Even the most creative writers of fiction could never dream up the bizarre situations that people actually experience every day. In real life, cats win lawsuits and receive tax returns; lawnmowers kill demons; escaped roulette balls become lodged in cleavage; screws are swallowed; and ghosts give weather forecasts. Read on as reminiscent Redditors share these and other crazy stories.
1. Cash Cat
Years ago, my family had two cats. Suzy would terrorize Guy all day, every day. She'd stalk and attack him, and his whole life consisted of hiding. We almost never saw him. To try to calm her down, the vet put Suzy on Prozac. A few months later, the vet put Guy on some sort of stimulant in hopes that it would prompt him to stand up for himself. Again, there were no noticeable effects.
About a year later, an envelope arrived in our mailbox addressed to Guy. Clearly assuming that Guy was a human the letter, which was sent by a large legal firm, explained that the manufacturer of the medication Guy had been prescribed was the subject of a class action lawsuit due to price manipulation, and asked if Guy would like to join the suit. We replied in the affirmative, and then forgot all about it.
About another year later, Guy received a check for around $150 for his legal victory. Mom used the money to buy him toys and treats.
2. Just Another Day at the Weirdest School Ever
My science teacher in eighth grade was teaching us about evolution, using the example of how bed bugs evolved to become resistant to bug spray. Then, to our horror, he whipped out a petri dish from behind his back with live bed bugs inside it! As we were all beginning to panic, he proceeded to tell us that we could not, under any circumstances, tell the principal about this, because he'd get fired.
The next thing we knew, he sneezed REALLY hard and dropped the petri dish! The bed bugs went EVERYWHERE, sliding across the floor in all directions. Everyone scrambled away from the spreading black specs. Then, after we'd all finished screaming and freaking out, our teacher proceeded to tell us that they were not bed bugs; they were sunflower seeds.
3. Baptist Fire Drill?
Well over a decade ago, before I could drive, I was in the car with my Grandma at a red light. Across the street was a Jack In the Box, and I could see the parking lot from the car. I watched a sedan drive up and stop. A man in a white gown, like a baptismal gown, got out and went to the trunk. He opened it, and my eyes nearly popped out of my head. There was a man in the trunk!
Just as I was thinking about calling the police, the man in the trunk stood up and got out. It was another man in the same gown! As I watched in confusion, they calmly switched spots. The man that was in the trunk went to sit in the driver’s seat, while the driver folded himself into the trunk. Then the light turned green, and we drove off.
4. Extreme Manscaping
On my brother's 18th birthday, he had the house to himself and his friends. They all obviously got very drunk, since the age to drink in my country is 18. Then they came up with a "brilliant" idea to mow the entire lawn in our extremely large yard in the shape of a man's private part. They did it, somehow. My parents found out, obviously, but all they did was laugh.
5. The Shaggy Dog Lives
My friend Ben rode to and from high school with me every day. Every day, like clockwork, we saw the same guy drive past us on the same road. He drove an old Chevy truck, probably an 80’s model, with a single cab. He always had his dog, a big German shepherd, who would be sitting in the passenger seat.
One day, coming home from school, we passed the guy, but when I looked, I couldn't believe my eyes: the dog was in the driver’s seat, and the guy was riding shotgun. I turned to Ben and he immediately said, “yeah, what the heck? You saw that too?” Imagination? Glitch in the matrix? I don’t know. But I swear I saw that dog driving.
6. Principal of Shade
At my high school orientation, the principal was giving a speech about road safety for pedestrians. At one point he said, and I quote, “In my time here, I’ve seen 3 kids hit by cars, and that’s 1 too many.”
7. Potty-Mouth Parrot
My aunt's African Grey parrot talked incessantly, but he mostly used cuss words and phrases that my Aunt’s first husband had taught it. She'd say something to him like, "How's Mr. Peter Parrot today?" And he'd reply with "Stick it up your butt!" or various other things that were worse.
We never figured out why the parrot retained everything her former husband had taught it, but retained nothing that she said.
8. Paging Stephen King
A while back, I helped investigate a fire scene. The fire was pretty much confined to the basement, but the whole basement was damaged. While going through the debris, we found a lawnmower. In the basement. Which was very unusual. But in the lawnmower blades, we found chunks of carpet and wood. Which was even weirder. And then, just to add fuel to the fire, parts of the carpet and furniture in the basement looked like they'd been attacked with a lawnmower.
The owner of the house had been arrested, but we didn't find out the dark reason why until later.
It turns out that the guy had been on a three-day meth binge. He had begun to hallucinate heavily and claimed demons were attacking him in his house. He said he had somehow figured out that they were coming from the basement, so he had gone down and started fighting them. He was soon overwhelmed.
Realizing there were too many demons for him to fight empty-handed, he had gone up to his garage, retrieved the lawnmower, brought it to the basement, and started mowing the demons as they came out of the basement floor. Unfortunately, they still overpowered him, and stopped his lawnmower blade from moving. So, in desperation, he had taken the gas cap off, dumped the tank out, and lit the whole basement on fire in an attempt to kill the demons.
So I had to collect the lawnmower as evidence. And that is the story of how I ended up with a demon-killing lawnmower.
9. Porno Escobar
Back when schools did not have Wifi, I downloaded a massive amount of pornography. I hid it in the school desktop using the hide feature, and became a porn kingpin in school. Basically, I passed porn files through Bluetooth and took money for it. It was an easy way to get lunch money. I never got caught either.
10. Eau de Ginger Ale
One time, I was at the store buying party supplies for a Christmas Eve party. The store was packed because it was Christmas time, and I hate crowded stores. I only had to get one thing: a pack of ginger ale cans. So I skipped the lines and went to the self-checkout. The barcode for the pack of cans was on the top of the pack, so I awkwardly rolled the pack over on the scanner to scan it… and a single can fell out onto the floor of the store.
As it hit the ground, a tiny hole opened between the body of the can and the seam of the top of the can. A small, pressurized stream of ginger ale was projecting out of the can as it began to roll away. Like a ginger ale sprinkler, it rolled down the alley of self-checkouts, misting all the Christmas Eve shoppers with ginger ale as the clerk chased it down the queue of people waiting to check out.
It was quite embarrassing.
11. Thrill-Seeker
There was a guy called Nathan that used to go to our school. He was pretty chill, but he had this one weird habit: he would slide down the stairs on a wet floor sign, using it like a toboggan. One time, he literally made a slip-and-slide by flooding the toilets until water flowed down the stairs, before sliding down on the wet floor sign.
12. A Young MacGyver
When I was in high school, I threw a party and a friend drunkenly put a hole in the wall right by the entrance to my house. I knew my parents would be back in a little over 24hrs, so the next morning, I went to Home Depot and explained my situation to the guy working there. He basically told me I didn’t have enough time to fix a hole in the wall. Despite this, after getting all the supplies, I figured I was good to go out with some friends for a while, then come home and quickly fix the wall before bed.
I came home around 10pm, giving me about 12 hours before my parents would be home. No problem. I filled up the hole with the mesh and sheetrock. It was looking better, all filled up and smooth, but still wet and obviously a different color than the wall itself.
I remembered that my Mom had painted the wall herself a few years back, and there were still paint cans left over in the basement. After grabbing a can that matched the color of the wall, I got ready to cover the spot. But the second I painted onto the wall, my heart sank: the paint color was too dark. It was the same color, but a much darker shade, so my Mom must have thought it was too dark and added white to lighten it to the wall color.
So, I went back to the basement for white paint and spent the next few hours trying to find the right shade. After an eternity, I finally got the right color! It was 3-4am at that point, and I painted the whole wall. Once I was done, the wall looked great. I couldn’t even tell there was ever a hole! But I still had a pretty obvious giveaway: the smell of paint. One step into the house, and my parents would immediately know something wasn’t right.
That’s when I had a flash of utter brilliance: I remembered seeing a can of blue paint in the basement. I grabbed the blue paint and a poster board from a school project and made a sign saying WELCOME HOME. I then hung the sign in the same room as the wet wall, on an opposite wall to draw attention there and off of the painted wall. I purposely left the can of blue paint there on the floor with the lid off to help sell the reason for the strong smell of paint.
Then I went to bed, exhausted and with only a few hours to spare. I woke up when they arrived to greet them. My plan worked like a charm! I got away with it. They loved the welcome home sign. I know what you must be wondering, but what about the wet paint!? There’s no way it dried in time! You’re right, it was 100% still wet when they arrived; I just prayed nobody would touch the wall!
That’s one of my stories that I’m actually very proud of! That was over 10 years ago, and I’m still just as proud of it today as I was back then.
13. Frustrated Fowl
One of my friends had a bird that would occasionally make a phone ringing noise, then lift its foot to its head and say: "Hello? Yes. No, we're not interested. Because I flipping said so!" Then it would put its foot back down and say, "Gosh-darn telemarketers."
14. Educational Explosions
My friend and I were in welding class one day, and I filled up a small trash bag with an oxy/acetylene mix when he wasn’t looking and set it off behind him. It made a big bang, and got a big laugh, but was harmless.
I didn't know it then, but I'd made a big mistake. The next day, this idiot found a small hole about the size of a quarter in the cinder block wall in our class, stuck his unlit torch in there, and just pumped gas inside. After awhile, he got my attention, said, "watch this," pulled his striker from his pocket – and lit it right next to the gas-filled hole in the wall.
BOOOOOOM! This kid blew a 5-foot hole clean into the other classroom.
15. Pencils Are Dangerous
When I was a kid, the guy sitting behind me in class was fooling around and holding onto my arm one day, pulling it backwards over my head. I was obviously trying to pull back to get my arm free. I had a pencil in the hand he was pulling backwards and my other hand was on my desk. When he let go suddenly, I stabbed myself in my left hand so hard that the tip of the pencil broke inside. The lead from it is still inside my palm about 22 years later.
16. Pre-Op Flatulence
This is the funniest thing I have ever seen. When I was a student on clinical rotations, I was in the Operating Room one day while the surgeon and resident were prepping a patient for laparoscopic surgery. As the surgeon leaned down near the foot of the table, the patient (who was half sedated at this point) farted directly into the surgeon’s face. It took everything I had not to lose it.
17. Stranger Danger
When I was back in 8th grade, I lived in a really rural area. It was just off of the highway, and the only store was a gas station. I liked to walk down by the gas station sometimes. It was pretty run down, but it had everything I wanted. My stepdad had lived in the house beside the gas station too, so he knew the owners well. Pretty safe. Right? Wrong.
One day, I really wanted a Fanta soda. There were no real sidewalks, so I was walking on driveways and dirt paths. As I was just nearing the one intersection I had to cross, I noticed a white van go past me, pull into the gas station, turn back around, and drive past me again. I started to feel really uneasy when it pulled into a neighbor’s driveway behind me to turn around again, and then drove up slowly beside me.
A man, in maybe his late 40s, wearing a blue baseball cap over badly dyed blonde hair stared at me out of his open window. I couldn’t see into the back. I stepped into the ditch a bit, just to put some distance in between us. The man leaned over in the car and said, “Open the door.” With me being the meek female I am, I just shook my head and started to move a little bit further back into the ditch, closer to the intersection. The man stayed there for a bit, watching me, but as soon as I moved far enough away, he sped off down the highway. I ran across the intersection and into the gas station. I did get the soda, and a chocolate bar, but I was picturing hitting the man in the skull with the can if he came back.
18. Mistaken Identity
When I was around 15, I was walking to work my summer job one day around 5am. I usually really enjoyed the walk because it was quiet and still cool out. This day, a van passed me, slowed down, and less than a block ahead of me, pulled to the side of the road I was on.
Goosebumps jumped up my arms and neck and I quickly crossed to the other side of the road. I kept my head down, but threw him a few side-glances to make sure the driver knew I knew he was there. I started speed walking past the van when the driver rolled down the window to call out to me.
I broke into a run and covered another block before the van pulled up to me again. This time, the driver managed to call out my name, and I looked over – and saw it was my boss driving on his way to work! He was just offering me a lift.
He was driving his wife's van in instead of his car, which is why I didn't recognize him immediately. Thankfully, I had known the man since I was a child, as my Father worked for the same company. Later that day, my Dad came in to tell me that he was proud of me after hearing about how I reacted. It still makes me smile when I think about it.
19. Sticky Situation
When I was about 4, I found a bottle of super glue on the counter. I rubbed it on my hands – and then rubbed my eye. Then I realized that I couldn’t open my eye. It dried quickly so when my Mom found me and too me to the hospital, they had to cut it off so as to not hurt me. Ever since then, nothing related to super glue was left open or in my reach again.
My mother tells me that there is a picture of me somewhere with my eye glued shut. Apparently I looked like a burn victim.
20. Not Lemonade
When I was 10, my Mom had brought some bleach home in a water bottle. She worked as a custodian, and had brought a little home from work, which is why it wasn’t in a proper container. Well, the bleach was yellow and I thought it was lemonade or some type of juice, so I opened the bottle and started chugging it.
I didn’t even realize something was wrong until a gulp or two in. It was the worst feeling I had ever felt, the burn of it going down, the awful taste of it going down. My Mom shoved my mouth under the sink and tried to flush it out, shoved her fingers down my throat making me vomit it up. It burned even worse then. She contacted poison control, and luckily everything was fine afterwards. But I'll never make the mistake of drinking out of mystery bottles again.
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21. Promiscuity in Panama
I signed up to teach English in Panama between my freshman and sophomore years of college. I was minoring in Spanish, and I thought the language and cultural exposure would look good on my transcript/resume. My parents weren't thrilled about me spending the summer in a different country but my best male friend also signed up, so it made them feel better that I wouldn't be alone.
Except when we got to Panama (a week early so we could settle in before starting work), we decided we didn't want to teach language classes. Instead, we turned in our resignations and spent the rest of the summer traveling around Central America. Our platonic friendship got a little less platonic in pretty short order, and those three months were a blur of skinny dipping, sunbathing, staying in cheap hostels, eating amazing local food, making out everywhere, dancing on the beach, spending money on his credit card, and calling our parents pretending we were having a great time teaching English and completely behaving ourselves.
We came back home, took extra jobs that next semester to pay off his credit card and make up for the money we didn't make while not teaching, went back to our totally platonic friendship, and restarted our normal lives. We never told anyone about our summer of completely inappropriate everything. We talked about it shortly after returning and decided we couldn't ever really be together again in that way because it would never be as good, and we're both in happy and committed to long-term relationships now. Although, every time we see each other or talk, one of us always drops a word or wink to recall that amazing summer. It's this incredible shared secret that still gives me butterflies and makes my heart thump.
22. Safety Bubble
When I was 22, I was involved in a 12-car pile up on the highway. I was driving in the left lane on a 4-lane highway. Two cars in front of me were trying to merge into my lane, one from a left side highway on-ramp, and an idiot who crossed the double solid “no passing” line from my right. I saw it happening before hand, so I slammed on my horn and braked, but they hit. I missed them by a hair.
The car behind me could not stop in time, so he swerved, missed me somehow, but hit the two cars in front of me. The next car behind me slammed on his brakes in time to stop himself from hitting me, but he was rear-ended, starting a chain of two or three more rear-endings. All of this caused several more secondary crashes all around me.
Miraculously, every single car around me was wrecked except mine.
23. Questionable Heritage
My hometown has a pond named after a former mayor who died in the middle of intimate time with his mistress.
24. I Feel Your Pain…Literally
My hospital co-worker and I each went to grab separate patients from the ER to image (we have multiple imaging rooms). After calling each other over to look at each other’s patients’ impressive injuries, we realized both patients had the same imaging orders, both were the same age, and both had the EXACT same injury: calcaneus fractures.
It gets wilder.
So... patient 1 was on his way into town to visit his buddy for a week, and they were planning on rafting down the river the next day and doing other outdoor stuff. It had been raining out, so the ground was slick. He had slipped getting out of his Jeep at a gas station he stopped at.
The house he was headed to belonged to patient 2. Patient 2 was headed outside to move his car to make room for Patient 1’s arrival. He slipped on the wet porch steps. Both incurred identical injuries on the same night through completely separate accidents. They both ended up in the ER that morning at the same time getting fixed and casted. No rafting trip for them.
25. When Life Tosses You a Turd
I went to use the lavatory on an airplane once, and there was a short line. When it was my turn, I went in – and found a fat turd half on, half off the seat, hanging in mid air. I stared at it, trying to figure out how someone had done this, before remembering that there was a line behind me. I was going to have to clean it up or convince the person behind me that I hadn't done it.
I was trying to figure out how to word this, when it dawned on me that at that point, I had been in there TOO LONG, and everyone would think I had done it, regardless of what I said! I was angry when I realized I had no choice but to clean someone else’s feces off of the toilet seat. But I did it, gagging all the while, and then did what I had gone in to do, before letting the next person in line in.
As I walked back to my seat, I was looking for the guy who had been in there before me. I was going to call him out loud enough for everyone to hear. And there he was, all the way at the other end of the airplane...staring at me. He'd been waiting for me to come out, and he LOCKED eyes with me. I thought, "no way...this is his thing. This is his perversion, and I'm trapped in his fantasy forever now." As I was getting freaked out, the guy staring me in the eyes mouthed the words "I didn't do it," and shook his head slowly back and forth.
My brain did a complete instant 180...this guy wasn't a freak coprophiliac, he was just some guy, some guy who found himself in the exact same situation I'd just been in, and had made a different choice. He panicked and ran. I panicked and cleaned it up.
In the years since then, I've often thought back to this event. From a philosophical point of view, I think there was a lot of wisdom to be found in that moment. Sometimes life tosses you a turd, and you have to decide what to do with it. You can run away. You can own it. You can pass it off on someone else. But you can't ignore it.
26. Enchanted Garden
I grew up in a house that had an unexplainable "presence." For one thing, I never felt like I was alone in that house. It was common to catch a figure moving out the corner of my eye. One time, all four family members happened to be in the area when the large glass sliding doors leading to the back porch began to shake violently. The shaking lasted long enough that I got up, walked over, and leaned on the window frame to try to stop the shaking but could not stop it.
On a more positive note, every plant on that property flourished without sprinklers or fertilizer or anything. The grass was amazingly green. Flowers planted by the original owner along the front and side of the house seemed to bloom constantly. We would also have strangers "sneak" into the backyard to pick oranges off of a tree that produced so much fruit that the weight would sometimes break its limbs.
27. Dad’s Damsel in Distress
During the early 80's, my dad was at this bar and having a good time, when he noticed a guy harassing a young woman. My dad went up to the guy and told him to leave her alone. This made the guy unhappy, and he started badmouthing my dad. My dad isn't a tall guy, but he played football in high school, so he was pretty strong. He grabbed the guy’s hand that was holding the beer bottle and squeezed hard enough to crush the beer bottle in the guy’s palm. The guy took off like a shot with broken glass shards in his hands.
It turns out the guy was the girl's ex, and he was harassing her after he dumped her. So, my dad and the girl got talking, ended up dating, and then got married. That girl is my mom, and they are still happily married.
28. International Stalker
I was backpacking around Europe, and we got to Belgrade about 3 weeks in. We went out to a nightclub one night and were having a great time, when this really strange dude started chatting with my friend and me. He was very odd-looking, with a shaved head, lazy eye, and a patch goatee. He was behaving very strangely, copying/mimicking our laughs and being generally weird when we were trying to talk to him. Eventually, he leaned over to talk to my friend and put his hand over my drink. When he moved it, my jaw dropped. I saw something white fizzing in the glass and– he had tried to spike my drink!
Now, I'm a pretty big dude and under usual circumstances, I would have taken his head off his shoulders. Sanity prevailed because I realised getting locked up in a Serbian jail wouldn’t be too great, so I told my friend, and we left.
Fast-forward 5-6 years, and I was out for a drink in my hometown in Northern England. I was with about 15 friends, all having pre-drinks in a bar before we went to the nightclub. I looked across the bar at one point, and saw a man staring at me. He was weirdly familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on where I’d met him before.
Eventually, I walked over and asked him if I knew him from somewhere. He replied in a strange accent, "I don’t think so, friend." Then he laughed in a super annoying way – and that's when the penny dropped; incredibly, it was that dude from Serbia years ago! I immediately asked him where he was from and he strangely wouldn’t reply, and then I asked him if it was Belgrade and his jaw dropped. He turned around and booted it out of the bar.
Legitimately the craziest experience of my life.
29. Indecent Exposure
I was working a job that required near constant car travel. I was at my first assignment, and my co-worker and I had had a terrible day. I had come down with the flu the day before, and his face had swelled up from an allergy or something. It was a million degrees, all the restaurants were closed when we had time off for lunch, and work was rough.
We finally got into my car to go back to the hotel, and this dude suddenly walked in front of my car. He was a skinhead, Stone Cold Steve Austin-looking-guy, and he was carrying something that I couldn’t see from behind the wheel. I’m brown, and my co-worker is gay. We got a little worried, wondering if we had wandered into the wrong part of town.
Then, the guy threw up his arm, and I braced myself for him to bash in my windshield with a baseball bat. Instead, he slammed down the biggest, filthiest sex toy I have ever seen, right onto the hood of my car. He stared deep into our eyes, dragged the sex toy across the hood, walked into an alley, and disappeared.
30. Evil Genius
My brother got his first BB gun back in the early 70s. There was a row of bushes between us and the neighbors to the South. Whenever the neighbor would mow his back lawn, my brother would get come to attention like Pavlov's dog, grab his BB gun, head outside, and go hide in those bushes. The neighbor used a push mower, and usually mowed while dressed in shorts. My brother would carefully aim and shoot for his ankles.
Do you see the wicked genius in this? When you're mowing with a push mower, every now and then, stuff gets thrown out from the blades and hits you. Well, this poor guy got more than his share. Way more.
31. His Patronus
I nearly died when I was a kid, but the weirdest thing in the world saved my life: my large brown stuffed teddy bear Clancy. The story is that I had gotten stuck in my cousin’s laundry chute. When I realized I was trapped in there, I freaked out and used my bear to keep me from falling down the chute. I still love that bear.
32. The Day That Goes Wrong
The one and only time I went to New York City was a disaster. I took a bus ride from Pennsylvania to the city, and once I got there, my stomach started feeling funky. This was about 7am on a Tuesday. I brushed it off, but then I started to feel worse, to the point that I couldn’t go on a subway ride without feeling like I had to throw up. I ended up sitting in a little park close to Broadway, waiting for the show to start. Rather ironically, I was seeing The Play That Goes Wrong.
Eventually 2:00pm rolled around, I got into the theatre – and instantly had to go throw up. I ended up falling asleep in the dingiest bathroom ever. Eventually, staff found me and asked me to leave the theatre because they thought I was a drug addict when in reality, I was just really, really, sick.
I went to the bus terminal, which took me over an hour because my stomach hurt so bad I couldn’t walk properly. I ended up just sitting there on the bench for a long while, trying to fend off creeps and the like, until my bus came by. Then, I got on the bus and headed back to Pennsylvania. My stomach still hurt.
I went to the urgent care in my hometown at about 9am the next morning because I didn’t know what was going on, and they sent me to the hospital. That’s when I found out that I had had appendicitis for over 25 hours.
33. Out of Bounds
About 15 years ago, at a Michigan City riverboat casino, while I was playing roulette, the spinner ball popped out of the roulette wheel and went down the front of my blouse, settling in my bra. They had to stop the game, and a manager came over to watch me fish the ball out of my cleavage, whereupon he inspected it carefully (the ball, not my cleavage). I don't know what the odds of that are, but I can tell you it pays 0:1.
34. Knock Yourself Out
Once, in the middle of the night, I woke up, hit my head on the bedside table while looking for my glasses, and fell back asleep. When I woke up my first thought was "Who put something on my pillow!?...oh, wait – that’s – blood." I can't help but laugh thinking about what someone would have seen had they been standing next to the bed. Me waking up, banging my head into the bedside table and knocking myself out, then bleeding all over the pillow while sleeping soundly.
35. I Need More Line!
A few years ago, we went to see the redwoods in Humboldt County, California for my birthday. We stayed in a very, very, small town. After a long morning of adventuring, we were returning to the house for lunch when we saw this awful mess of a house. There was a kiddie pool on the roof, and the house itself was behind a chain link fence with so much trash piled up behind it, we could barely see the house.
There was smoke billowing from behind the fence. Almost everyone in the car dismissed it as a trash fire, except my husband, who insisted something was wrong. He did a U turn and pulled over on the side of the road, opposite the house. Sure enough, the flames were coming out of the roof.
My sister in law called 911, my husband ran to warn the neighbors, while my brother and I ran to a nearby field, where we could see a farmer riding a tractor. He was completely oblivious to the fire, and it was quite difficult to even get his attention. We pointed out that the house was on fire, and he responded, "hm. Sure is." We asked if he knew who lived there, and he said he didn't.
I began running around the perimeter of the house, trying to see inside and listen for anyone calling for help. As I rounded the corner of the property, I heard sitcom laughter coming from a shed. I screamed, "Hello, is anyone there?!"
Sure enough, a dazed, drugged-up-looking man poked his head out from the shed and simply said, "What."
I responded, "your house is on fire!"
This time, with a bit more concern, "what??"
I repeated "fire, fire, fire" while pointing frantically.
"AWE SHOOT!"
The man then grabbed a garden hose and climbed onto the roof of the house. By this point, the neighbors had also gathered across the street to spectate. The man called for help, and out came a second, even more dazed-looking man. He was instructed to turn on the hose, so he stumbled over to it – and only a light trickle of water came from the mouth. "I NEED MORE LINE!" yelled the first man.
"THERE AIN’T ANY MORE LINE!" responded the second, completely oblivious to their situation.
Eventually, the volunteer fire department arrived and promptly took control of the situation. We decided it was time to leave.
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36. Bust-ed
A couple of years ago, while working on a stage during a rehearsal by a very popular female A list artist, I turned around a bit too fast – and ended up with my face completely lodged into this person's chest. I'm not even joking; it was all the way in there. It took a few seconds for me to even work out what had happened and when I came to my senses, I removed my head from between her breasts and looked up to see whom I had run into – and I almost had a stroke.
This person was a global superstar, and I had just inadvertently committed a cardinal sin in the entertainment industry, and she was minutes away from performing for a very large audience. I didn't say anything and walked off in a hurry, leaving her to do what she needed to do.
A few minutes later, the stage was cleared, and I had a problem that I needed a colleague to assist me with. I couldn’t find him, and eventually ran off the stage into the side stage corridor, as that's the only other place I thought he could be. I ran around the corner, taking a sharp right hand turn and BAM! Unbelievably, I had run face first into her chest again.
At this point, there was no way she could have possibly reasoned that it was an accident. I mean once, sure. But twice? Come on!!! Before I even had time to react, two of the biggest, most intimidating bodyguards I had ever seen pushed me away from her. I just looked straight past them and called my co-worker’s name, then looked around really fast and jetted back to the stage, where he was waiting for me, naturally.
37. Life Lesson
I once put my finger in the top of a power washer hose and turned it on to see how powerful it was. I ended up blasting my fingernail off. It remains one of the most painful experiences of my life, and I’ve had a few.
38. Perfect Aim
Once during high school football practice, my wide receiver coach was reaming us out for throwing the ball back in instead of running it back. "You're not quarterbacks for a reason. You all throw horribly. The next one of you to throw it back is running laps." I ran my out route, caught the ball, turned up field for a few yards, and then turned back around. I thought to myself, I'll show you. I hurled that ball with all my 14-year-old might. Unfortunately for my coach, he was looking over at another coach listening to a story.
That was the most accurate ball I've ever thrown in my life. Hit him right in the junk. He hunched over, and I became concerned that the first case of a coach murdering a player might be imminent. After a few seconds that felt like an eternity, he just pointed without looking up, clearly telling me to run laps. I took off running and laughing.
What makes this even funnier is that he had his whistle in his teeth while listening to the story from the other coach, so when the ball connected, he exhaled sharply and inadvertently blew the whistle.
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39. Emergency Acrobatics
When I was 15, I was carrying my 6-month-old sister, and I tripped. It all happened in a split second. But somehow, with my feet tangled up in a blanket and my arms full, falling straight forward towards the table, I managed to swivel 180 degrees and fall backwards instead. The back of my head hit the table hard, but baby was unharmed! It’s crazy how the instincts to protect a child override the instinct to catch yourself.
Public Domain Pictures
40. Phantom Forecaster
It was 1999, and my Mom and Dad were cleaning the entire house. Mom had gotten a brand new computer, the Windows 98, and it was very smart and dandy. It had two great speakers and everything. It stood in the office, which was also one of the coldest rooms in our old house. As my Mom was cleaning the office, her blood suddenly ran cold. She could hear whispering voices, tiny voices that she could not locate. The room was also ice cold. My Mom ran to my Dad for help. He was scared too, because he had also heard the voices but had ignored them, hoping the ghosts would go away naturally.
One day, my father was sitting in the haunted office when he heard the voices. The house was empty and quiet, so my father could suddenly hear what the voices were actually saying. They were whispering the weather forecast. "Tonight in Kattegat, strong winds of 12 knots are expected. Storebælt will also be affected by strong winds."
Apparently, our brand new speakers were never turned off, and their wires were working as antenna. They picked up the shortwave radio sent out by the towers close to our house. So, the ghosts were meteorologists, dutifully reporting on the weather.
41. Winged Thieves
When I was a kid, we took an RV to Cape Cod. We stopped at an outdoor food court with a bunch of food stalls, so my parents sat my brother and I down at a table. My dad left his 15$ lobster roll with us and told us to wait while he got us some food. While he was gone, a family came over, sat at our table, and began speaking in French. My brother and I got scared, because we didn't know these people or speak French, so we got up, took my Dad's sandwich, and went over to the fountain.
I am allergic to shellfish, and I was a major hypochondriac, so I kept his lobster sandwich at arm’s length away from me. We were there for maybe a minute before a seagull came over. I got out a "HEY!" before it grabbed the box from my hand and tried to fly away with the sandwich. What ended up happening is that the gull dumped the sandwich on the ground – and then hundreds of birds came out of seemingly nowhere to take what fell. After 5 short seconds, all that was left was a stain on the ground.
When my Dad came back, the first thing he asked was what happened to the table.
"French people took it." Then he asked what happened to the sandwich. "Birds took it."
42. Out of Order
I went to a drive through ATM at night years ago, pulled in at a bad angle, and spent many minutes trying to shimmy around the guard pole. Eventually, I got frustrated enough that I half gunned the engine – and tore off my side view mirror – but I got the car out! Triumphantly, I threw the side view mirror in the back seat, and finally pulled up to the ATM.
It was out of order.
43. Candid Camera
I was in the orchestra in 5th grade. When we did our big performance, a camera in the back of the room recorded it. The next day, we had a pizza party and watched the tape. It began well, but then I nearly puked. Everyone turned to the camera, because the flag was in the back of the room. This girl in the back (right by the camera) started picking her nose and eating it, not knowing 40 kids were watching her, or that she was being recorded.
44. Twin Trials
I tutor a pair of identical twin girls in Grade 8. They had a term-long Science project that allowed them to choose to do any experiment and research topic they wanted. They chose the category of Human Biology. Their experiment was to uncover the effects of sleep and food deprivation, and get this: they were going to experiment on themselves. One twin starved herself for 3 days straight (only drinking water), while the other twin only slept for 3 hours on each of those 3 days. They vlogged the whole thing.
Their observations were as follows: The starved twin didn't feel hunger very often over those 3 days; however, she experienced pain doing simple tasks, such as walking up the stairs. The sleep-deprived twin was frequently very tired, and would also have frequent lapses in memory, like starting an assignment on the computer and then forgetting what she was supposed to do. After those 3 days, the sleep deprived twin had to take about a week for her sleep schedule to recover, whereas the starved twin recovered her regular eating schedule within a day, and didn't require any large feasts to make up for the lack of food.
I have no idea how their teachers approved this, but they did receive approval. They also conducted the experiment on a weekend when both of their parents were away, and they never told them about it.
45. Silver Lining
Someone stole my wallet as I was getting off the bus in India. It didn't have much money in it, but it did have my library card, government ID card, college card, etc, which would all have been a massive pain to replace.
Half an hour later, I started getting calls from shopkeepers and random citizens from an adjoining area. It turned out that the man who stole my wallet kept the money, but scattered the stuff he didn't have any use for on the footpath. One by one, people found my cards and contacted me. Thus I embarked on a scavenger hunt across the area – my library card was outside a church, my ID card was outside a stationery shop, etc. I got each and every one of my cards back.
46. Arbor Amour
I was on a plane next to a celebrity of my home country. She read my horoscope and told me that I was born under the influence of Mars, and that I am therefore cursed. Whoever I will marry will die. The prophecy was weird but the way to "fix" the curse was even weirder. To break the curse, I first have to marry a tree, transfer my bad luck to it, and then go on with my life.
47. Points for Being Elaborate?
When I was in the third grade, I went to a school that required uniforms. One day, early in the morning before class started, this lady approached me and asked me where the lost and found was, because her daughter had lost her sweater. I showed her the lost and found room, but then she changed her mind about it and asked me to hold the door for her while she used the bathroom. She asked me a lot about myself, what grade I was in etc.
We were in the bathroom when she told me that gold earrings weren't allowed anymore and that an announcement had been made about the change in uniform rules. I was shocked a bit, but didn’t want to get into trouble. She took my earrings out, wrapped them in a piece of toilet paper, and put them in my trousers pockets herself. She then asked me to follow her to the gate, told me to wait, got me a chocolate from the store, and left.
A few days later, my Mom asked me where my earnings were. I started to say "in my pocket" but then discovered that they weren't. I felt stupid, I HATED that I was tricked. The gold earrings were something that I had always worn since I was two. I lost a pair of earrings, but I could have lost my life too. What if she was someone crazy, and tricked me into going out of school with her to who knows where?
48. Young Darwin… Or A Psychopath
When I was 10, I was in the car with my Mom when we drove past my school. I asked her why they have slower speed limits near schools. She said something like, "Well, there are a lot of kids near schools, so they have a slower speed limit so that the kids don't get hit by cars." My reply? "But they'd only hit the stupid kids, and we'd be better off without them. Wouldn't it make more sense for the cars to go faster by schools?" Mom did not have a response.
I imagine that I must have just learned about the concept of "survival of the fittest" and taken it to its extreme.
PxHere
49. Screwed
When I was 3, I went under the dinner table and found a screw. I swallowed it without thinking it through. I came back up to the dinner table and proceeded to eat dinner. Later that night, my Mom was giving me a bath and she said, "I can see potatoes in your tummy!" She did this with everything I ate for dinner, but she forgot one thing. So I said, "Mommy, can you see a screw in my tummy?" She responded with a horrified “WHAT?”
They took me to the doctor and were told to just check my poop every day until the screw came out. A few days later, I looked and sure enough, the screw was there. I proceed to yell, "Daddy, Daddy I pooped out the screw!”
50. Henry Finds A Mate
I volunteered at the local zoo, and they had a Scarlet McCaw named Henry, who was awesome. But there was something a little strange about him. Whenever he “took a shower” (got sprayed down), he’d just start yelling “ROBERT ROBERT” at the top of his lungs, in a very female voice. We have no clue who Robert was. Henry would also randomly say the name of his long dead mate, “Tusha.”
His roommate, “Benny” the Blue McCaw, was not very sociable, and was known to bite and attack other birds. But when he met Henry, everything changed. He was immediately just obsessed with Henry. He even built a nest for the two of them to sit in. Henry was very chill with it.
51. Smile! You’re on Camera
Many many many years ago I worked at a retailer in the UK. A grimy looking family came in and started acting shifty, having over exaggerated discussions on washing machines, asking ridiculous questions about our returns policy. They bought a reasonably expensive Hotpoint washing machine from us, and wanted to take it with them that day, which we were happy to do.
They paid cash. They took their washing machine, loaded it into the back of their van, and we watched them drive over to the McDonald's on the other side of the trading park. About an hour later they drove back and said that we'd sold them the wrong machine. They'd gotten it home, unwrapped it, and it was the wrong machine.
We told them to bring it on in and we'd sort it out. They went out to their van and brought in a CLEARLY DIFFERENT, DIRTY, OBVIOUSLY SECOND-HAND WASHING MACHINE. Oh, and they didn't want an exchange. Just a refund. With every alarm bell ringing, my boss and I had a quick scan through the security cameras.
Sure enough, they had driven to McDonald's, and come straight back. Whilst I was "running the refund through," my boss called the police, who turned up, had a little look in the back of their van where, unsurprisingly, there was a brand new Hotpoint washer, still in its wrap. They were carted off by the cops. Didn't get charged, unfortunately, but it was a definite get out moment.
If they'd only been more patient and less greedy and gone home for a few hours first, they probably would've gotten away with it, knowing how much my boss would adhere to the “customer is always right” principle.
52. My Boss is a Heartbreaker
I had a doctor that constantly ignored patients in serious pain. He thought all of them were faking it to get pain killers. After a senior director at Microsoft died from a heart attack in our ER that he refused to do an EKG on, I went to management and told them what I had seen.
Sources: Reddit,
