubling down repeatedly, claiming that new Zealand is north of Australia."
"I even told her about how I had lived there and she just assumed I was such a huge idiot that I didn't know where on the globe I was living."
"Brought the smartphone out and put an end to that."
"Let me just say, it's ok to not know where all the countries are."
"The problem is if you heavily assert you are right and others are stupid."- PlopPlopPlopsy.
Is it supposed to hurt this much?
"My husband told me that I was a 'baby' about my IUD insertion and insisted that it wasn't painful."
"That my concerns about entrusting a stranger to shove a foreign object into my body were paranoid."
"I listened to him because really, the info you'd find online is overwhelmingly positive."
"Long story short: the provider placed it wrong, didn't check/fix it when I asked her to."
"I spent 4 years in pain that I eventually 'got used to."
"It expelled half way out my cervix, had to get it yanked out at the ER."
"That's when I was told that copper IUDs are notorious for breaking inside the uterus."
"Because it broke inside me."
"The cherry on top?"
"The female gyno with three kids I saw to get the broken piece removed told me that 'cervixes don't really feel pain' and that I didn't really need to remove it."
"Goes without saying, I was in severe pain for 2 weeks straight before this appointment."
"Tons of women came out with their stories about lawsuits over IUDs, how they got pregnant with an IUD."
" Stories similar to mine."
"And how women should really be offered anesthesia or pain pills for this procedure."
"And when my husband was surprised to learn about the pain I endured I reminded him 'You called me a baby and everyone else told me it was all in my head'."
"Which is why I didn't talk about it."- PopK0rnAndMMs.
Seems like you could learn something from me.
"In sixth grade chemistry a teacher asked us what element was a gas that was lighter than air, and extremely flammable/explosive."
"I grew up on science because of what my dad does for a living and Bill Nye."
"I knew about the Hindenburg, and so I was really proud of myself when I raised my hand and said 'Hydrogen'."
"The teacher laughed at me and said that no, it was Helium, and the entire rest of the class proceeded to laugh too."
"Almost three decades later I work in a lab now, and f*ck that teacher I was right."- vanyel_ashke.
The dictionary is your friend.
"I have worked as a translator and a proofreader."
"For one of my translations, it went something like 'and he piqued her interest'."
"My proofreader docked me for an inaccuracy and switched it to 'and he peaked her interest'.”
"I’m still salty."
"I tried to get the agency I was working for to remove this person as a proofreader since I question his/her command of the English language."
"Had a similar problem with the phrase “lynch pin” used metaphorically."
"I stopped working with that agency because it pissed me off so much being 'corrected' incorrectly."- spot_o_tea.
No, that's just an illusion.
"When I told my mom that the clouds were moving and she laughed like I was crazy."-
Did you even read the menu?
"I was in the passenger's seat at a Carl's Jr Drive Thru with a friend."
"He asked what I wanted and I requested the Fried Zucchini."
"He puts half his body through the window to the voice box and goes on this 'My friend here thinks you have some kind of food I know you don't have so I am just going to say it for laughs because you will get a kick out of this'."
"She wants FRIED ZUCCHINI' and starts laughing."
" Well guess who ends up eating fried zucchini."- User Deleted.
And how do you spell that?
"Believe it or not, the pronunciation of my own middle name."- ThePlantie.
We have standards in this community...
"Not me but my Mom tells a story about how she wrote a paper for school about how tough her small town makes it for any new people moving in."
"Basically if you didn't grow up there you were a social outcast for decades and were excluded from a lot of things."
"The teacher didn't agree so she got a bad grade and scoffed at."
"A few years later a news paper reporter essentially wrote the same thing and won a local award for calling out the same small town BS that was going on."- Jberg18.
It's pretty amazing that anyone in this day and age would jump to tell someone they're wrong without having any authority.
Particularly when someone can quickly look up the truth on their phone in less than a minute.
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