24 Of The Best Cases Of Vengeful Teachers Getting Back At 'That Kid'.
If you're going into the teaching profession you know you're going to need patience and lots of it. Kids will act out and rebel in the weirdest ways, often to get attention or to push the boundaries. But every once in a while you get a kid who lashes out or cheats just for the fun of it and then what do you do?
Teachers and professors of Reddit were asked: "How did you secretly get back at 'that kid'?" These are some of the best answers.
I taught English at a ritzy private school in South Korea. We weren't allowed to discipline the kids for any reason, no matter what, because the school was making money from the tuition.
For the most part the kids (grade 5-6) were pretty good but there was this one kid. He was always disruptive, bullying the other kids, throwing pencils, writing swear words in Korean on the white board before class, never listening, etc.
I started eating a lot of kimchi on the days I taught that specific class, which gave me wicked indigestion. When I walked by the kid I would let out these horrible silent creeping hot farts. No one ever blames the teacher and after a couple weeks he became known as the farty kid.
He was still a little prick, but it made me feel better knowing that he was knocked down a few pegs.
funsizedsamurai
My stats professor said he saw a group of really talkative and distracting kids doing well, and he thought it was fishy. He looked at the tests and saw that they were all the same answers, then he looked at the seating chart and noticed that they could all look over each others shoulders to the front of the class where the smart, quiet girl sat. Solution: Give her a different test. Only her. When he handed back the tests, he told everyone who got under a certain grade, like a 50% to come see him. Each student got like a 10% or something. When they were alone, he basically said "Well, this is your punishment for cheating. Don't do it again." I thought that was awesome.
YisThatUsernameTaken
I should firstly say that I am a well reviewed teacher and have had great success with at risk students.
How do I get 'back' at students though? I don't mercy pass. I'll bend steel to get you to get your assignments in and do an okay job... But I will not mercy pass. If you got a 49, you got a 49.
Shurtugal929
High school teacher here. Had a kid we'll call Anthony. Complained about everything, did no work whatsoever, made fun of kids with disabilities, you name it. And, of course, he was always the first to start shrieking that he was the victim in every situation, everyone was against him, how come he always got picked on and so forth.
Now, in my teaching career, which has spanned the better part of a decade so far, I've taught more than a thousand kids. Plenty of those have been "bad" kids. The thing about bad kids, though, is they're usually bad for fairly simple reasons. Unmedicated or undiagnosed mental illness. Trauma in their past. Hell, maybe just lonely. If you pay attention, you can find out why almost any kid is acting out.
That said, out of 1000+ kids, I've encountered maybe ten who are genuinely broken people. You could call them sociopaths. No trace of empathy, no trace of conscience or even inner life. People who basically exist to serve their own desires, exclusively, and have no compunctions about how they might most quickly realize those desires.
Anthony was one of those kids. The worst thing about him was his constant tendency to immediately poop upon anything that anyone else had put effort into, including my lessons. We would nearly have these very vulnerable, tender moments in the classroom - where kids were talking about big, important issues and really growing intellectually in awesome and uncomfortable ways - and then Anthony would call them expletives or whatever else.
One day, this girl Patrice - an incredibly sweet girl, sensitive, with an artist's heart - is sharing something in class for the first time. Visibly nervous, shaky voice.
Anthony, of course, begins making fun of her hair, her glasses, her face. Loud enough that it's plausibly a whisper, but loud enough so that we can all hear what he's saying. I start walking toward his desk but am interrupted when Patrice very, very calmly says, "Screw you, Anthony."
The entire class was dead silent. This girl never spoke, let alone swore, and she said it with such self-control. Everyone's eyes are on me, waiting for me to react.
Anthony starts screaming DID YOU HEAR THAT? YOU ALWAYS GET ME IN TROUBLE WHEN I SWEAR, THIS AIN'T FAIR, HOW THIS GONNA...
I say "Huh? I didn't hear anything," turn back around, and continue the lesson. A few kids cheered. It felt really good.
arthur_figgis
A twelfth grader stole a bottle of water, then denied it, demonstrably lying, and got really super snotty and insulting when I called him out. A couple months later, he was devastated to learn he wasn't allowed to go on the camping field trip with all the other seniors. Like I'm going to chaperone hundreds of kids to Death Valley and take this lying thieving student and be legally responsible for whatever crap he pulls? No way, Paul. You can sit in an empty classroom and watch PBS videos while we go hiking and sit around campfires and sleep in tents and make bacon and pancakes for breakfast.
todlee
I was in a class where the professor had the two blatant plagiarists stand up and read both of their papers at the same time. Halfway through without even looking at them and his eyes turned to a wall he said out the last conclusion statement. Turns out they stole from his own body of work and they changed just enough of the paper to make it past the checker (but he reads every paper anyways). It was the most awkward and hilarious thing I have watched to this day.
He then told them that each paper they wrote would be read out loud by them after each submission and he would personally grade their papers. They also had to sit at the front and he would call on them with every open ended question first. To be clear he was furious that these two stole from him, call it their ideas, change it into a weaker structure and complain about their low-grade. He crushed them, it was great.
sect-10
I was a TA for a little in school.
My professor was notorious for leaving his old tests in the lab file cabinets. Students had access to those for studying. One punk in the class went from low 60% scores to 97% stuff. I noticed his answers were "dated" (It's an old code, but it checks out). But not wrong enough to get poor marks. I compared his answers to the ones in the cabinet. Dead on.
So, I marked up an upcoming final test with the wrong answers...this test was worth 30% of the final grade. Slapped a 115% on it, left it in the cabinet, and waited. I made sure my fake answers were very official sounding and such for the unlikely event he cross checked.
He copied my fake exam word for word. Got a failing grade in the class and had to retake next semester. Guess who his TA was?
Tampaburn
Had an AP Chemistry teacher who had three students that would only show up for the exams (our school's rules allowed unlimited skips in classes of Honors level or above) and all three would pass with identical grades, despite never sitting within eyesight of each other.
He spent the entire year trying to figure out how they could have possibly cheated.
The way our AP class worked, your grade was based solely on the final exam at the end of the year-- all other class work, homework, and exams were to help you learn and the grades for these things decided if you would be allowed to take the AP Exam.
So my teacher decided that instead of a written exam we'd have a lab exam for a final. I forget what the exam was on but I remember it was some chemical that stained your skin blue for weeks or months if it touched you. These three students never showed up for class, never knew anything about lab procedures, and ended up failing the class and having blue skin for the rest of the school year.
pard68
I had a letter mailed to my office, as in paid postage etc etc, that was basically threatening me, saying I better stop handing out Cs and Ds or "word on the street" was going to be that I was a bad teacher and no one would take my class and I'd be out of a job.
I had a pretty good idea of who it was, obviously immediately ruled out all the students doing well in my classes, but didn't think direct accusations would be really effective anyway.
I decided to take it to each of my three classes and turn it into a lesson on faulty rhetoric. My expectations were exceeded when I began to read the letter out loud and without fail each class erupted in laughter and exclaimed things like "What a jerk!" before I could even weigh in.
The kid I suspected the most definitely sat slumped in his chair without much to say that day.
okkoto
Over the course of 2 and a half weeks I slowed down his mouses tracking speed until it was at the lowest setting. He was getting so aggravated and I just said "Sorry but we have a full class and there aren't any extra mice." Then I flipped it to full speed tracking the day we had all the students clean their keyboards and mice.
Derocc400
I have had a number of challenging students in my 15 years as a public school teacher. These kids sometimes don't know how to act. They might lash out and treat teachers with disrespect. They might blow off assignments and make other choices that increase the burdens of my job.
So - you get back at them by offering them extra attention. Helping them grow by seeking productive ways to correct their behavior. Challenging their academic failures by offering help outside school hours. Addressing holistic problems by circling the wagons and bringing outside resources to bear (including guidance, administration, and parents in a cooperative effort to encourage growth).
I get back at that kid by helping him or her get past being that kid. In the end, we can both sit back and laugh at how hard it sometimes feels to mature.
iamkuato
This was in a college freshman composition class. I had a student who was constantly making obnoxious, borderline racist comments in class. He thought he was the edgy class clown but mostly he was just annoying. Also wrote papers for me about how Hitler wasn't as bad as people say he is (basically using the old "he got Germany out of economic despondency" argument) and even wrote in another essay about how American soldiers need to learn to be as dedicated to America as Nazi soldiers were to Germany.
So when he finally wrote an essay that was basically just a barely coherent rant about how much he hates Muslims I reported him to the dean of students for hate speech. Other than the occasional comment about how he was being persecuted for "standing up for America" he finally stopped making obnoxious comments in class after that.
schnit123
My favorite English teacher once led a discussion about Vietnam war novel The Things They Carried into a discussion about drugs and paranoia in order to mess with the dude that always showed up to class high.
She didn't look at him ONCE- just kept saying stuff to mess with him while, might I add, actually leading a very interesting conversation about drug abuse in Vietnam. I was sitting across the room from him and he looked like he was dying.
Modspot
These two girls in my econ class were cheating all the time. They turned in this paper on the Federal Reserve that didn't get picked up with the plagiarism checker but they both turned in the exact same paper as each other. I told them you guys did a great job on this paper, you get 50%, and you get 50%. In retrospect I shouldn't have done it in front of the class.
[deleted]
Had a terrible student who was obnoxious and disruptive. He had no respect for anyone, including his classmates. I gave him a class participation grade that was just low enough to have him fail the class. Twice. He tried to appeal it, but it wasn't appealable. He changed majors and the professors in his new major hate him too.
[deleted]
Let them fail.
I had a student that no matter how many conversations I had with her, with her councilor, with her parent, etc, she refused to do assignments or turn anything in. She was of the opinion that my class was throwaway, an easy A.
So I let her fail. I stopped reaching out to her for the last six weeks, and let her build her own gallows for her GPA. She came to me half panicked two days before the final, begging for extra credit, anything.
"No."
"But, I'll fail."
"Yeah, you will. The real world works like this- you don't do what's required of you, you fail. I tried to help but you never cared."
"I can't have an F!"
"That's really not my problem at this point. Take it up with the principal, kid."
IronBoomer
The way I got "back" at that kid, is tricking him into believing he's just playing and getting away with things - while he actually learned without knowing that he was actually learning.
Booyah!
JoOngle
There was a kid in my class who ALWAYS was cheating on my tests and quizzes. I caught him several times and contacted the parents, but nothing was ever really done about it (aside from the fact that he got 0's if I caught him). I don't think his mom ever really believed he was cheating as much as he was, and there were plenty of times I probably didn't catch him.
Once on the midterm, he missed the test. He came back the day I gave the kid their scores back which also had the answers, but not the questions. I saw him "sneakily" talking to his friends and they gave him their papers that had the answers on them. I didn't say anything, but the make-up midterm has the same questions with all of the answer choices moved over by one letter. He got a 3% on a multiple choice midterm. I assume he must have read one question and then copied the rest from his friends. Justice.
teacherthrowawayyyy
When I was in high school I was a librarian assistant at the elementary school that my mom taught at. There was this one little jerk who was always bullying this kid who was a little heavier set about his weight. I would always tell him to stop and he would for a bit, but the next day he would carry on. One day I finally had enough and told him that he needed to go to the principal's office and he responded with something along the lines of "I don't need to listen to you, I'm strong!" and then I knew that I needed to do something else. So I told him that since he is so "strong" that for the rest of the class period (about 30 minutes) that he would have to stand in the middle of the room with his arms stretched out. Let me just say that it is more difficult than it sounds.
He took it as a challenge and walked his stupid smug face to the middle of the library and started holding his arms out. It didn't even take a minute for him to start lowering them, and I would turn to him and say "Yeah, you must be really strong" sarcastically and he would lift them back up.
About 5 minutes had passed and then my mom walked into the library to see what was up. My mom and I chatted for a second and then she noticed the turd face standing in the middle of the room and asked what he was doing. The kid's face went red immediately. I told my mom that he was bullying other students and was disrespectful. Turns out that my mom was this kid's favorite teacher and he had no idea that I was her daughter. He ran and started crying into my mom's skirt and apologized, but my mom still took him to the principal. The rest of the year he was a little damn angel.
Looking back, I don't think I went about it in a good way, but I was 17 and had no tolerance for bullies since I was bullied a good bit in elementary. I guess things worked out in the end?
yourbff
I taught math last school year at a high school. There was this really snotty disrespectful kid in my class. He was a senior and he quickly decided the class was beneath him and stopped coming.
The way I approach grading is half the grade is attendance and participation. I feel like I can teach any kid math and help them get really good at it as long as they come to my class and do what they're supposed to. The other half of the grade was going to be their comprehensive final.
Guess who comes into my class one week before finals with some sob story about how he needed me to pass him for blah blah reasons. Yeah.
So I tell him "OK here's the deal. Half your grade is attendance and participation. Half is the final. That means you can't get more than a 50% right now. However, I also don't fail anyone that gets at least a B on my final. If you were able to learn the math without being here listening to my spiel every day, fine, you pass."
Of course there was no way this guy was going to pass my final. I was teaching trigonometry and he couldn't even do basic algebra worth a darn. given his attitude toward me I have to admit I enjoyed this thought. Passing my class is SOOO important to him a week before finals, but not important enough for him to attend my lessons. Justice = served.
So he says "What am I gonna do I don't know the stuff?" So I tell him. "OK. I have a review here of all the types of problems that will be on the final. It's what we are working on all week. you come in every day and do your best and if you need extra help I'll help you at lunch time and you can try to pass my test. That or you can just give up."
Of course he realizes it's futile and gives up right? No. He actually comes in, works hard and spends every minute of every lunch in my classroom getting individual attention. And he gets an A on his final!
When I grade his test and he sees he got an A his eyes actually tear up. So I point to the test and say "Look at that math! That's some hard damned math. Most people can't do that math but you know what? You can! I wonder how many other things you can do that other people told you you couldn't do. That you told yourself you couldn't do!"
He agreed and thanked me profusely for all my help and for not letting him take the easy way out. I don't think I'll ever teach a kid a more important thing than that.
Unholy_VI
I learned to take copius notes and have a file on every student. Lazy students will often try to throw the blame on the teacher.
I had two students request a meeting with the Dean of Students to discuss my unfair grading, and I showed up with a stack of evidence. Every substantive in-person interaction was documented on the front of the file, and I included copies of every email and note on the inside.
There's nothing more embarrassing than coming face to face with your own laziness and being unable to wriggle free. They started paying attention after that.
VestigialTail
I taught a TCP/IP networking course at a university. The assignment was to write a simple client and server in C. Circa 1992. They had to submit their code and I compiled it and tested it.
One submission had an error in a certain case, so I fixed the error to see if the rest of the cases worked. I graded the submission a 90 percent for something due to the one minor problem.
Marking another student submission I find the exact same error. Exact same variable names. I run the two submissions through Unix diff command and the only difference was the student name in the comment at the top.
I gave both students 45 percent. One complained. I told him the submission deserved a 90 but someone copied the work; tell me who the real author is and I'll give them 90, the other gets zero and reported. They both accepted the 45s.
d_stick
One time there was this girl sleeping in my calculus class. Well, my teacher walked over to his desk phone and says to the rest of the class, "Did you guys hear that ring?" He proceeds to pick up the phone, nod his head and hang up. He wakes the girl up and tells her she's needed in the main office, so she leaves. The entire class is super confused. 10 minutes later she returns and is like, "They didn't need me at the office." He says "I know, but I hope that walk woke you up..."
GDE1990
My Abnormal Psych (a 400 level class, so you would assume people in this class were interested in the field) had us visit a local homeless shelter. This was an accelerated night class so classes were 4 hours long. She arrange for us to go during our normal class time. A few people in the class felt it was dumb or a waste of time and bailed just as the tour was starting. The final exam for that class was about 4 questions that were VERY easy to answer if you stayed for the whole tour and absolutely impossible if you did not.
TollBoothW1lly
Some of this material has 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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