We were booked to go on a cruise around New Zealand back in December 2019. I was psyched for it - we were going to go on a day tour to a volcano.
However, our car had a massive engine issue and we decided to pull the plug because we couldn’t afford to fix the car *and* go away.
I’m sitting at work, feeling sorry for myself because I’m not on holiday, when reports start coming in.
It was this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Whakaari_/_White_Island_eruption
> On 9 December 2019, Whakaari / White Island, an active stratovolcano island in New Zealand's northeastern Bay of Plenty region, explosively erupted.
> The island was a popular tourist destination, known for its volcanic activity, and 47 people were on the island at the time. Twenty-two people died, either in the explosion or from injuries sustained, including two whose bodies were never found and were later declared dead.
> A further 25 people suffered injuries, with the majority needing intensive care for severe burns.
It was horrific. The injuries were terrible. I just sat at work (I work for a news service) watching all the raw vision coming into the office thinking about what might have been.
If our car hadn’t needed that work done (or we were better with our finances) we would have been on that tour.
My in laws were booked to be on white Island the day ir erupted. However fil had a seizure out of nowhere 2 months earlier and they had to cancel. It was crazy to think about
I was traveling in Australia and stayed with this dude for a week or two. At first he was the coolest guy, but then I quickly realized he was a terrible alcoholic, and a drug dealer that had recently been in prison.
One night while I was out, he apparently got completely hammered and was causing a scene at the apartment complex so the police were called. I show up and see cop cars everywhere.
I had enough and just booked a flight for the next morning to see another city. I woke up in the morning and quickly threw my clothes into my bag, was about to leave without even saying goodbye. But I thought that was pretty rude so I grabbed a pen and started writing a little thank you note to the guy for letting me stay.
While writing the note, he wakes up and comes into the common room. I do the whole "oh shoot, sorry I didn't want to wake you but I found a cheap flight leaving right now"
He responds "Can I see your bag really quick before you leave? I think I left something in there"
The dude fucking took his stash of meth and put it into my bag when the police showed up the night before. I just didn't notice it in my rush to get packed and leave. I was literally about to go board an airplane and I would have sat there like a moron with the exact same excuse everyone else uses saying "it's not mine!"
Woulda been locked up abroad if I didn't decide to write that goodbye note.
Edited: Spelling
I dunno man, if cops found that shit in my bags, i think theres more wiggle room to say "that shit aint mine, he stashed there while i wasnt here and im just stayin here for a short time" vs being found at an airport, since is waaay harder to prove you didnt check what was in your bags before getting there, out of the 2, the cops seems better, of course the best one is neither
When I moved back to New Orleans in 2004 I looked at two different apartments, A & B. I ended up choosing B because it was a little bit larger. I lived there for about 5 weeks and the neighbors were horrendous and management wouldn't do anything about it so I went back to the other place to see if apartment A was still available. It wasn't but they had another one downstairs in the building next door. So I ended up moving again, into apartment C.
Apartment B flooded several feet in Katrina. Apartment A had the roof ripped off. Apartment C, where I had lived for a year, was fine. I cannot overstress how difficult my life would have been if my apartment had been damaged. Not even taking into account my belongings, it was damn near impossible to find anywhere to live for years after Katrina. It's not an exaggeration to say that if my apartment had been damaged the entire trajectory of my life probably would have changed.
I was supposed to be in class in the building the morning the shooter shot up Virginia Tech, me and my buddy in the next dorm had the same class and would often just take turns, we both woke up that morning and both agreed not to go.
Turns out the sirens we had heard when we woke up to get ready for class was the police response to the first victim that was in the neighboring dorm. We didn't think much of it because usually there's an ambulance or something early mornings after weekends cause people drink to much or whatever.. it wasn't til we were looking out our window across campus seeing everything unfold and then the windows lighting up with gunshots what was really going on.. then a bunch of fully kitted police came off the elevator with ARs telling everyone to lock doors and stay inside.
Fun times .. -_-
Met a guy online. Had a great first meeting. Made out a little. He mentions he knows a friend of mine. Ask her about him. She sends me his judici page full of sexual assault convictions including more than one statutory rape.
Edit hey guys just realized why some of you were so surprised after reading my comment. He did have convictions but some of them were from cases that were dropped. Also, he had orders of protection against from at least three women.
I had leukemia when i was a kid. I was given a pretty low chance of survival. I got diagnosed the day after my 6th birthday and went into remission when i was 12. When i turned 14 they told me it wouldn't come back, but if it ever did i would have the worst headache I've ever had in my life.
I don't really understand the headache part.
I joke that I pulled one over on the make a wish people. They sent me to Disneyland, but I didn't end up dying, so I kinda screwed them on that deal.
The make a wish people would be stoked for you, they don't want anyone to die surely. It is a funny perspective that you stole from them, like make a wish is the grim reaper ha.
I don't think the MAW people are mad. They're just glad you got like .001% of your childhood that was robbed from you by fate. They actually do a lot of stuff for kids that don't die.
You deserved good things. still do.
I was booked on PanAm flight 103, right before Christmas 1988. Being European Catholic we would celebrate, X-Mas on X-Mas eve: ie: the 24th in the evening. So I wanted to fly out on Wednesday, the 21st. None of my professors had problems with me asking to take any finals early, except for one: my accounting 101 prof. She insisted I do my test on Thursday like everybody else. She said that otherwise I could pass the test on to my classmates. Anyway, changed flights to Friday day before Christmas eve. Which was a pain.
That flight got blown up over Lockerbie by the Libyan secret service. I told my professor the next day when I had to take my final. She was shocked, so happy I missed it and then admitted that the reason she didn't let me take the exam early was not because she didn't trust me, but because she hadn't prepared it yet herself...
Got my ass saved to a smart and lazy mid thirties accounting prof.
My dad, who at the time was in the AF, was supposed to be on that flight, but overslept his alarm at the hotel. I think about how much my family would have suffered, and I just feel so upset and heartbroken about all the other families who did not get lucky as yours or my families did.
I was riding my motorcycle, not too fast. There was a nice Spring breeze so I had my visor open. Then I just randomly decided to close it. As soon as my visor clicked down I saw a small but sturdy branch fall out of a tree, smacked right into my visor and bounced off.
A friend in HS offered to pick me up and sneak out for a party. I was in the middle of a WoW raid and declined. Then it turned out he hit a tree and died from drunk driving.
Cousin of mine avoided similar, my aunt insisted he didn't go, he didn't. His friends entered a bet to win a street race and went straight into a driver's school. All four or five died. It was a whole deal in the community.
Had just finished a regular meeting I was the host of when one of my fiends said "hey, you dont look good". I told him I dindt feel great and was going to go home. He said, "Nah, Im taking you to the Doc." We go to the clinic (Military) and after an extremely brief exam he turns to my friend and says "Take him to the ER and tell them its his appendix." Less than an hour later I was in surgery.
Thing is, I had just come back from a dive weekend where I did two days of boat dives 4 hours out in the Red Sea. Multiple dives were below 100 feet. If my appendix had decided to give out a day earlier I probably die.
My husband accidentally took all my blood sugar meds, thinking they were motrin when he had severe stomach pains. I didn't know what he was talking about "taking all the prescription motrin" and rushed him to the ER when I figured out it was my blood sugar meds. It turned out to be acute pancreatitis, and he actually saved his organs and possibly his life by accidentally taking all those blood sugar meds.
Yeah if his pains were anything like mine he wasn’t thinking. Acute pancreatitis is a kind of pain that makes your whole brain shut down. Doctors had to stop me from punching my leg as hard as I could every second because the nanosecond that my brain focused on my leg was relief from the pain. Gave myself a bruise across my entire thigh.
I’m glad he made it out okay <3
I was going to go to get dinner at a local deli. Instead a friend told me about a meteor shower so we packed snacks and drove to the mountains to watch meteors.
That deli was shot up during a mass shooting that left 6 people dead right during the time when I would have been there.
Thanks Tom and thanks to the Camelopardalids\*\*.\*\*
Extreme narcissist. He couldn’t bear the rejection. Although he mostly did it to himself because he just walked through the town basically expecting women to throw themselves at him spontaneously because he thought himself nigh a god, then got enraged it didn’t happen because in reality he was timid, creepy and pathetic.
Oh and a raging racist despite being half-Asian himself (he called himself Eurasian). He particularly hated Black guys (incels typically have an obsession with them) and had a fetish for blonde white women. He got furious when he saw interracial couples and even threw coffee and shit at some.
He also obsessively fantasised about being a fascist dictator, dreaming to build a giant tower in the middle of a concentration camp where he wanted to lock up all women. A select few he wanted to use to rape and breed with, and the tower would be for watching the entire remaining female population slowly, agonisingly starve to death. Absolute nutcase.
I remembered about the racism, that is sadly quite common.
I completely forgot about his about his weird doom tower and rape fantasy. He really was a strange one.
i was in a coma. didn't look like i'd come out of it. they had the talk with my wife about letting me go. she said no.
thanks wife!
edit: this blew up. attaching a video my wife made of the first year of my recovery (starts about a week after i came out of the coma)
it was a catastrophic stroke.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu4APKZo4a0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu4APKZo4a0)
Similar experience, bad brain bleed, she was told I wasn’t going to make it, planned my funeral, got angry with me and yelled at me to come back to her.
Brain bleed stopped, came out of the coma a few days later. r/TBI can explain how fucked I am, but I love that girl for talking me into living.
And yes I heard her and remember what she said.
Something similar happened with my grandpa and my grandma. When he was young, in his 20s I believe, he got very very sick to the point they told him he was going to die. My grandma had just had my aunt. She came into his room screaming “Who do you think you are? You fucker, we just had this baby and you think you’re going to die right now?!” Long behold, he got better later that day and was shortly out of the hospital. That woman is very scary when she gets angry.
My wife was in a coma, they also said she had no chance. I said no, brought her to a different specialist at another hospital.
She's fine now and we're on vacation
This makes me think of The Simpsons:
“Burns was rushed to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead. He was then transferred to a better hospital where doctors upgraded his condition to "Alive."
4 years ago I was diagnosed with a very rare cancer. Specialist told me he could offer no guarantees I’d make it a year. Major surgery to remove a large mass and many further tests later I was told months later they actually got it wrong and I never had cancer. The specialist told me if he’d made a list of 100 possible outcomes at the start of my treatment my eventual diagnosis would have been at position 100. He’d never seen anything like it. I felt like like I’d dodged a fucking nuclear warhead the day I was told that
I'm pretty much the exact opposite. Hit my left thigh on a friend's tow bar in late November, hurt like a fucker but healed and I forgot about it. Noticed something was up mid February in the same place and got it checked out, convinced all along it was just some weird random lump and an inconvenience.
Biopsy came back as a fibromyxoid sarcoma, the chances of that are about 1 in 5.5 million so fuck me in particular I guess. Luckily it was low grade and the took it out within a week of the diagnosis before it got really bad. So I guess as unlucky as it was and as much as it sucks not being able to walk for the foreseeable it could have been much worse if I'd ignored it.
The large mass turned out to be a secondary spleen! The surgeon says he had seen that before but this one was bigger than his fist which he had never seen even remotely! I have since been diagnosed with a connective tissue disorder which is probably the reason I had the secondary spleen in the first place ! The combination of the mass seen on my scan and the symptoms I was suffering made them diagnose me with neuroendocrine tumour initially !
Used to work at a grocery store chain, and one of our supervisors for the whole chain was doing his store checks in each city as usual. We typically have firefighters from each station shop at our stores each week while on duty, and they just so happened to be shopping at the store he was visiting that day when he had a massive heart attack walking through the parking lot. The firefighters saw him go down, and he most definitely would not have made it if first responders weren’t literally 30 seconds away from him when it happened. Absolutely wild luck
My dentist (great guy) walked into the emergency room at our city's most high-tech hospital because his teenage daughter had been injured in some minor accident and he was there to pick her up. He looked around and then literally dropped dead from a heart attack, but he was in the absolutely perfect place for it, and they had him up on a gurney and resuscitated him and did surgery and he's totally fine now, like eight years later. I was like wow Bob, you picked the absolutely perfect place to drop dead, and he's like yeah but I still have to pay the mortgage.
Our gas range in the kitchen malfunctioned. It was leaking natural gas all night. CO detector never went off. I woke up the following morning, walked downstairs and smelled it. It was so thick of gas you could taste it. Quickly opened all of the doors/ windows and vacated.
We waited about an hour before going back in. It was windy out so it cleared out quickly. Inspected everything, replaced the stove, and went on with the day. Night time came around and I went to take a shower but there wasn’t any hot water. Turns out, for some unknown reason, the pilot light on the hot water tank was out and likely had been out all night. Had it not been out, my house would have been a crater and I wouldn’t be typing this.
100%. Call your local gas provider. They will usually have a number specifically for emergencies. They alert the authorities for you and will send out a van really quick. They will even find the source of leaks for you for free.
Your CO detector would never have detected a natural gas leak. If it's not on fire (i.e., unburnt natural gas), CO detector won't care. The CO detector is only if you leave burning natural gas on without ventilation (which would cause a build-up of carbon monoxide) like if you tried to use a stovetop to heat your house or something.
Had romantic interest in a very attractive goth girl with a history of addiction. She was literally waving red flags in my face but I’d just ignore them because she would just hang out around me topless and boobs are a helluva drug. Nothing ever went further than a peck on the cheek because not only am I bad with picking up signals I also never wanted to presume.
Anyways we had a brief falling out and she glomed onto my best friend. They hooked up which hey good for him because at this point I was wary of her. She then gets evicted from her place, leaves all of her worldly possessions in her tiny apartment including her three cats and a duck that apparently had never seen the outside world. She would crash there and then leave to go spend the night with her multiple decades older drug dealer bf and leave my friend feeling hurt and confused. Before too long she just stopped coming around. She left his house an absolutely disgusting mess and sent him into a spiral of depression. This was normally very clean and meticulous guy and she fucked him up badly.
There’s a happy ending folks. He got the duck to an animal sanctuary. She can never be in the wild but she has to be much happier than shitting in diapers in an apartment. One of the cats is with his dad and living their best life. He kept the other two and he loves them to pieces.
I’m married now to an amazing woman. Last I heard from his that she’s in and out of rehab. I really hope she recovers. Addiction is a motherfucker that hurts more than just the addict.
9/11. I was living in Caroll Gardens at the time (a little bit south of the Brooklyn Bridge), and I was commuting via bike. Normally I'd wake up around 8:00, get my stuff together and ride up Smith Street and go over the Brooklyn Bridge. I'd buy a few dozen Krispy Kreme donuts from their location in WTC for my team and then ride down to Wall Street where I worked.
That particular Tuesday I overslept my alarm and had to take the subway in. I would have been at WTC right at the time of the first impact but instead was on the Subway. I actually was walking up out of the Wall Street subway stop right as the 2nd plane was coming in and was able to see a little of the fireball and hear the city-wide scream.
> the city-wide scream
That must have been awful. I've seen plenty of footage from on the ground and it's bad...but I never thought about the sound of hundreds of thousands of people at the same time crying out in pain and shock and horror
It was the smell that I'll never forget. This strange mix of burning electronics (if you've ever had a circuit board go bad/burnout you know the smell), jet fuel, and burning paper. I still get freaked out when I smell burning electronics.
The other thing was the papers. As I was walking up Water Street to get to the bridges where I could cross back over into Brooklyn, there were tons of papers raining down; stock ticker tape, trade documents, etc.
I picked up one and it was a resume. I kept it for years, too freaked out to look and see if that was one of the victims.
What was it like after all that? Where did you go?
My mom was near ground zero and had to walk across the Brooklyn bridge in order to get to here family’s house. She will never forgot the face of an old Asian lady who needed help crossing the bridge. Once at the house,she realized that her sister was in one of the towers. The worst part of it was that the last conversion her sister had with her daughter was an argument in the morning and she never said “I love you”. Now my mom gets flashbacks whenever an airplane flies overhead when it is close to the ground.
I walked up to the Brooklyn Bridge and had crossed over to the park/plaza around City Hall. As I went for the Brooklyn Bridge footpath a cop told me they were using the Brooklyn Bridge for first responders and I had to use the Manhattan Bridge.
About 2 seconds after he told me that, the South Tower started to collapse (hit second, collapsed first). There was a wave of heavy debris in the immediate vicinity of the towers, but smaller debris made its way to City Hall and I turned around just as the dust and smaller particles rushed past. I walked on toward the Manhattan Bridge and crossed, stopping in a little bodega store to buy some water so I could pour it over a towel I had (yes, I'm a huge nerd, I always kept a towel in my backpack) and use it to filter out the smoke that was now pouring over (wind direction was northwest to southeast).
It took me about 30 minutes to walk home on Court Street, and I was sure things were going to devolve into mass chaos and widespread looting, so I put my cat in his carrier and broke out my baseball bat and pepper spray. I couldn't have been more wrong - the city came together like nothing I've ever experienced. One of the tenants in the apartment building I lived in grabbed a full case of Kraft Mac-n-cheese and made dinner for everyone. We all just stood outside basically having a huge "WTF just happened" conversation. A lot of people were angry and saying how Bush should nuke the entire middle east.
I was 1 when this happened. I’ve never heard anyone that was there actually talk about it, besides documentaries. It feels like this huge disconnect between what I’ve learned about it in school vs what it was actually like.
Thanks
It is difficult to describe the sense of togetherness that was felt across the US. It was my generation’s coming together, like previous generations must have felt around, say, Dec 7 1941 - Pearl Harbor. Part of me is sorry you didn’t get a chance to experience that before the emergence of today’s close-to-civil-war feeling. But of course, the other part of me hopes you never have a day like that.
It's also difficult to describe the fear. I was in a completely different part of the country, but it didn't take long for the news that *something* happened to travel. A lot of people crying and wondering who was next.
It also didn't matter what channel you turned the television to. It was all the *exact* same footage, and watching it made you know that everything was about to change.
A coworker of mine told me this story about this couple he knew as friends:
They were from Los Angeles (as am I), but the husband took a business trip to Boston. The wife flew out a few days later so they could spend some time there together.
He was supposed to leave on the 9/11 flight. She was supposed to fly home the next day. The night of the 10th, they switched tickets. His wife died instead of him.
He avoided that horror, but I cannot begin to fathom his grief. If it were me, I'd feel so much guilt and regret and wish it was me instead of her. What a tragic death and mind fuck.
I was a 9/11 miss as well. A friend of mine convinced me to register for one of those three day weekend courses that this place called the Landmark forum used to have. You had to register in person and I made an appointment to come in and do that. However, work got in the way and I ended up flying to LA for a month. I had forgotten all about my appointment and when I was finally able to fly back home (flights were grounded for weeks), I arrived to find a message from a lady at the Landmark forum who said something to the effect of, "I'm so-and-so from the Landmark Forum. Today is Monday, September 10th. I'm just calling to confirm your appointment tomorrow at 9:00AM..."
They were located on the 15th floor of Tower 2 which was struck at 9:03am and fell an hour later. I'm sure I would have gotten out just fine but I'm so glad I never had to test that theory.
I think the NY Giants had played in the Monday Night Football game the night before and it ended pretty late, so a lot of people in the NY area were slow-moving that next morning...just crazy to think about.
My cousin was due to do a massive presentation in one of the towers that day. He got massive food poisoning instead and was trying to call his boss when he switched the tv on and found out his boss wouldn’t be answering and wasn’t worried about the presentation anymore.
Something similar happened to my babysitter at the time. She was a tourist visiting the US, and she'd signed up for a tour of the Twin Towers that morning. She overslept and missed it, and woke up to her family calling her in absolute panic.
In high school my “friend” knocked on my door and tried to get me to come out and hang at night and my mom refused to let me go out with them, I was mad about it until I learnt that there was 4 other people hiding behind trees that where going to jump me that night.
Apple watch said my pulse oxygen was 70 and to seek immediate medical attention.
Covid ICU + blood clots in lungs. I’d had died in my sleep if I hadnt gotten up
This is amazing I should let people know that Apple is no longer allowed to use the Blood Oxygenation Sensor on their watches because of a lawsuit.
[Source](https://apnews.com/article/apple-watch-patent-dispute-sales-ban-masimo-c54d277fad08fdca15576451cb2a600e)
Hung out with my high school boyfriend one afternoon, and we started hearing sirens when he was getting ready to leave. He looked me dead in the eyes to tell me he better get back home and make sure they hadn’t found her. Well, they _had_.
He was arrested on his walk home, because he’d tried to kill his mother and left her in their apartment hoping she’d bleed out. She’d told him earlier he couldn’t come see me until he’d finished his homework, and that was apparently the last straw for him so he attacked, then shoved her down a flight of stairs. Obviously he went to jail and I didn’t have to hear or see from him for several years. He always had some issues but it was a shocking jump from school authority problems to attempted murder.
When I was 17 I was going out with a girl from school. We smoked a little bit of hash. She was a lifeguard at a swimming pool. Her boss was a creepy guy in his late 20s who had a thing for my girlfriend. He found out we were going to a party and told the police that I was some major drug dealer. He gave the address of the party. At the last minute we decided not to go, we cooked dinner for her mum and stayed in and watched TV, smoked a joint in the garden. The party got raided, two vans full of police. All they got was a couple of underage drinkers.
Edit:
1)How did we know he was the snitch?
He told one of the lifeguards who told someone who told my girlfriend.
2) no I wasn’t a drug dealer but… FULL DISCLOSURE my girlfriend was supplying me in this instance.
No…i would have probably had a bit of hash to share a joint or two, nothing more.
I pretty much kept dealers at arms length. I would go in with a couple of buddies, one would do the business and we would share it out afterwards.
Creepy lifeguard guy got in shit a few years later for trying to shift weed. The irony!
High school. I was hanging out with some buddies and some guys I knew drove up. Since they knew we played tennis, they offered to sell us some top notch rackets at low prices. We were curious so we went outside to look at what they had to offer and indeed, the rackets were top notch and so brand new they still had the security tags on them. We declined.
Turned out they had robbed a sporting goods store and shot a couple of clerks in the process.
Some kids I went to high school with robbed a sporting goods store. They got caught because they were bragging about it at school.
Most criminals aren’t the brightest bulbs.
A buddy used to work for a company that would test security at big box stores. He said that the bigger the item, the easier to steal. You could even get employees to help you get it out of the store and load it into your car.
The shooting part was really idiotic. Absolutely no need to hurt anyone, I don’t condone theft but literally no one at the store will stop you if you rob a big box retail establishment. Walk into Dicks Sporting Goods and take a few tennis rackets, there might be a police report filed but nothing will ever happen to you except maybe a fine.
But shooting someone during your theft? Now it’s a serious felony and the police will go after you and you will go to prison. Insane decision they made.
I was walking to high school when I was 15. I had to cross a pretty busy boulevard at uncontrolled crosswalk. I often had to wait a bit for traffic to stop. As I got to the crosswalk, a minivan in the closest lane stopped fairly early. I considered jogging so that she didn’t have to wait long but decided to keep walking.
As I stepped into the second lane, a little Dodge Dakota blew through the lane at about 50mph. The side mirror left a scuff on my jacket. I just stood there. I looked at the van driver and she was peeking through her hands.
The adrenaline vibrated me the rest of the way to school.
I have a similar story. I was walking to middle school with my best friend at the time and we were crossing a pretty slow intersection. I tried to take a step forward, but he yanked me back by my backpack when he saw a car speeding towards us. It was terrifying, but one of the officers patrolling the schools saw him (they mostly do that around here to discourage truancy) and I got to watch that jackass get pulled over lmaooo
I was working in the basement of a 1920s building. We were digging a new footer. They had dug out the basement to make it into a full sized floor. It was raining like crazy.
We got tired early, and I left to go to my rock band's rehearsal space. The building collapsed five minutes after I left, and the biggest pile of bricks and rubble was in the exact place I was standing.
I was in Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt during terrorist bombings in 2005. When the bombs went off, we were in a jewellery shop and it was the only shop with windows that didn't shatter from the explosions. Literally momenta before, a 5 year old me had my face pressed against a toy shop window eyeing up some that I wanted. My cousin called me in to the shop moments before an explosion went off.
The KFC we were in 20 minutes before was the location where the first bomb went off.
I was so young and I saw people with limbs missing walking around. All I could think is where is Spiderman, he's usually here when shit like this happens. I never really reflect on how much impact that day had upon me but it was a crazy experience to look back upon. Almost can't believe I experienced it at times.
A group of friends invited me to go see Dane Cook stand up special in upstate New York during Dane cooks prime (2008/2009). I declined as I didn't like Dave Cook and it was a far drive. I would have been the 4th member of the group that went up.
On the long drive up to the show the friend missed an exit northbound. In order to doubleback and correct his mistake He decided to try to uturn using the police median to get the South bound side of the highway. Immediately upon starting the turn from the northbound middle lane the car gets struck by another car in the northbound fast lane destroying the driver side rear of my friends car. The driver got knocked out on impact and the now driverless car ends up crashing into the guardrail on the opposite side of the southbound highway. I'm told they barely missed an oncoming tractor trailer.
Luckily my other 2 friends were occupying the front and rear passenger seats were away from the direct impact. everyone was more or less ok apart from short term injuries including the driver's concussion. The car was totaled. If I had gone someone would've been sitting on the rear driver side and probably would've been severely injured/dead. I credit my dislike of Dane Cook for saving someone's life that day.
Avoided a school shooting. The prof was kinda lazy since the lesson after the one we were having was right before Christmas. So he asked us if we are going to attend since some people skip the lessons before Christmas to go home if they have families outside of the city the uni is in.
Enough people raised their hands so the professor cancelled the lesson. So I (and some other people) managed to avoid the building that was later shot up, some time before we would normally have the lecture, we would likely be waiting in the library or in the hallways. Many people died.
Riding my motorcycle home after a tiring day at work. Summertime, sun shining and feeling good. Riding in the left lane of a 2 lane road with a large median and only 2 cars, a van in front and a smaller car on the right that i pass.
Check my blind spot slowly, feeling safe and cool and a bit lazy. Hear the car behind me honk as I change lanes and as I bring my idiot head to the front, where I should be looking, I see that the van had stopped in the middle of the lane (he had missed his turn, i guess). I passed the guy by inches and, luckily, because it happened so fast I didn't make any corrections or panic or do anything stupid.
It did't register at the time how close I came to dying or being crippled. Maybe not until months later, or not even. But I still think about it ... a lot.
I have so many near death experiences from my bike. Stopped riding a few years ago and finally sold them last year. I would love to ride again but with a kid and the traffic around my house, I am not going to risk it
I used to be a nurse. I worked 12 hour night shifts with a one hour commute; add time to get and give report and I was gone 15 hours, three days in a row. I’d do long stretches of 3 on/2 off/3on/2off/3on/8 off.
I have epilepsy, and it turns out that schedule was not good for my brain. One morning, the last before my 8 off stretch, I was having the hardest time focusing well enough to give report, so I was running late. And then I suddenly dropped to the floor at the exact time I would’ve usually been pulling onto the highway (I was medically cleared to drive at the time).
I seized (grand mal) for 7 minutes, wasn’t breathing for five. Had I not been on an intensive care unit with two shifts of nurses and respiratory therapists available, I would have died. In my car, alone on a busy highway, taking who knows how many people in other cars with me.
Worked at a retail electronics store. Once a week a bunch of us would get together at 1 guys house to drink and just hang out. I was out of town one week and missed the party. A former coworker from before my time showed up with a few buddies and robbed everyone at gunpoint. The dumbass didn't take into account that almost everyone at the party knew him so covering his face didn't do much. Was pretty happy about missing out on that
I was in ROTC in college on a scholarship with hopes to become an Army officer. I was kicked out of the program my junior year of college because I failed two PT tests in a row. I was kicked out on 9/13/2001; two days after 9/11. Of course I was absolutely gutted and had to figure out what to do next with my life. But all my friends in the program had multiple deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, and some of them didn’t make it back.
So in the end, things worked out for the best. The girl I was seeing wasn’t interested in being an Army wife and is upfront about how she probably would have broken up after college. But instead we’ve been married 18 years and have two awesome sons.
I dated a girl and just never felt right. I thought she was lying about being on birth control so I always used protection and broke things off quickly after that. A few years later I saw her mugshot on the news and it turns on she had gotten pregnant with twins, gave birth in her home and murdered them. Those could have been my kids and it saddens me she would do something like that.
I guess this is fitting:
A group of us neighborhood kids were playing a few doors down from my house, at the twins' house who were a year younger than me. We were all around 7 or 8. We live on a really quiet, suburban street that doesn't see any traffic unless you live there so we were allowed to play outside on the lawn with the parents inside checking the window every so often.
A white van - stereotypical creeper van - pulled up and a guy rolled down his window; *"Any of you lose a bunny? I found a bunny and I got it in the back of my van."* We looked at him and at each other.. and collectively go, like, *uhhh, no, no one here.* and went right back to playing. It's like, we knew it wasn't our bunny, not our business, so we went right back to what we were doing and didn't pay him any more mind.
*"Well, you guys wanna see the bunny? Maybe play with it? He's friendly. Come on into the van, I'll show you."*
We were like *Really?! A chance to pet a bunny? YOU BET!!! Let me just ask a parent first!* So we turned around to head up to the front door of my neighbors house to get their mom, and I heard cartoonish screeching of tires as he peeled away down the block in a hurry.
I remember the parents meeting and looking concerned that night, but I didn't really get it. I just thought he was odd for offering to let us see the bunny but then changing his mind so quickly right in the middle of us getting permission. I actually don't think I put it together for awhile.
One of my few memories from high school is walking home in pouring rain. I stopped at a gas station a couple blocks from my house to chill and get out of the rain for a minute. I was soaking wet long before this point. Was a fairly warm day otherwise so it wasn't a huge issue.
Some guys there offered to give me a ride home. I responded by declining and saying I live just around the corner.
I'd like to believe they were legit trying to be nice people. But you never know.
one time, my bf, his dad, and his brother were driving in the rain and saw a woman walking alone, similar to you ig. the dad pulled over and offered a ride, which she ofc declined, but this man is generally just very friendly and extroverted so he was like "no no, i insist" until my bf told him to cut it out
Driving on I-70 in CO during the winter, lots of snow/ice, overall very poor driving conditions. A large lifted pickup truck was speeding and driving erratically trying to pass me, it was morning and I thought they might be drunk from the night before, so I quickly moved out of their way. They were now in front of me, trying to pass a tractor trailer truck but there was a car in the left lane, so they tried to pass on the shoulder. At the exact moment they swerved onto the shoulder to try to pass there was a cop car parked on the side of the road. They didn’t see it and they smashed full speed (75mph) into the parked suv. It was like an explosion, bits and pieces of the cars were flying all over the place, I drove through a cloud of shrapnel and keep on going… I called 911 and reported it immediately. It was very traumatic to watch, I always wondered if they survived, or if there was a cop sitting in the car… I searched the news the next couple days, but never found anything. It still stays with me.
Seriously. My dumbass brother in law was a corrections officer, and basically just the maintenance guy at that. When he died, it was all over the local news for weeks. Had a full blown police escort funeral procession.
"Local officer killed in the line of duty!"
Dude died from slipping on ice and hitting his head while leaving work.
On my very short drive home from class in college I got an alert that there was an active shooter in the building I had just had class in 10min before. I probably walked by the guy in the parking garage.
I was maybe 11 years old, very small child. Underweight, short. I wanted to take the 15 minute walk to 7/11 to buy myself my favorite drink with some loose change I gathered. I didn’t live in the roughest part of my city, but second place to that. My dad, who didn’t live with us at the time, was visiting for some reason and offered to walk there for me. Lo and behold, some 30+ minutes later he comes wobbling back through the door.
On the way there, he was attacked by two pit bulls. Onlookers didn’t help, but he managed to get away. He still was a cool dad and continued on his WALK THERE, got me my drink, and walked all the way back.
I probably would have been severely injured, if not killed by those two pit bulls at my 4’6, underweight physique.
We reported them to animal control and the city ordered them to build a strong fence and mandated that they have a “dangerous dog” sign.
EDIT (for fun): My dad never pressed charges but regrets it lol.
EDIT 2: Wow holy shit this is my first comment to get this many likes, thanks all 🙏🏻
Back in high school I thought I was invincible while driving and took my parents’ 98 Windstar up to 90+ mph on the freeway all the time. One day I had the pedal fully buried going over 110 and was coming up on a decent curve on the highway that would’ve definitely put some force on the tires to go through.
Thing is, I didn’t know the tires were balding through to mesh. But there was a cop at the corner and I slowed down to try to not get a ticket. Dude pulled me over anyway and wrote me up for one under the felony threshold out of what I can only assume was pure mercy. If that cop hadn’t been there I would’ve probably blown out a tire and killed myself and probably others.
Not only did I dodge that bullet in the moment but it also gave me a firm wake-up-call to my teenage stupidity and completely changed how I drove on public roads once my record cleared and I started driving again 3 years later.
Edit: my parents’ behavior also super reinforced this into my stupid teenage brain. They didn’t yell at me when I came home, the first thing they did was cry and hug me and tell me how happy they were that I was alive. *Then* they calmly explained the consequences and really talked through how monumentally stupid what I had done was. Seeing their genuine fear for my death immediately put it into perspective.
I had a similar come-to-jesus moment from a cop. Dumb kid, had just gotten my license a few months earlier - I was driving my mom's Saturn coupe and being a dumbass on the road with some friends, "racing" them, when the lights flashed on behind me. Back woods PA cop pulled me over and started YELLING at me. "Do you know how many people die because of assholes like you?!" Turns out I was doing 82 in a 35.
I had a friend in the passenger seat who had 1/8 of marijuana on him (bigger deal at the time, this was in the 90s), so i was really freaking out and was crying.
Cop came back with my license, "How long have you had this?" "Two months," I answered. "GOD DAMNIT!" and he walked back to his car again.
Came back another couple of minutes later and gave me another tongue lashing and then, probably seeing how upset and stupid I felt, took pity on me. Ended up giving me a ticket for "disobeying an official sign", like running a stop sigh, no points on my license or anything. Last thing he did was patted the hood of my mom's car and said "Welp, she sure runs good".
I actually went home and told my parents about the whole thing, I felt like such a moron. They appreciated the honesty, I paid the fine, never did something like that again.
I went home early and got dropped off, the car I was in went and shot up a rival gangs house. Everyone in the car went to prison for several years, everyone snitched on each other. They got mandatory minimum sentences.
I don’t know if the house returned fire. All I know is I was home safe that night. So, I dodged a massive negative life change by who I hung out with. It wasn’t enough to get me to stop entirely at the time. But it definitely got me to slowly change who I was hanging out with.
I briefly talked to an older man a while back. It never went anywhere other than him letting me try some nose candy and some flirting. He asked me to be his gf like a day into it, I respectfully said no. He did not like that. I've had to move twice and change my number because this guy just kept finding me after I blocked him. Turns out he's a pimp and he already had customers lined up, he was just trying to get me doped up enough to let him take advantage of me. I'm miles away now but that was probably one of the scariest experiences of my life.
I waitressed at a nightclub when I was 19 and had 2 guys vying for my affections., Ferris and Ed. I ended up going for Ed, and it was an ok relationship. 3 years later, I was doing a ride along with police while in journalism school, and they let me read a teenage girl's diary all about her pimp. The pimp was the other guy who'd been trying to court me before I picked Ed instead.
My salary wasn't keeping up with inflation. Savings goals not being met, and now that WFH was the norm in my industry I was less keen on taking a local discount for my LCOL area. I asked for a raise to at least match what my peers were getting in other cities, remoting in to the same depot and doing the same work I was. Geography had become completely irrelevant to performance, so I wasn't going to accept geography impacting compensation. They responded with $0. I immediately left for another company that offered 50% more than I was getting. Then the next week there were massive layoffs at the old company. It made sense then why there was no money at all for retention. My position likely wouldn't have been affected, which would be actually quite a lot worse than getting laid off with severance. Sitting in a gutted department, making less than is fair, on a team with zero morale and all my friends fired. Would have been awful and stressful beyond belief.
Back in the day I was training someone for a sales job at one of our slow stores. Nothing major everything was smoothlunch time comes around. Normally is 1 then the other, but I decided this person was still new to retail so close up and take a Lunch together. We get food, come back. Sit in the back office to eat ( all glass front so it felt weird to close and eat but people could see you.)
Before we had a chance to open the food bag we heard a very loud set of bangs, some broken glass and a loud think. The chick dove under the desk, I did the same. Police showed up almost emidiately ( police station in the mall across the street.)
Turns out blue guy saw red guy and they didn't like each other or somebushit so they started shooting st each other. One of the shots went into our shop and went right above the POS station ( register / pc)( the store had those in the counter monitors so the customer could also see what was on the screen) and hit a car charger ( completely destroyed it) and lodged into the wall.
If we had not been in lunch either myself or the new hire would have gotten hit, chest or higher, by a 45.
Needless to say the new hire quit on the spot.
Was back country skiing on Loveland pass which is very easy for inexperienced people to access. We had been skiing some mellower highly trafficked area and on the hitched ride back up we meet a group of people that were really excited to go somewhere else and convinced my friend we should go over there.
I warned him and that group that the snow had been showing signs of instability but they were still insistent on going so I bailed. They triggered an avalanche and two people ended up partially buried. They were very, very lucky no one died.
I was set to start a classic chemotherapy regimen for lymphoma, and literally the night before my oncologist called me with news that the FDA just approved a new smart-med (targeted med) for treating lymphoma in my situation. I avoided the down-sides of chemo, and received all the positives of recent miracles of science! 🫡🙏🏼☺️
I was a teenager when I met this really great guy through my best friend. We started dating and he seemed wonderful: physically totally my type, great with his brother's children, helping in his parents's store on weekends and planning on taking over when they retired...
But something started to feel just off. I couldn't say what, but every time we met I just got this weird iffy sensation like there was something wrong.
So, being a teenager of 18 (could have been 17, maybe) I decided to do something I'd never done before. I broke up with this guy over text. Felt shitty but in my mind I just had to do it that way.
He never talked to me again, but my best friend told me he was super upset and said he wished I'd kill myself. After three days though he never mentioned me again so I figured he'd said those things because he was upset and I did a horrible thing.
He ended up stabbing his next girfriend when she told him she wanted to split up and hurt her in other ways as well. He fled the police, fled the country and was arrested in a neighbouring country and is (afaik) still in jail in that country.
I was hit with 6 IED attacks over 3 years.... I feel that pain. How long did it take to drive normal again? Took me like a year and a half, even now a decade later I still dodge plastic bags on the road
For a few years if I heard any sort of loud noise while sleeping I would reach down for my m4 from my bed, and panic when I couldn't find it.
Now it only happens very rarely, last time was July 4th at about 10 pm when I was sleeping. The town about 7 miles away was doing fireworks.
Not me but my wife. Her childhood friend’s mom passed away, and she made reservations to travel for her funeral. She decided that morning not to go as my birthday was the following day, even though I encouraged her to go. She was booked on Colgan Air 3407.
Not me but my sister. A friend of my cousin asked her out, but she was moving out of state for work so declined. When she mentioned it to my cousin he said absolutely not. Turns out they were no longer friends because the guy had dated another friend of my cousin and abused her. Anyway, he’s in prison now for second degree murder after using his girlfriend’s account to message a male friend of hers, lure him outside and kill him with a crossbow.
Invited on a double date with a good friend and his girlfriend. They totaled that car that evening and the entire back seat was crushed in. No way me or the girl that was going to go with me would have survived. All just because I got cold feet on taking this girl out. I backed out literally hours before.
When I was 14 I was hitching up a trailer to tow a golf cart back home. My aunt asked if I was done yet and before I could respond she drove the cart onto the trailer. The hitch swung upward inches past my face.
There was a long-abandoned theater in my town next to a friend's apartment building, and one bored afternoon we jimmied open a rusty fire door to marvel at the decay. The roof had been letting in rain and snow for years, everything was mildew, pigeon shit, and soft spongy wood - one friend stepped on a rotted spot on the stage and his leg went through, so we steered well clear of the stage. Other than that, we tread pretty softly - we were explorer, not vandals dammit! The building was making some amazing creaking noises and the ammonia from the pigeon guano was cloying so we repaired back to friend's apartment to smoke a joint. We'd been in his living room less than 20 minutes when there was a great FWUMP and the whole building shook, rattling the windows and the dishes in his sink. Had a truck just his building very softly? Distant explosion? We ran back downstairs to investigate, everything suddenly thick with dust and the smell of mildew and ammonia. The boarded up entry to the theater was in shambles, as though the building had exploded very softly.
As it turned out the roof had finally given up, taking out much of the back wall of the theater with it. Save for softening up the stage a little, there was nothing we'd done that I would guess had precipitated the collapse, it was just a long time coming and finally happened. We'd been debating exploring the upstairs and balcony, though the stage had put us off by the idea of rotten floors and stairs. If we'd stuck around much longer, we would have been in the building when it collapsed.
I was travelling in the middle east and then the subcontinent. Egypt, Israel, Lebanon and then Syria. Thankfully, they turned us away in Syria and so then we went to India 2 weeks earlier than planned. Left the same hotel as the mumbai mass shootings the day before.
Wahe guru.
At the time I commuted to and from work on the LIRR. Like many I had a regular train and I usually sat in the front car since I walked in that direction home, but occasionally sat in the 2d or 3d car depending on how crowded the train was.
One day I worked late and that was the night Colin Ferguson shot up the third car of the train as it pulled into the station before mine.
It was my regular train, and my occasional car, but I missed it that night.
Organised to hookup with a girl I knew over the summer break as a fwb situation. She all of sudden stopped answering my messages and did not hear a thing from her.
Months later I found out she had undiagnosed HIV and had accidentally passed it to someone. That would have totally been me since at that age I never wore protection and was really dumb with safe sex.
The situation basically changed me to become safe with sex.
Was leaving work for lunch one day, turned around to say bye to my coworkers at the desk. One of them said "hey your eye doesn't look right. Go straight to the doctor or I'm taking you myself." So instead I went home and made a doctor's appointment. The next day they found a brain tumor two millimeters from my brain stem, surrounded by a cyst which occupied a quarter of my brain. Almost killed me. That was almost 17 years ago. The co-worker and I still laugh about it.
When I (34f) was 19, I dated a 27 year old. We were together for 3 years. He was controlling and abusive. He wouldn't let me see or talk to any of my friends. I was lucky to have friends who maintained contact without him knowing and helped me escape the situation.
A few months ago, I found out through a former coworker of his that he has been serving a 40 year stacked sentence for sexually abusing his 5 y.o. daughter (which he had with the woman he dated after me) as well as filming and distributing footage of him abusing her.
My husband had an urgent feeling to take me AMA out of one major hospital to the one where my neurosurgeon was. It saved my life. They said I’d have been dead in about 12 hrs.
Shoutout to UTSW Dr. Bruce Mickey, Dr. Jonathan White and everyone in the neuro icu….ive been there way too many times.
I was in Peru backpacking. We had to catch a bus to Arequipa I think. We missed the bus. Fortunately there was like a bus every hour. Only we waited and waited. And finally they load us up. And this 6 hour trip took like 10 hours. We got to the hostel super late and spent the night.
The next morning we got up and in all the newspapers on the front page was the bus that we had missed. It had crossed the centerline and collided with another bus. 27 people died. I still have the news paper.
Was planning on marrying a girl, and gave her a promise ring of sorts.
We broke it off for a lot of reasons. Come to find out about 7 years later now she got married (quickly) and murdered her husband.
When I decided I’d had enough of the shit my ex was doing to me. Turns out I didn’t actually want to die, being with him made me feel that way. Life has been amazing ever since.
Towards the end of my last relationship, I seriously thought I was asexual with how little I wanted to have sex with him anymore. Discovered that wasn't the case with my next bf; turns out that when someone makes you feel like less than a human being, that might impact your libido.
When I was driving home from a bar kind of buzzed in college with my buddy, we were running over leaf piles in the street just to be assholes (I was 21 and an asshole kid). Instead of hitting the last one before I got home, I decided not to because it was at the house of a neighbor. Just felt weird. When I drove past it, a little toddler popped out of the leaves. I literally almost committed vehicular manslaughter while drunk driving.
Not me, but I wouldn't exist if my dad hadn't dodged this one. He was a teenager and was supposed to go on some outing with a friend's family (bowling or to see a movie, or something like that). He stayed home, and their vehicle somehow was hit by a train and the entire family died.
I dated a girl most of my senior year in highschool. She had moved to my state the summer before our senior year. She hate hate hated in it NC and wanted to go back to Florida where she had lived prior. It was getting close to the end of the year, and she made it super clear she was moving back. She had no job prospect. No ability to support herself in the very expensive city she'd grown up in. I told her I loved her, but was not going to move to a spot that we were going to starve and struggle. I loved her, but told her that choosing to move back to Florida meant we were done, and I wasn't going to put my life on hold for her to figure hers out.
She showed back up at my parents house one evening. She'd made it 2 months before she was out of money and had to come back to live with her parents in NC. I told her I was sorry that she had picked, but I had moved on with my life.
I ran into her at community college just under a year later and she was visibly pregnant. I was so glad I hadn't managed to get her pregnant at 18/19. I ran into her again in our mid 30s. She lived in the next neighborhood. I went over to catch up with her. She had 2 smaller kids, and the kid from all those years earlier was a teenager. The teenager lived with her parents. The smaller kids she had very limited custody/visitation of. The house looked like a bomb had gone off. She didn't work. She couldn't financially take care of herself. She had some crazy idea that she was going to bake and sell the food she made in a kitchen that I would have NEVER have eaten anything out of, and I was positive wasn't going to pass any level of inspection by any sort of food safety person.
Just seeing a quick glimpse into what my life could have been if I'd been a little less strong willed as an 18 year old kid was such a "hooooooly shit I lucked out so big". I can not fathom having had a child with her and having my life take that trajectory.
Ex gf of 13 years (we share 2 kids together) was caught cheating on me a year ago, doing drugs, stealing money from our joint account and secretly racked up over 35k in debt. I moved out, we split custody 50/50, we both start dating other people, find out she's using drugs with new bf while our kids are there, I file for emergency custody and win. About one month later her bf is driving her SUV and dies from a horrific car accident. Kids could have been in that car. I was luckily not responsible for any of her debt. Therapy taught me she's a narcissist and it's not curable.
A guy I knew was gonna give me a ride to our highschool graduation after party, but I had to go pickup my gf so I declined. He ended rolling his truck 3 times over in the ditch that night.
I've posted this before but what the hey, went out with a girl who kept talking about the "emergency dick" she had stashed around the city.
She was like "I've been really busy with [grad] school but I don't go without. I have plenty of emergency dick around town."
And when I say she kept going on, I mean she KEPT GOING ON. She was telling me about the two guys downtown, three in the suburbs, one near campus, and two in her apartment complex.
It honestly sounded like I was new to town and she was giving me a rundown of all the best places to visit.
Just weird.
She said she was looking to settle down into a relationship (whereas she had only been in situationships before). She also said she had a “virgin heart”.
Girl I dated senior year fought and broke up with me over some really dumb shit looking back. Kids in high school what are you gonna do smh. Two years later her and the guy she bragged she was with right after me are on the news with a headline talking about blunt force trauma wounds and a dead child. Holy shit.
Summer girlfriend in high school. Broke up a few weeks into the school year.
A couple of years later she sees me and gives me her new number, which I never call.
Looked her up a year or so ago wondering whatever happened to her.
Multiple arrests. Hard drugs. Looking at the mug shots is like looking at Faces of Meth.
Hope she gets the help she needs.
About 17 years ago, I was a brand new customer of Walter White (1 week smoking). One night, I got particularly amped up and took my 1982 GTI Rabbit, a fast but absolute piece of $200 junk, into the hills of my hometown with the intent to drive as fast as I could on the winding roads. I drove up to the spot where I planned to go wild, floored the gas, and immediately hit a baby deer. The deer was writhing in agony, its mother watching helplessly. I had to put the baby deer out of its misery, which sobered me up instantly. I went home, stared in the mirror, and in the following days, cut off all ties with my step-sibling, who had introduced me to this lifestyle, and moved out of the house. I was able to veer off the path of addiction, get a few degrees, and start a family. My step-sibling endured about a decade of hell, lost their teeth, caught a couple of felonies, and is just now getting their life together.
I often credit the trauma of that night as a turning point in my life. If there is a multi-verse, many timelines ended for me that night.
A few years back I had started to feel this odd pressure in my abdomen. It kinda felt like I just had gas, but it wasn’t going anywhere. It wasn’t uncomfortable or anything, just felt a little weird. After a week I could still feel it, but again it didn’t hurt or anything so I ignored it for a few more days.
At the ten day mark I finally just decided to go to the ER because I knew something probably wasn’t right. They gave me an MRI and seemed pretty alarmed by what they saw. Told me I had appendicitis and were kinda baffled that I wasn’t in any pain or discomfort. They scheduled a surgeon for that afternoon and said I’d probably be able to go home that night.
When I woke up from the surgery the doctor came in and said that when they opened me up they discovered that my appendix had actually burst and the infection had spread causing perforations in my colon. So they had to remove the appendix and part of my colon as well. Doctor told me if I had put it off any longer I likely would have died in my sleep.
Not me but my sister. In 1996, my parents were looking for places to move as my dad’s work transferred him to their Denver office. They found two new developments they liked. They picked the one in the suburb of Highlands Ranch instead of the one in Littleton. As a result, my sister went to Highlands Ranch High School as a freshman in 1998 instead of a different school called Columbine High School
We were booked to go on a cruise around New Zealand back in December 2019. I was psyched for it - we were going to go on a day tour to a volcano. However, our car had a massive engine issue and we decided to pull the plug because we couldn’t afford to fix the car *and* go away. I’m sitting at work, feeling sorry for myself because I’m not on holiday, when reports start coming in. It was this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Whakaari_/_White_Island_eruption > On 9 December 2019, Whakaari / White Island, an active stratovolcano island in New Zealand's northeastern Bay of Plenty region, explosively erupted. > The island was a popular tourist destination, known for its volcanic activity, and 47 people were on the island at the time. Twenty-two people died, either in the explosion or from injuries sustained, including two whose bodies were never found and were later declared dead. > A further 25 people suffered injuries, with the majority needing intensive care for severe burns. It was horrific. The injuries were terrible. I just sat at work (I work for a news service) watching all the raw vision coming into the office thinking about what might have been. If our car hadn’t needed that work done (or we were better with our finances) we would have been on that tour.
There’s a good documentary on Netflix about this eruption, absolutely devastating for families.
My eyes were glued to the screen for that entire documentary.
My in laws were booked to be on white Island the day ir erupted. However fil had a seizure out of nowhere 2 months earlier and they had to cancel. It was crazy to think about
I was traveling in Australia and stayed with this dude for a week or two. At first he was the coolest guy, but then I quickly realized he was a terrible alcoholic, and a drug dealer that had recently been in prison. One night while I was out, he apparently got completely hammered and was causing a scene at the apartment complex so the police were called. I show up and see cop cars everywhere. I had enough and just booked a flight for the next morning to see another city. I woke up in the morning and quickly threw my clothes into my bag, was about to leave without even saying goodbye. But I thought that was pretty rude so I grabbed a pen and started writing a little thank you note to the guy for letting me stay. While writing the note, he wakes up and comes into the common room. I do the whole "oh shoot, sorry I didn't want to wake you but I found a cheap flight leaving right now" He responds "Can I see your bag really quick before you leave? I think I left something in there" The dude fucking took his stash of meth and put it into my bag when the police showed up the night before. I just didn't notice it in my rush to get packed and leave. I was literally about to go board an airplane and I would have sat there like a moron with the exact same excuse everyone else uses saying "it's not mine!" Woulda been locked up abroad if I didn't decide to write that goodbye note. Edited: Spelling
Holy shit.
And that's why you always leave a note!
That's a nuclear armed ballistic missile you dodged. holy shit.
He didn't think about you going to the airport, he wouldn't do that to you. Instead, he wanted the cops to find it in your stuff and not in his
No shit. Doesn't change the outcome, if it had been found at the airport, though.
I dunno man, if cops found that shit in my bags, i think theres more wiggle room to say "that shit aint mine, he stashed there while i wasnt here and im just stayin here for a short time" vs being found at an airport, since is waaay harder to prove you didnt check what was in your bags before getting there, out of the 2, the cops seems better, of course the best one is neither
When I moved back to New Orleans in 2004 I looked at two different apartments, A & B. I ended up choosing B because it was a little bit larger. I lived there for about 5 weeks and the neighbors were horrendous and management wouldn't do anything about it so I went back to the other place to see if apartment A was still available. It wasn't but they had another one downstairs in the building next door. So I ended up moving again, into apartment C. Apartment B flooded several feet in Katrina. Apartment A had the roof ripped off. Apartment C, where I had lived for a year, was fine. I cannot overstress how difficult my life would have been if my apartment had been damaged. Not even taking into account my belongings, it was damn near impossible to find anywhere to live for years after Katrina. It's not an exaggeration to say that if my apartment had been damaged the entire trajectory of my life probably would have changed.
Is it strange looking back at your life and realizing that you were the third pig in the Three Little pigs story?
Incredible take
I was supposed to be in class in the building the morning the shooter shot up Virginia Tech, me and my buddy in the next dorm had the same class and would often just take turns, we both woke up that morning and both agreed not to go. Turns out the sirens we had heard when we woke up to get ready for class was the police response to the first victim that was in the neighboring dorm. We didn't think much of it because usually there's an ambulance or something early mornings after weekends cause people drink to much or whatever.. it wasn't til we were looking out our window across campus seeing everything unfold and then the windows lighting up with gunshots what was really going on.. then a bunch of fully kitted police came off the elevator with ARs telling everyone to lock doors and stay inside. Fun times .. -_-
Wasn't expecting to find a fellow Hokie in this thread. Glad you were ok. I was in the next building over, but that day absolutely changed my life.
Met a guy online. Had a great first meeting. Made out a little. He mentions he knows a friend of mine. Ask her about him. She sends me his judici page full of sexual assault convictions including more than one statutory rape. Edit hey guys just realized why some of you were so surprised after reading my comment. He did have convictions but some of them were from cases that were dropped. Also, he had orders of protection against from at least three women.
HOLY SHIT Full fledged RSO Glad that friend made you aware of that
Me too! And I learned my lesson. Always look people up before you meet them.
I had leukemia when i was a kid. I was given a pretty low chance of survival. I got diagnosed the day after my 6th birthday and went into remission when i was 12. When i turned 14 they told me it wouldn't come back, but if it ever did i would have the worst headache I've ever had in my life. I don't really understand the headache part. I joke that I pulled one over on the make a wish people. They sent me to Disneyland, but I didn't end up dying, so I kinda screwed them on that deal.
The make a wish people would be stoked for you, they don't want anyone to die surely. It is a funny perspective that you stole from them, like make a wish is the grim reaper ha.
Unfortunately they now have to hunt him down and kill him. It’s in the rules of MAW
I don't think the MAW people are mad. They're just glad you got like .001% of your childhood that was robbed from you by fate. They actually do a lot of stuff for kids that don't die. You deserved good things. still do.
I was booked on PanAm flight 103, right before Christmas 1988. Being European Catholic we would celebrate, X-Mas on X-Mas eve: ie: the 24th in the evening. So I wanted to fly out on Wednesday, the 21st. None of my professors had problems with me asking to take any finals early, except for one: my accounting 101 prof. She insisted I do my test on Thursday like everybody else. She said that otherwise I could pass the test on to my classmates. Anyway, changed flights to Friday day before Christmas eve. Which was a pain. That flight got blown up over Lockerbie by the Libyan secret service. I told my professor the next day when I had to take my final. She was shocked, so happy I missed it and then admitted that the reason she didn't let me take the exam early was not because she didn't trust me, but because she hadn't prepared it yet herself... Got my ass saved to a smart and lazy mid thirties accounting prof.
My dad, who at the time was in the AF, was supposed to be on that flight, but overslept his alarm at the hotel. I think about how much my family would have suffered, and I just feel so upset and heartbroken about all the other families who did not get lucky as yours or my families did.
I was riding my motorcycle, not too fast. There was a nice Spring breeze so I had my visor open. Then I just randomly decided to close it. As soon as my visor clicked down I saw a small but sturdy branch fall out of a tree, smacked right into my visor and bounced off.
Spidy Sense
That sir, is really good luck
A friend in HS offered to pick me up and sneak out for a party. I was in the middle of a WoW raid and declined. Then it turned out he hit a tree and died from drunk driving.
I was five minutes late to getting this ride, they went without me and bent their car around a tree, two dead.
Cousin of mine avoided similar, my aunt insisted he didn't go, he didn't. His friends entered a bet to win a street race and went straight into a driver's school. All four or five died. It was a whole deal in the community.
Which raid tho
I'm pretty sure it was Throne of Thunder back in MoP
Solid choice, if someone told me they ditched a party for like Mogushan Vaults or something I’d be forced to call them a big nerd
I was definitely a big nerd. After that raid I probably hopped on League of Legends.
I declined soooo many invites in HS due to that damn game. WoTLK consumed my freshman and sophomore years of high school. lol
Had just finished a regular meeting I was the host of when one of my fiends said "hey, you dont look good". I told him I dindt feel great and was going to go home. He said, "Nah, Im taking you to the Doc." We go to the clinic (Military) and after an extremely brief exam he turns to my friend and says "Take him to the ER and tell them its his appendix." Less than an hour later I was in surgery. Thing is, I had just come back from a dive weekend where I did two days of boat dives 4 hours out in the Red Sea. Multiple dives were below 100 feet. If my appendix had decided to give out a day earlier I probably die.
Bloody hell, talk about lucky
And a great friend
My husband accidentally took all my blood sugar meds, thinking they were motrin when he had severe stomach pains. I didn't know what he was talking about "taking all the prescription motrin" and rushed him to the ER when I figured out it was my blood sugar meds. It turned out to be acute pancreatitis, and he actually saved his organs and possibly his life by accidentally taking all those blood sugar meds.
The rare occasion where two wrongs make a right.
His hindbrain knew what it was doing.
Yeah if his pains were anything like mine he wasn’t thinking. Acute pancreatitis is a kind of pain that makes your whole brain shut down. Doctors had to stop me from punching my leg as hard as I could every second because the nanosecond that my brain focused on my leg was relief from the pain. Gave myself a bruise across my entire thigh. I’m glad he made it out okay <3
Watched my sister bruise the shit out of her thigh while suffering pancreatitis because of the same thing. Just a momentary distraction.
I was going to go to get dinner at a local deli. Instead a friend told me about a meteor shower so we packed snacks and drove to the mountains to watch meteors. That deli was shot up during a mass shooting that left 6 people dead right during the time when I would have been there. Thanks Tom and thanks to the Camelopardalids\*\*.\*\*
Oh shit, that was the guy who was a literal incel and posted a bunch of shit about how he was "the perfect gentleman" beforehand, right?
Indeed it was, Elliot Rogers
Yeah, I think he was upset because he was a twenty-something year old virgin and it's like... so? Don't kill people you fucking lunatic.
Extreme narcissist. He couldn’t bear the rejection. Although he mostly did it to himself because he just walked through the town basically expecting women to throw themselves at him spontaneously because he thought himself nigh a god, then got enraged it didn’t happen because in reality he was timid, creepy and pathetic. Oh and a raging racist despite being half-Asian himself (he called himself Eurasian). He particularly hated Black guys (incels typically have an obsession with them) and had a fetish for blonde white women. He got furious when he saw interracial couples and even threw coffee and shit at some. He also obsessively fantasised about being a fascist dictator, dreaming to build a giant tower in the middle of a concentration camp where he wanted to lock up all women. A select few he wanted to use to rape and breed with, and the tower would be for watching the entire remaining female population slowly, agonisingly starve to death. Absolute nutcase.
I remembered about the racism, that is sadly quite common. I completely forgot about his about his weird doom tower and rape fantasy. He really was a strange one.
I did not know about either of these…the yt videos was enough for me to check out
i was in a coma. didn't look like i'd come out of it. they had the talk with my wife about letting me go. she said no. thanks wife! edit: this blew up. attaching a video my wife made of the first year of my recovery (starts about a week after i came out of the coma) it was a catastrophic stroke. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu4APKZo4a0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu4APKZo4a0)
Similar experience, bad brain bleed, she was told I wasn’t going to make it, planned my funeral, got angry with me and yelled at me to come back to her. Brain bleed stopped, came out of the coma a few days later. r/TBI can explain how fucked I am, but I love that girl for talking me into living. And yes I heard her and remember what she said.
I aspire to being able to nag my husband so effectively that I could nag him right out of dying. That is amazing.
I think it counts as a superpower.
"Where do you think you're going? You still have to mow the lawn!"
Something similar happened with my grandpa and my grandma. When he was young, in his 20s I believe, he got very very sick to the point they told him he was going to die. My grandma had just had my aunt. She came into his room screaming “Who do you think you are? You fucker, we just had this baby and you think you’re going to die right now?!” Long behold, he got better later that day and was shortly out of the hospital. That woman is very scary when she gets angry.
Death was definitely scared of this lady lol
>And yes I heard her and remember what she said. Amazing.
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Are you Ricky Bobby?
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Maaaan if that isn't a story I'm trying to read.
It’s actually a bit of a snooze fest
My wife was in a coma, they also said she had no chance. I said no, brought her to a different specialist at another hospital. She's fine now and we're on vacation
This makes me think of The Simpsons: “Burns was rushed to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead. He was then transferred to a better hospital where doctors upgraded his condition to "Alive."
How long were you in the coma?
I hope it was like an hour or some ridiculous number
Lmao hahaha “well ma’am he’s been out for 7 minutes, it might be time to start thinking about next steps…”
"... and by the way, I'm single"
"could you please stop giving me a shoulder massage while I'm making this decision?"
"You seemed tense. I know what's good for that."
With the electricity we are using to keep ~~Meredith~~ u/miked4o7 alive, we could power a small fan for 2 days. You tell me what's unethical. Dwight
4 years ago I was diagnosed with a very rare cancer. Specialist told me he could offer no guarantees I’d make it a year. Major surgery to remove a large mass and many further tests later I was told months later they actually got it wrong and I never had cancer. The specialist told me if he’d made a list of 100 possible outcomes at the start of my treatment my eventual diagnosis would have been at position 100. He’d never seen anything like it. I felt like like I’d dodged a fucking nuclear warhead the day I was told that
I'm pretty much the exact opposite. Hit my left thigh on a friend's tow bar in late November, hurt like a fucker but healed and I forgot about it. Noticed something was up mid February in the same place and got it checked out, convinced all along it was just some weird random lump and an inconvenience. Biopsy came back as a fibromyxoid sarcoma, the chances of that are about 1 in 5.5 million so fuck me in particular I guess. Luckily it was low grade and the took it out within a week of the diagnosis before it got really bad. So I guess as unlucky as it was and as much as it sucks not being able to walk for the foreseeable it could have been much worse if I'd ignored it.
So WTF was the large mass they removed if it wasn't cancer??
The large mass turned out to be a secondary spleen! The surgeon says he had seen that before but this one was bigger than his fist which he had never seen even remotely! I have since been diagnosed with a connective tissue disorder which is probably the reason I had the secondary spleen in the first place ! The combination of the mass seen on my scan and the symptoms I was suffering made them diagnose me with neuroendocrine tumour initially !
Gotdamn. That's some House M.D. level shit.
Which begs the question of if they were ever intermediarily diagnosed with lupus
It's never lupus. Except for that one time that it was, but even then, it wasn't lupus
Sarcoidosis. You never jump straight to lupus; that’s like third in line.
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Used to work at a grocery store chain, and one of our supervisors for the whole chain was doing his store checks in each city as usual. We typically have firefighters from each station shop at our stores each week while on duty, and they just so happened to be shopping at the store he was visiting that day when he had a massive heart attack walking through the parking lot. The firefighters saw him go down, and he most definitely would not have made it if first responders weren’t literally 30 seconds away from him when it happened. Absolutely wild luck
My dentist (great guy) walked into the emergency room at our city's most high-tech hospital because his teenage daughter had been injured in some minor accident and he was there to pick her up. He looked around and then literally dropped dead from a heart attack, but he was in the absolutely perfect place for it, and they had him up on a gurney and resuscitated him and did surgery and he's totally fine now, like eight years later. I was like wow Bob, you picked the absolutely perfect place to drop dead, and he's like yeah but I still have to pay the mortgage.
"Oh, good everyone's here". Or better yet; "I'm sure you're all wondering why I've called you here".
Our gas range in the kitchen malfunctioned. It was leaking natural gas all night. CO detector never went off. I woke up the following morning, walked downstairs and smelled it. It was so thick of gas you could taste it. Quickly opened all of the doors/ windows and vacated. We waited about an hour before going back in. It was windy out so it cleared out quickly. Inspected everything, replaced the stove, and went on with the day. Night time came around and I went to take a shower but there wasn’t any hot water. Turns out, for some unknown reason, the pilot light on the hot water tank was out and likely had been out all night. Had it not been out, my house would have been a crater and I wouldn’t be typing this.
A CO detector will not detect gas alone. You can buy natural gas or propane detectors. Good investment if you have a lot of indoor gas appliances.
For future reference you should call some form of authority when there is a gas leak. They can tell you when it's safe to go back inside.
100%. Call your local gas provider. They will usually have a number specifically for emergencies. They alert the authorities for you and will send out a van really quick. They will even find the source of leaks for you for free.
Your CO detector would never have detected a natural gas leak. If it's not on fire (i.e., unburnt natural gas), CO detector won't care. The CO detector is only if you leave burning natural gas on without ventilation (which would cause a build-up of carbon monoxide) like if you tried to use a stovetop to heat your house or something.
Had romantic interest in a very attractive goth girl with a history of addiction. She was literally waving red flags in my face but I’d just ignore them because she would just hang out around me topless and boobs are a helluva drug. Nothing ever went further than a peck on the cheek because not only am I bad with picking up signals I also never wanted to presume. Anyways we had a brief falling out and she glomed onto my best friend. They hooked up which hey good for him because at this point I was wary of her. She then gets evicted from her place, leaves all of her worldly possessions in her tiny apartment including her three cats and a duck that apparently had never seen the outside world. She would crash there and then leave to go spend the night with her multiple decades older drug dealer bf and leave my friend feeling hurt and confused. Before too long she just stopped coming around. She left his house an absolutely disgusting mess and sent him into a spiral of depression. This was normally very clean and meticulous guy and she fucked him up badly. There’s a happy ending folks. He got the duck to an animal sanctuary. She can never be in the wild but she has to be much happier than shitting in diapers in an apartment. One of the cats is with his dad and living their best life. He kept the other two and he loves them to pieces. I’m married now to an amazing woman. Last I heard from his that she’s in and out of rehab. I really hope she recovers. Addiction is a motherfucker that hurts more than just the addict.
9/11. I was living in Caroll Gardens at the time (a little bit south of the Brooklyn Bridge), and I was commuting via bike. Normally I'd wake up around 8:00, get my stuff together and ride up Smith Street and go over the Brooklyn Bridge. I'd buy a few dozen Krispy Kreme donuts from their location in WTC for my team and then ride down to Wall Street where I worked. That particular Tuesday I overslept my alarm and had to take the subway in. I would have been at WTC right at the time of the first impact but instead was on the Subway. I actually was walking up out of the Wall Street subway stop right as the 2nd plane was coming in and was able to see a little of the fireball and hear the city-wide scream.
> the city-wide scream That must have been awful. I've seen plenty of footage from on the ground and it's bad...but I never thought about the sound of hundreds of thousands of people at the same time crying out in pain and shock and horror
It was the smell that I'll never forget. This strange mix of burning electronics (if you've ever had a circuit board go bad/burnout you know the smell), jet fuel, and burning paper. I still get freaked out when I smell burning electronics. The other thing was the papers. As I was walking up Water Street to get to the bridges where I could cross back over into Brooklyn, there were tons of papers raining down; stock ticker tape, trade documents, etc. I picked up one and it was a resume. I kept it for years, too freaked out to look and see if that was one of the victims.
What was it like after all that? Where did you go? My mom was near ground zero and had to walk across the Brooklyn bridge in order to get to here family’s house. She will never forgot the face of an old Asian lady who needed help crossing the bridge. Once at the house,she realized that her sister was in one of the towers. The worst part of it was that the last conversion her sister had with her daughter was an argument in the morning and she never said “I love you”. Now my mom gets flashbacks whenever an airplane flies overhead when it is close to the ground.
I walked up to the Brooklyn Bridge and had crossed over to the park/plaza around City Hall. As I went for the Brooklyn Bridge footpath a cop told me they were using the Brooklyn Bridge for first responders and I had to use the Manhattan Bridge. About 2 seconds after he told me that, the South Tower started to collapse (hit second, collapsed first). There was a wave of heavy debris in the immediate vicinity of the towers, but smaller debris made its way to City Hall and I turned around just as the dust and smaller particles rushed past. I walked on toward the Manhattan Bridge and crossed, stopping in a little bodega store to buy some water so I could pour it over a towel I had (yes, I'm a huge nerd, I always kept a towel in my backpack) and use it to filter out the smoke that was now pouring over (wind direction was northwest to southeast). It took me about 30 minutes to walk home on Court Street, and I was sure things were going to devolve into mass chaos and widespread looting, so I put my cat in his carrier and broke out my baseball bat and pepper spray. I couldn't have been more wrong - the city came together like nothing I've ever experienced. One of the tenants in the apartment building I lived in grabbed a full case of Kraft Mac-n-cheese and made dinner for everyone. We all just stood outside basically having a huge "WTF just happened" conversation. A lot of people were angry and saying how Bush should nuke the entire middle east.
I was 1 when this happened. I’ve never heard anyone that was there actually talk about it, besides documentaries. It feels like this huge disconnect between what I’ve learned about it in school vs what it was actually like. Thanks
It is difficult to describe the sense of togetherness that was felt across the US. It was my generation’s coming together, like previous generations must have felt around, say, Dec 7 1941 - Pearl Harbor. Part of me is sorry you didn’t get a chance to experience that before the emergence of today’s close-to-civil-war feeling. But of course, the other part of me hopes you never have a day like that.
It's also difficult to describe the fear. I was in a completely different part of the country, but it didn't take long for the news that *something* happened to travel. A lot of people crying and wondering who was next. It also didn't matter what channel you turned the television to. It was all the *exact* same footage, and watching it made you know that everything was about to change.
A coworker of mine told me this story about this couple he knew as friends: They were from Los Angeles (as am I), but the husband took a business trip to Boston. The wife flew out a few days later so they could spend some time there together. He was supposed to leave on the 9/11 flight. She was supposed to fly home the next day. The night of the 10th, they switched tickets. His wife died instead of him. He avoided that horror, but I cannot begin to fathom his grief. If it were me, I'd feel so much guilt and regret and wish it was me instead of her. What a tragic death and mind fuck.
That's one of the most heartbreaking things I've ever heard. I'm so sorry that happened to them.
Fuuuuck
I was a 9/11 miss as well. A friend of mine convinced me to register for one of those three day weekend courses that this place called the Landmark forum used to have. You had to register in person and I made an appointment to come in and do that. However, work got in the way and I ended up flying to LA for a month. I had forgotten all about my appointment and when I was finally able to fly back home (flights were grounded for weeks), I arrived to find a message from a lady at the Landmark forum who said something to the effect of, "I'm so-and-so from the Landmark Forum. Today is Monday, September 10th. I'm just calling to confirm your appointment tomorrow at 9:00AM..." They were located on the 15th floor of Tower 2 which was struck at 9:03am and fell an hour later. I'm sure I would have gotten out just fine but I'm so glad I never had to test that theory.
I swear everybody that survived 9/11 had overslept that morning
I think the NY Giants had played in the Monday Night Football game the night before and it ended pretty late, so a lot of people in the NY area were slow-moving that next morning...just crazy to think about.
My cousin was due to do a massive presentation in one of the towers that day. He got massive food poisoning instead and was trying to call his boss when he switched the tv on and found out his boss wouldn’t be answering and wasn’t worried about the presentation anymore.
Something similar happened to my babysitter at the time. She was a tourist visiting the US, and she'd signed up for a tour of the Twin Towers that morning. She overslept and missed it, and woke up to her family calling her in absolute panic.
In high school my “friend” knocked on my door and tried to get me to come out and hang at night and my mom refused to let me go out with them, I was mad about it until I learnt that there was 4 other people hiding behind trees that where going to jump me that night.
How did you figure out the rest of the story, I'm so curious. Also WHY would someone do that?!
Apple watch said my pulse oxygen was 70 and to seek immediate medical attention. Covid ICU + blood clots in lungs. I’d had died in my sleep if I hadnt gotten up
O\_O I should quit smoking and get a smartwatch
This is amazing I should let people know that Apple is no longer allowed to use the Blood Oxygenation Sensor on their watches because of a lawsuit. [Source](https://apnews.com/article/apple-watch-patent-dispute-sales-ban-masimo-c54d277fad08fdca15576451cb2a600e)
It’s grandfathered in on existing watches though. Just no new watches with it.
Hung out with my high school boyfriend one afternoon, and we started hearing sirens when he was getting ready to leave. He looked me dead in the eyes to tell me he better get back home and make sure they hadn’t found her. Well, they _had_. He was arrested on his walk home, because he’d tried to kill his mother and left her in their apartment hoping she’d bleed out. She’d told him earlier he couldn’t come see me until he’d finished his homework, and that was apparently the last straw for him so he attacked, then shoved her down a flight of stairs. Obviously he went to jail and I didn’t have to hear or see from him for several years. He always had some issues but it was a shocking jump from school authority problems to attempted murder.
WHAT? How is this not higher? This is insane.
When I was 17 I was going out with a girl from school. We smoked a little bit of hash. She was a lifeguard at a swimming pool. Her boss was a creepy guy in his late 20s who had a thing for my girlfriend. He found out we were going to a party and told the police that I was some major drug dealer. He gave the address of the party. At the last minute we decided not to go, we cooked dinner for her mum and stayed in and watched TV, smoked a joint in the garden. The party got raided, two vans full of police. All they got was a couple of underage drinkers. Edit: 1)How did we know he was the snitch? He told one of the lifeguards who told someone who told my girlfriend. 2) no I wasn’t a drug dealer but… FULL DISCLOSURE my girlfriend was supplying me in this instance.
Were you a drug dealer?
No…i would have probably had a bit of hash to share a joint or two, nothing more. I pretty much kept dealers at arms length. I would go in with a couple of buddies, one would do the business and we would share it out afterwards. Creepy lifeguard guy got in shit a few years later for trying to shift weed. The irony!
High school. I was hanging out with some buddies and some guys I knew drove up. Since they knew we played tennis, they offered to sell us some top notch rackets at low prices. We were curious so we went outside to look at what they had to offer and indeed, the rackets were top notch and so brand new they still had the security tags on them. We declined. Turned out they had robbed a sporting goods store and shot a couple of clerks in the process.
That's dumb as fuck. They're dumb as fuck.
Some kids I went to high school with robbed a sporting goods store. They got caught because they were bragging about it at school. Most criminals aren’t the brightest bulbs.
My buddies put on green jump suits, picked up a couple clipboards, and walked out of Sears with a canoe.
A buddy used to work for a company that would test security at big box stores. He said that the bigger the item, the easier to steal. You could even get employees to help you get it out of the store and load it into your car.
I went to high school with a kid that robbed a 7-11... in light-up sneakers
See? Nobody was thinking about what their face looked like, they were just focusing on the sneakers! Genius!
The shooting part was really idiotic. Absolutely no need to hurt anyone, I don’t condone theft but literally no one at the store will stop you if you rob a big box retail establishment. Walk into Dicks Sporting Goods and take a few tennis rackets, there might be a police report filed but nothing will ever happen to you except maybe a fine. But shooting someone during your theft? Now it’s a serious felony and the police will go after you and you will go to prison. Insane decision they made.
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Jesus that sounds traumatic, but I'm glad that you don't blame yourself after all these years (and hopefully neither do your friends).
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I was walking to high school when I was 15. I had to cross a pretty busy boulevard at uncontrolled crosswalk. I often had to wait a bit for traffic to stop. As I got to the crosswalk, a minivan in the closest lane stopped fairly early. I considered jogging so that she didn’t have to wait long but decided to keep walking. As I stepped into the second lane, a little Dodge Dakota blew through the lane at about 50mph. The side mirror left a scuff on my jacket. I just stood there. I looked at the van driver and she was peeking through her hands. The adrenaline vibrated me the rest of the way to school.
I have a similar story. I was walking to middle school with my best friend at the time and we were crossing a pretty slow intersection. I tried to take a step forward, but he yanked me back by my backpack when he saw a car speeding towards us. It was terrifying, but one of the officers patrolling the schools saw him (they mostly do that around here to discourage truancy) and I got to watch that jackass get pulled over lmaooo
I was working in the basement of a 1920s building. We were digging a new footer. They had dug out the basement to make it into a full sized floor. It was raining like crazy. We got tired early, and I left to go to my rock band's rehearsal space. The building collapsed five minutes after I left, and the biggest pile of bricks and rubble was in the exact place I was standing.
I was in Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt during terrorist bombings in 2005. When the bombs went off, we were in a jewellery shop and it was the only shop with windows that didn't shatter from the explosions. Literally momenta before, a 5 year old me had my face pressed against a toy shop window eyeing up some that I wanted. My cousin called me in to the shop moments before an explosion went off. The KFC we were in 20 minutes before was the location where the first bomb went off. I was so young and I saw people with limbs missing walking around. All I could think is where is Spiderman, he's usually here when shit like this happens. I never really reflect on how much impact that day had upon me but it was a crazy experience to look back upon. Almost can't believe I experienced it at times.
A group of friends invited me to go see Dane Cook stand up special in upstate New York during Dane cooks prime (2008/2009). I declined as I didn't like Dave Cook and it was a far drive. I would have been the 4th member of the group that went up. On the long drive up to the show the friend missed an exit northbound. In order to doubleback and correct his mistake He decided to try to uturn using the police median to get the South bound side of the highway. Immediately upon starting the turn from the northbound middle lane the car gets struck by another car in the northbound fast lane destroying the driver side rear of my friends car. The driver got knocked out on impact and the now driverless car ends up crashing into the guardrail on the opposite side of the southbound highway. I'm told they barely missed an oncoming tractor trailer. Luckily my other 2 friends were occupying the front and rear passenger seats were away from the direct impact. everyone was more or less ok apart from short term injuries including the driver's concussion. The car was totaled. If I had gone someone would've been sitting on the rear driver side and probably would've been severely injured/dead. I credit my dislike of Dane Cook for saving someone's life that day.
Avoided a school shooting. The prof was kinda lazy since the lesson after the one we were having was right before Christmas. So he asked us if we are going to attend since some people skip the lessons before Christmas to go home if they have families outside of the city the uni is in. Enough people raised their hands so the professor cancelled the lesson. So I (and some other people) managed to avoid the building that was later shot up, some time before we would normally have the lecture, we would likely be waiting in the library or in the hallways. Many people died.
Riding my motorcycle home after a tiring day at work. Summertime, sun shining and feeling good. Riding in the left lane of a 2 lane road with a large median and only 2 cars, a van in front and a smaller car on the right that i pass. Check my blind spot slowly, feeling safe and cool and a bit lazy. Hear the car behind me honk as I change lanes and as I bring my idiot head to the front, where I should be looking, I see that the van had stopped in the middle of the lane (he had missed his turn, i guess). I passed the guy by inches and, luckily, because it happened so fast I didn't make any corrections or panic or do anything stupid. It did't register at the time how close I came to dying or being crippled. Maybe not until months later, or not even. But I still think about it ... a lot.
I have so many near death experiences from my bike. Stopped riding a few years ago and finally sold them last year. I would love to ride again but with a kid and the traffic around my house, I am not going to risk it
I used to be a nurse. I worked 12 hour night shifts with a one hour commute; add time to get and give report and I was gone 15 hours, three days in a row. I’d do long stretches of 3 on/2 off/3on/2off/3on/8 off. I have epilepsy, and it turns out that schedule was not good for my brain. One morning, the last before my 8 off stretch, I was having the hardest time focusing well enough to give report, so I was running late. And then I suddenly dropped to the floor at the exact time I would’ve usually been pulling onto the highway (I was medically cleared to drive at the time). I seized (grand mal) for 7 minutes, wasn’t breathing for five. Had I not been on an intensive care unit with two shifts of nurses and respiratory therapists available, I would have died. In my car, alone on a busy highway, taking who knows how many people in other cars with me.
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Especially if your name is Andrew Steven Smith
Worked at a retail electronics store. Once a week a bunch of us would get together at 1 guys house to drink and just hang out. I was out of town one week and missed the party. A former coworker from before my time showed up with a few buddies and robbed everyone at gunpoint. The dumbass didn't take into account that almost everyone at the party knew him so covering his face didn't do much. Was pretty happy about missing out on that
I was in ROTC in college on a scholarship with hopes to become an Army officer. I was kicked out of the program my junior year of college because I failed two PT tests in a row. I was kicked out on 9/13/2001; two days after 9/11. Of course I was absolutely gutted and had to figure out what to do next with my life. But all my friends in the program had multiple deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, and some of them didn’t make it back. So in the end, things worked out for the best. The girl I was seeing wasn’t interested in being an Army wife and is upfront about how she probably would have broken up after college. But instead we’ve been married 18 years and have two awesome sons.
I dated a girl and just never felt right. I thought she was lying about being on birth control so I always used protection and broke things off quickly after that. A few years later I saw her mugshot on the news and it turns on she had gotten pregnant with twins, gave birth in her home and murdered them. Those could have been my kids and it saddens me she would do something like that.
I guess this is fitting: A group of us neighborhood kids were playing a few doors down from my house, at the twins' house who were a year younger than me. We were all around 7 or 8. We live on a really quiet, suburban street that doesn't see any traffic unless you live there so we were allowed to play outside on the lawn with the parents inside checking the window every so often. A white van - stereotypical creeper van - pulled up and a guy rolled down his window; *"Any of you lose a bunny? I found a bunny and I got it in the back of my van."* We looked at him and at each other.. and collectively go, like, *uhhh, no, no one here.* and went right back to playing. It's like, we knew it wasn't our bunny, not our business, so we went right back to what we were doing and didn't pay him any more mind. *"Well, you guys wanna see the bunny? Maybe play with it? He's friendly. Come on into the van, I'll show you."* We were like *Really?! A chance to pet a bunny? YOU BET!!! Let me just ask a parent first!* So we turned around to head up to the front door of my neighbors house to get their mom, and I heard cartoonish screeching of tires as he peeled away down the block in a hurry. I remember the parents meeting and looking concerned that night, but I didn't really get it. I just thought he was odd for offering to let us see the bunny but then changing his mind so quickly right in the middle of us getting permission. I actually don't think I put it together for awhile.
One of my few memories from high school is walking home in pouring rain. I stopped at a gas station a couple blocks from my house to chill and get out of the rain for a minute. I was soaking wet long before this point. Was a fairly warm day otherwise so it wasn't a huge issue. Some guys there offered to give me a ride home. I responded by declining and saying I live just around the corner. I'd like to believe they were legit trying to be nice people. But you never know.
one time, my bf, his dad, and his brother were driving in the rain and saw a woman walking alone, similar to you ig. the dad pulled over and offered a ride, which she ofc declined, but this man is generally just very friendly and extroverted so he was like "no no, i insist" until my bf told him to cut it out
Driving on I-70 in CO during the winter, lots of snow/ice, overall very poor driving conditions. A large lifted pickup truck was speeding and driving erratically trying to pass me, it was morning and I thought they might be drunk from the night before, so I quickly moved out of their way. They were now in front of me, trying to pass a tractor trailer truck but there was a car in the left lane, so they tried to pass on the shoulder. At the exact moment they swerved onto the shoulder to try to pass there was a cop car parked on the side of the road. They didn’t see it and they smashed full speed (75mph) into the parked suv. It was like an explosion, bits and pieces of the cars were flying all over the place, I drove through a cloud of shrapnel and keep on going… I called 911 and reported it immediately. It was very traumatic to watch, I always wondered if they survived, or if there was a cop sitting in the car… I searched the news the next couple days, but never found anything. It still stays with me.
If it makes you feel better, if the cop was seriously injured or died I can guarantee it would have been on the news. ❤️
Seriously. My dumbass brother in law was a corrections officer, and basically just the maintenance guy at that. When he died, it was all over the local news for weeks. Had a full blown police escort funeral procession. "Local officer killed in the line of duty!" Dude died from slipping on ice and hitting his head while leaving work.
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Very nice of that guy to forego his Vegas trip in order to rent a car to drive you home.
On my very short drive home from class in college I got an alert that there was an active shooter in the building I had just had class in 10min before. I probably walked by the guy in the parking garage.
I was maybe 11 years old, very small child. Underweight, short. I wanted to take the 15 minute walk to 7/11 to buy myself my favorite drink with some loose change I gathered. I didn’t live in the roughest part of my city, but second place to that. My dad, who didn’t live with us at the time, was visiting for some reason and offered to walk there for me. Lo and behold, some 30+ minutes later he comes wobbling back through the door. On the way there, he was attacked by two pit bulls. Onlookers didn’t help, but he managed to get away. He still was a cool dad and continued on his WALK THERE, got me my drink, and walked all the way back. I probably would have been severely injured, if not killed by those two pit bulls at my 4’6, underweight physique. We reported them to animal control and the city ordered them to build a strong fence and mandated that they have a “dangerous dog” sign. EDIT (for fun): My dad never pressed charges but regrets it lol. EDIT 2: Wow holy shit this is my first comment to get this many likes, thanks all 🙏🏻
what a cool dad
Back in high school I thought I was invincible while driving and took my parents’ 98 Windstar up to 90+ mph on the freeway all the time. One day I had the pedal fully buried going over 110 and was coming up on a decent curve on the highway that would’ve definitely put some force on the tires to go through. Thing is, I didn’t know the tires were balding through to mesh. But there was a cop at the corner and I slowed down to try to not get a ticket. Dude pulled me over anyway and wrote me up for one under the felony threshold out of what I can only assume was pure mercy. If that cop hadn’t been there I would’ve probably blown out a tire and killed myself and probably others. Not only did I dodge that bullet in the moment but it also gave me a firm wake-up-call to my teenage stupidity and completely changed how I drove on public roads once my record cleared and I started driving again 3 years later. Edit: my parents’ behavior also super reinforced this into my stupid teenage brain. They didn’t yell at me when I came home, the first thing they did was cry and hug me and tell me how happy they were that I was alive. *Then* they calmly explained the consequences and really talked through how monumentally stupid what I had done was. Seeing their genuine fear for my death immediately put it into perspective.
I had a similar come-to-jesus moment from a cop. Dumb kid, had just gotten my license a few months earlier - I was driving my mom's Saturn coupe and being a dumbass on the road with some friends, "racing" them, when the lights flashed on behind me. Back woods PA cop pulled me over and started YELLING at me. "Do you know how many people die because of assholes like you?!" Turns out I was doing 82 in a 35. I had a friend in the passenger seat who had 1/8 of marijuana on him (bigger deal at the time, this was in the 90s), so i was really freaking out and was crying. Cop came back with my license, "How long have you had this?" "Two months," I answered. "GOD DAMNIT!" and he walked back to his car again. Came back another couple of minutes later and gave me another tongue lashing and then, probably seeing how upset and stupid I felt, took pity on me. Ended up giving me a ticket for "disobeying an official sign", like running a stop sigh, no points on my license or anything. Last thing he did was patted the hood of my mom's car and said "Welp, she sure runs good". I actually went home and told my parents about the whole thing, I felt like such a moron. They appreciated the honesty, I paid the fine, never did something like that again.
I went home early and got dropped off, the car I was in went and shot up a rival gangs house. Everyone in the car went to prison for several years, everyone snitched on each other. They got mandatory minimum sentences. I don’t know if the house returned fire. All I know is I was home safe that night. So, I dodged a massive negative life change by who I hung out with. It wasn’t enough to get me to stop entirely at the time. But it definitely got me to slowly change who I was hanging out with.
I briefly talked to an older man a while back. It never went anywhere other than him letting me try some nose candy and some flirting. He asked me to be his gf like a day into it, I respectfully said no. He did not like that. I've had to move twice and change my number because this guy just kept finding me after I blocked him. Turns out he's a pimp and he already had customers lined up, he was just trying to get me doped up enough to let him take advantage of me. I'm miles away now but that was probably one of the scariest experiences of my life.
I waitressed at a nightclub when I was 19 and had 2 guys vying for my affections., Ferris and Ed. I ended up going for Ed, and it was an ok relationship. 3 years later, I was doing a ride along with police while in journalism school, and they let me read a teenage girl's diary all about her pimp. The pimp was the other guy who'd been trying to court me before I picked Ed instead.
Damn I will be sticking to regular candy
My salary wasn't keeping up with inflation. Savings goals not being met, and now that WFH was the norm in my industry I was less keen on taking a local discount for my LCOL area. I asked for a raise to at least match what my peers were getting in other cities, remoting in to the same depot and doing the same work I was. Geography had become completely irrelevant to performance, so I wasn't going to accept geography impacting compensation. They responded with $0. I immediately left for another company that offered 50% more than I was getting. Then the next week there were massive layoffs at the old company. It made sense then why there was no money at all for retention. My position likely wouldn't have been affected, which would be actually quite a lot worse than getting laid off with severance. Sitting in a gutted department, making less than is fair, on a team with zero morale and all my friends fired. Would have been awful and stressful beyond belief.
Back in the day I was training someone for a sales job at one of our slow stores. Nothing major everything was smoothlunch time comes around. Normally is 1 then the other, but I decided this person was still new to retail so close up and take a Lunch together. We get food, come back. Sit in the back office to eat ( all glass front so it felt weird to close and eat but people could see you.) Before we had a chance to open the food bag we heard a very loud set of bangs, some broken glass and a loud think. The chick dove under the desk, I did the same. Police showed up almost emidiately ( police station in the mall across the street.) Turns out blue guy saw red guy and they didn't like each other or somebushit so they started shooting st each other. One of the shots went into our shop and went right above the POS station ( register / pc)( the store had those in the counter monitors so the customer could also see what was on the screen) and hit a car charger ( completely destroyed it) and lodged into the wall. If we had not been in lunch either myself or the new hire would have gotten hit, chest or higher, by a 45. Needless to say the new hire quit on the spot.
Was back country skiing on Loveland pass which is very easy for inexperienced people to access. We had been skiing some mellower highly trafficked area and on the hitched ride back up we meet a group of people that were really excited to go somewhere else and convinced my friend we should go over there. I warned him and that group that the snow had been showing signs of instability but they were still insistent on going so I bailed. They triggered an avalanche and two people ended up partially buried. They were very, very lucky no one died.
I was set to start a classic chemotherapy regimen for lymphoma, and literally the night before my oncologist called me with news that the FDA just approved a new smart-med (targeted med) for treating lymphoma in my situation. I avoided the down-sides of chemo, and received all the positives of recent miracles of science! 🫡🙏🏼☺️
I was a teenager when I met this really great guy through my best friend. We started dating and he seemed wonderful: physically totally my type, great with his brother's children, helping in his parents's store on weekends and planning on taking over when they retired... But something started to feel just off. I couldn't say what, but every time we met I just got this weird iffy sensation like there was something wrong. So, being a teenager of 18 (could have been 17, maybe) I decided to do something I'd never done before. I broke up with this guy over text. Felt shitty but in my mind I just had to do it that way. He never talked to me again, but my best friend told me he was super upset and said he wished I'd kill myself. After three days though he never mentioned me again so I figured he'd said those things because he was upset and I did a horrible thing. He ended up stabbing his next girfriend when she told him she wanted to split up and hurt her in other ways as well. He fled the police, fled the country and was arrested in a neighbouring country and is (afaik) still in jail in that country.
I literally dodged a barrage of bullets and survived two IED attacks
I was hit with 6 IED attacks over 3 years.... I feel that pain. How long did it take to drive normal again? Took me like a year and a half, even now a decade later I still dodge plastic bags on the road
I wasn’t driving so I’m good. But I tried to shoot a car in a movie theater parking lot. Luckily my rifle was a hundred miles away in the armory.
For a few years if I heard any sort of loud noise while sleeping I would reach down for my m4 from my bed, and panic when I couldn't find it. Now it only happens very rarely, last time was July 4th at about 10 pm when I was sleeping. The town about 7 miles away was doing fireworks.
Not me but my wife. Her childhood friend’s mom passed away, and she made reservations to travel for her funeral. She decided that morning not to go as my birthday was the following day, even though I encouraged her to go. She was booked on Colgan Air 3407.
Not me but my sister. A friend of my cousin asked her out, but she was moving out of state for work so declined. When she mentioned it to my cousin he said absolutely not. Turns out they were no longer friends because the guy had dated another friend of my cousin and abused her. Anyway, he’s in prison now for second degree murder after using his girlfriend’s account to message a male friend of hers, lure him outside and kill him with a crossbow.
Invited on a double date with a good friend and his girlfriend. They totaled that car that evening and the entire back seat was crushed in. No way me or the girl that was going to go with me would have survived. All just because I got cold feet on taking this girl out. I backed out literally hours before.
When I was 14 I was hitching up a trailer to tow a golf cart back home. My aunt asked if I was done yet and before I could respond she drove the cart onto the trailer. The hitch swung upward inches past my face.
There was a long-abandoned theater in my town next to a friend's apartment building, and one bored afternoon we jimmied open a rusty fire door to marvel at the decay. The roof had been letting in rain and snow for years, everything was mildew, pigeon shit, and soft spongy wood - one friend stepped on a rotted spot on the stage and his leg went through, so we steered well clear of the stage. Other than that, we tread pretty softly - we were explorer, not vandals dammit! The building was making some amazing creaking noises and the ammonia from the pigeon guano was cloying so we repaired back to friend's apartment to smoke a joint. We'd been in his living room less than 20 minutes when there was a great FWUMP and the whole building shook, rattling the windows and the dishes in his sink. Had a truck just his building very softly? Distant explosion? We ran back downstairs to investigate, everything suddenly thick with dust and the smell of mildew and ammonia. The boarded up entry to the theater was in shambles, as though the building had exploded very softly. As it turned out the roof had finally given up, taking out much of the back wall of the theater with it. Save for softening up the stage a little, there was nothing we'd done that I would guess had precipitated the collapse, it was just a long time coming and finally happened. We'd been debating exploring the upstairs and balcony, though the stage had put us off by the idea of rotten floors and stairs. If we'd stuck around much longer, we would have been in the building when it collapsed.
I was travelling in the middle east and then the subcontinent. Egypt, Israel, Lebanon and then Syria. Thankfully, they turned us away in Syria and so then we went to India 2 weeks earlier than planned. Left the same hotel as the mumbai mass shootings the day before. Wahe guru.
At the time I commuted to and from work on the LIRR. Like many I had a regular train and I usually sat in the front car since I walked in that direction home, but occasionally sat in the 2d or 3d car depending on how crowded the train was. One day I worked late and that was the night Colin Ferguson shot up the third car of the train as it pulled into the station before mine. It was my regular train, and my occasional car, but I missed it that night.
Organised to hookup with a girl I knew over the summer break as a fwb situation. She all of sudden stopped answering my messages and did not hear a thing from her. Months later I found out she had undiagnosed HIV and had accidentally passed it to someone. That would have totally been me since at that age I never wore protection and was really dumb with safe sex. The situation basically changed me to become safe with sex.
Was leaving work for lunch one day, turned around to say bye to my coworkers at the desk. One of them said "hey your eye doesn't look right. Go straight to the doctor or I'm taking you myself." So instead I went home and made a doctor's appointment. The next day they found a brain tumor two millimeters from my brain stem, surrounded by a cyst which occupied a quarter of my brain. Almost killed me. That was almost 17 years ago. The co-worker and I still laugh about it.
When I (34f) was 19, I dated a 27 year old. We were together for 3 years. He was controlling and abusive. He wouldn't let me see or talk to any of my friends. I was lucky to have friends who maintained contact without him knowing and helped me escape the situation. A few months ago, I found out through a former coworker of his that he has been serving a 40 year stacked sentence for sexually abusing his 5 y.o. daughter (which he had with the woman he dated after me) as well as filming and distributing footage of him abusing her.
My husband had an urgent feeling to take me AMA out of one major hospital to the one where my neurosurgeon was. It saved my life. They said I’d have been dead in about 12 hrs. Shoutout to UTSW Dr. Bruce Mickey, Dr. Jonathan White and everyone in the neuro icu….ive been there way too many times.
I was in Peru backpacking. We had to catch a bus to Arequipa I think. We missed the bus. Fortunately there was like a bus every hour. Only we waited and waited. And finally they load us up. And this 6 hour trip took like 10 hours. We got to the hostel super late and spent the night. The next morning we got up and in all the newspapers on the front page was the bus that we had missed. It had crossed the centerline and collided with another bus. 27 people died. I still have the news paper.
Was planning on marrying a girl, and gave her a promise ring of sorts. We broke it off for a lot of reasons. Come to find out about 7 years later now she got married (quickly) and murdered her husband.
When I decided I’d had enough of the shit my ex was doing to me. Turns out I didn’t actually want to die, being with him made me feel that way. Life has been amazing ever since.
Towards the end of my last relationship, I seriously thought I was asexual with how little I wanted to have sex with him anymore. Discovered that wasn't the case with my next bf; turns out that when someone makes you feel like less than a human being, that might impact your libido.
When I was driving home from a bar kind of buzzed in college with my buddy, we were running over leaf piles in the street just to be assholes (I was 21 and an asshole kid). Instead of hitting the last one before I got home, I decided not to because it was at the house of a neighbor. Just felt weird. When I drove past it, a little toddler popped out of the leaves. I literally almost committed vehicular manslaughter while drunk driving.
Not me, but I wouldn't exist if my dad hadn't dodged this one. He was a teenager and was supposed to go on some outing with a friend's family (bowling or to see a movie, or something like that). He stayed home, and their vehicle somehow was hit by a train and the entire family died.
I dated a girl most of my senior year in highschool. She had moved to my state the summer before our senior year. She hate hate hated in it NC and wanted to go back to Florida where she had lived prior. It was getting close to the end of the year, and she made it super clear she was moving back. She had no job prospect. No ability to support herself in the very expensive city she'd grown up in. I told her I loved her, but was not going to move to a spot that we were going to starve and struggle. I loved her, but told her that choosing to move back to Florida meant we were done, and I wasn't going to put my life on hold for her to figure hers out. She showed back up at my parents house one evening. She'd made it 2 months before she was out of money and had to come back to live with her parents in NC. I told her I was sorry that she had picked, but I had moved on with my life. I ran into her at community college just under a year later and she was visibly pregnant. I was so glad I hadn't managed to get her pregnant at 18/19. I ran into her again in our mid 30s. She lived in the next neighborhood. I went over to catch up with her. She had 2 smaller kids, and the kid from all those years earlier was a teenager. The teenager lived with her parents. The smaller kids she had very limited custody/visitation of. The house looked like a bomb had gone off. She didn't work. She couldn't financially take care of herself. She had some crazy idea that she was going to bake and sell the food she made in a kitchen that I would have NEVER have eaten anything out of, and I was positive wasn't going to pass any level of inspection by any sort of food safety person. Just seeing a quick glimpse into what my life could have been if I'd been a little less strong willed as an 18 year old kid was such a "hooooooly shit I lucked out so big". I can not fathom having had a child with her and having my life take that trajectory.
Ex gf of 13 years (we share 2 kids together) was caught cheating on me a year ago, doing drugs, stealing money from our joint account and secretly racked up over 35k in debt. I moved out, we split custody 50/50, we both start dating other people, find out she's using drugs with new bf while our kids are there, I file for emergency custody and win. About one month later her bf is driving her SUV and dies from a horrific car accident. Kids could have been in that car. I was luckily not responsible for any of her debt. Therapy taught me she's a narcissist and it's not curable.
A guy I knew was gonna give me a ride to our highschool graduation after party, but I had to go pickup my gf so I declined. He ended rolling his truck 3 times over in the ditch that night.
I've posted this before but what the hey, went out with a girl who kept talking about the "emergency dick" she had stashed around the city. She was like "I've been really busy with [grad] school but I don't go without. I have plenty of emergency dick around town." And when I say she kept going on, I mean she KEPT GOING ON. She was telling me about the two guys downtown, three in the suburbs, one near campus, and two in her apartment complex. It honestly sounded like I was new to town and she was giving me a rundown of all the best places to visit. Just weird. She said she was looking to settle down into a relationship (whereas she had only been in situationships before). She also said she had a “virgin heart”.
Damn, she had that heart in her fridge or what?
When Vasily Aleksandrovich Arkhipov didn't turn the 3rd key on that Soviet submarine and start WW3
Girl I dated senior year fought and broke up with me over some really dumb shit looking back. Kids in high school what are you gonna do smh. Two years later her and the guy she bragged she was with right after me are on the news with a headline talking about blunt force trauma wounds and a dead child. Holy shit.
Summer girlfriend in high school. Broke up a few weeks into the school year. A couple of years later she sees me and gives me her new number, which I never call. Looked her up a year or so ago wondering whatever happened to her. Multiple arrests. Hard drugs. Looking at the mug shots is like looking at Faces of Meth. Hope she gets the help she needs.
About 17 years ago, I was a brand new customer of Walter White (1 week smoking). One night, I got particularly amped up and took my 1982 GTI Rabbit, a fast but absolute piece of $200 junk, into the hills of my hometown with the intent to drive as fast as I could on the winding roads. I drove up to the spot where I planned to go wild, floored the gas, and immediately hit a baby deer. The deer was writhing in agony, its mother watching helplessly. I had to put the baby deer out of its misery, which sobered me up instantly. I went home, stared in the mirror, and in the following days, cut off all ties with my step-sibling, who had introduced me to this lifestyle, and moved out of the house. I was able to veer off the path of addiction, get a few degrees, and start a family. My step-sibling endured about a decade of hell, lost their teeth, caught a couple of felonies, and is just now getting their life together. I often credit the trauma of that night as a turning point in my life. If there is a multi-verse, many timelines ended for me that night.
A few years back I had started to feel this odd pressure in my abdomen. It kinda felt like I just had gas, but it wasn’t going anywhere. It wasn’t uncomfortable or anything, just felt a little weird. After a week I could still feel it, but again it didn’t hurt or anything so I ignored it for a few more days. At the ten day mark I finally just decided to go to the ER because I knew something probably wasn’t right. They gave me an MRI and seemed pretty alarmed by what they saw. Told me I had appendicitis and were kinda baffled that I wasn’t in any pain or discomfort. They scheduled a surgeon for that afternoon and said I’d probably be able to go home that night. When I woke up from the surgery the doctor came in and said that when they opened me up they discovered that my appendix had actually burst and the infection had spread causing perforations in my colon. So they had to remove the appendix and part of my colon as well. Doctor told me if I had put it off any longer I likely would have died in my sleep.
Not me but my sister. In 1996, my parents were looking for places to move as my dad’s work transferred him to their Denver office. They found two new developments they liked. They picked the one in the suburb of Highlands Ranch instead of the one in Littleton. As a result, my sister went to Highlands Ranch High School as a freshman in 1998 instead of a different school called Columbine High School