One way someone screwed up their life with just a couple of words? That line added kidnapping to the charges against O. J. Simpson and assured he was going to prison.
Don’t let nobody out of this room. A guy I was once friendly with got stopped for speeding while under the influence. He wondered why he got taken to headquarters and then jail after he tried to bribe the cop by saying, “Here’s $50. Go buy yourself some donuts and let’s forget the whole thing.
” Police here in Chile are very strictly against corruption and wear cameras at all times. There was a video on the news of a foreigner trying to bribe an officer with increasingly large amounts of money. He got laughed out of the country. In 2011, Alexandra Wallace, a UCLA student, uploaded a video to YouTube mocking Asian UCLA students.
The video went viral, resulting in numerous videos mocking her and her blatant racist statements. She had to leave UCLA. My friend got stopped for a DUI. He told me he was sober when we left, but when the cop pulled us over, he admitted he had actually been drinking.
He managed to pass all the field sobriety tests and even had a conversation with the cop for like fifteen minutes. The cop was going to let him off with a speeding ticket. He was speeding and asked my friend to sign the ticket. My friend said no.
The cops arrested him, took him to jail, gave him a breathalyzer, discovered he was over the limit, and wrote him up for a DUI. I once watched someone talk themselves out of a job. They were giving a presentation to a senior client, providing update information on the last three months of work in a particular project stream. Their presentation consisted of them stating that they didn’t know what they were talking about, had done no investigation work, and had made up their own story.
Yes, that is a quote. Anyone remember the balloon boy incident? A family where the dad was some sort of inventor made a weather balloon that flew off, and they panicked because one of their younger boys, around six at the time, was missing. They thought he was up in the rogue balloon.
News crews were called, and it became viral as cameras followed the balloon around, even panicking when they saw something fall out of it. Turns out the boy was found safe playing in the attic. They still became viral, and news outlets wanted to interview the family. The dad was happy to comply.
Well, kids being innocent kids during one major news network interview, the sleepy boy said, “We did it for a show. ” You could see the look in the dad’s eyes. He had messed up. It was revealed that the rogue balloon boy was staged so the dad could shop for a reality TV show for his family.
After that, they went under a hail storm of investigation. CPS was called, and they were sued for the hoax. Big mess. I don’t feel sorry for the dad.
I feel sorry for his kids going through public scrutiny just because daddy wanted his fifteen minutes of fame. What really sold it? The boy let out a fart during the awkward silence. I once messed up a job interview when I replied to a question with, “Yeah, I have anger issues, but I usually draw them out.
” Then I proceeded to show him angry scribbles. I remember many years ago when I was young, interviewing for some job. It wasn’t sales, but it could lead to a well-paying sales position. The lady was telling me all the advancements I could make, and I said, “Oh, I don’t want to do sales at all.
I’m not a good liar. ” The interview ended sixty seconds later. Magic player Travis Woo was a respected entertainer, streamer, and content producer until he went on a rant on Twitch about Hitler doing nothing wrong. Fired and swept mostly under the rug now.
He was always a weird guy anyway, with his shirtless bad angle streams. Freaking nutter. “Nah, man. I’m fine to drive.
” Got a DUI, lost his job, was injured, and now evens out liquid concrete instead of finishing college. I bet people who feel the need to say they’re fine to drive are not, in fact, fine to drive. About a year ago at my job, we were doing trial days. We were hiring three new people and had five in for trial days, one per day, Monday to Friday.
My manager asked me to email her that night to let her know how the girl I had for the trial day got on and if she was worth hiring. Everything was going great. Lovely girl, very easy to get along with, adapted easily. I was making conversation, and she mentioned that she goes from job to job a lot because she gets bored of jobs very easily.
Literally because of that, I had to tell my manager not to hire her, because we’d only be replacing her soon enough. I still don’t understand why someone would say that during a trial for a job. She shot herself in the foot. Side note, the three people we did hire are still working for us a year later.
So, there’s some happy ending. I saw somebody screw up their own life and somebody else’s simultaneously. A few years ago, my fifteen-year-old cousin got pregnant. She wanted an abortion.
My aunt wouldn’t let her get one. Adoption wasn’t an option either. “You’re not getting an abortion. You made your bed, so you lie in it.
” So my cousin carried the baby to term and had a healthy baby girl. She dropped out of school because my aunt wanted nothing to do with the baby, so she had to tend to it full-time. A week of this went on, and my cousin decided enough was enough and ran away with her seventeen-year-old boyfriend. My cousin had straight A’s until she was basically forced to drop out.
She still doesn’t have her degree and is still living with her boyfriend somewhere in Washington. He has a construction job, and my cousin has an Etsy shop. They’re doing okay, but I know she always wanted to go to college. My aunt had to raise the baby and is still raising her.
She is forty-five and did not want another kid. My alcoholic and abusive ex-stepfather was drunk at a bar once in our hometown. Ran into his boss, said a few mouthy words to him, and was fired the following Monday. He had been at his job for twenty years and made over a hundred thousand dollars.
He lost it all because he was a drunk jerk. This is a real story. A few years ago, I was an avid World of Warcraft player, and one of my best friends had finally started playing the game. It was great for our friendship because I had moved to another state, and it was something we could do together, like hanging out.
We’d log into WoW a few times a week after work and chat over Skype. At this time, he was dating this girl who also played WoW. Their relationship had been going strong for about a year, and she was starting to want to move in with him. However, he had been dodging the subject, stating he’d never lived with a girl before, which he had, and wasn’t ready to go there yet.
One day, him and I were on a Skype call doing our WoW thing. His girlfriend was also in the room, playing on his Xbox in the background. I started talking about my wife, going into a funny story about living with her, and we got a chuckle out of it. My friend tried to one-up the story by telling me something he experienced while living with his former girlfriend, and he said, “Dude, when I lived with Melissa, blah blah blah.
” Immediately, my heart sank. I sent him a DM in the game that simply said, “You done messed up, dude. You just said you lived with your ex, and I swear to God I heard his balls shoot up from his nut sack to his throat over Skype. ” He replied back in game, “It’s cool, bro.
I don’t think she heard. She’s playing Xbox. Let’s just play it off. ” In my mind, there’s no way she didn’t hear that.
I pictured her picking up that sentence like when Peter Parker went into spider sense mode during the first Spider-Man movie, hearing every little detail around him, including a fly buzzing through the air. The tone of our Skype conversation went from laughing to awkward silence pretty quick. It was funny because I was genuinely nervous even though it had nothing to do with me. We played WoW for a few more minutes, and he DM’d me, “Dude, she just got up and left without even saying anything.
I got to go. ” That was it. He was dead. A woman in Brazil yelled macaco, Portuguese for monkey, seen as a wildly offensive slur against black people, so offensive you can be prosecuted for hate speech, at a black soccer player during a game.
She didn’t know she happened to be on the jumbotron at that moment. She lost her job and became a complete social pariah. Destroyed her life with one word. A few years ago here in the US, a Republican congressman lost his seat and his political career was ruined because he called a person from India macaca.
He’ll always be known as George Macaca Allen for all time. My step uncle recently got married, and while super drunk at the reception, he made a cringe-inducing speech about how he knew a really good divorce lawyer who would guarantee him alimony in the settlement. When the smiles turned to gasps, he quickly backpedaled and said he wouldn’t divorce her right away. He would get his money’s worth from the wedding.
Then, still trying to get a laugh, he boldly claimed he would murder and kill to make more money than she did, so she would be well taken care of. Everyone at the reception hall was completely dumbfounded, while my brother and I, who attended with our wives, tried to stifle our laughter at the train wreck we just watched in slow motion. The bride cried and ran out, while my uncle chased after her yelling, and I kid you not, “What did I say? ”
Varner from Survivor screwed up pretty badly.
He was about to be voted off the tribe and was making one last plea to let him stay when he brought up how there was deception in the tribe because one of the tribe members hadn’t told everybody that they were transgender. He outed the guy on national television, was immediately voted off, and was fired from his job after the episode aired because of how much hate he got from that. A friend in college said he had crabs just to avoid the advances of a fat girl, who then spread the rumor around school. Next thing you know, he was known as the guy with crabs.
A guy in my high school class told the teacher he was writing a piece on her and asked how to spell the letter C. He’s been in and out of prison a lot since then. I’m more careful when I drive drunk. Dead at nineteen.
Glad I didn’t get in that car with him. RIP Brandon. A kid I knew was being mugged. Gun to his forehead, the thug took his phone and wallet and was about to leave.
The kid politely asked if the thug could give back only his ID card. The thug shot him dead in the head. Two days after having my head cracked open, I had a really bad day. My four-year-old daughter, who I love, wasn’t picked up by her respite care family, and they were completely unreachable.
My first-grade son was running a fever, so he was home from school. My daughter has anger and aggression issues, and she threw three gigantic tantrums that day. A social worker even came to my home and checked on us that day. I’ll admit I was really mentally messed up before the car accident, but I was just depressed.
After begging anyone I could think to call to come help, because my daughter was trying to rip my staples and stitches out, I called the social worker and said someone had to come help or get her, because she was downright terrifying. The next thing I know, the police came and took my children. I’ve never gotten them back. I can’t fathom how many people and social workers ignored me.
It makes me sick. Not even a week into foster placement, my daughter was behaving like she did at home and was put into a psychiatric hospital. She was four years old. To this day, she still has violent behavior with no common trigger.
She’s finally old enough to be medicated, but as far as I know, it’s caused her to gain weight. That’s it. She’s just gone and bitten a classmate and taken out a chunk. I am scared of her and for her.
How and why? I shouldn’t have been left alone after a social worker watched her behavior hours earlier and knew I had a head injury. I was never charged with abuse or neglect, but my family is destroyed because I asked for help. Some guy at work in distribution jokingly said, “I’ll cut you,” to a coworker and motioned with a box cutter.
HR didn’t like that and let him go. A kid I knew told a trans woman she’d always be a man and nothing else. No one hung out with him after that. They all basically shunned him.
I’m glad he saw consequences for his crappy behavior. There are a lot of places where people would have just dismissed that. I was on a job interview once for a high-profile academic position where the candidate was asked what tools would be essential to their research. The first thing they named was a technique our institution is not capable of carrying out.
They backpedaled really fast, but the damage was done. Maybe they’ll get the job at an institution that doesn’t suck. There’s that CIO guy who filmed himself yelling at the girl in the drive-thru and got fired and ruined his life. A candidate in an interview group of three hundred for twenty-three positions, when the moderator asked the group if there were any questions, said, “How much are we going to be paid?
” That’s a fair question, just wrong timing. PewDiePie isn’t exactly ruined, but I think it counts. He did a video featuring the website Fiverr, where you pay five dollars to people to do stuff. He paid five dollars to a couple of guys who would do a silly dance along with any message.
He requested the message “death to all Jews” as a joke. The guys actually did it, got their account suspended when the video got out, and eventually got it back. The Wall Street Journal did an article based on many of his Nazi and edgy jokes, only they didn’t say they were jokes. He lost his second season of Scare PewDiePie and other things.
And now it seems like WSJ was running a war against YouTube. Every time someone famous says something racist, even internet personalities with no rules, they fall off their high horses. It’s incredible how fast you can screw up your life by saying something like that. Remember presidential candidate Howard Dean from the 2004 election?
He was doing pretty well. Then at a rally he did a weird little scream thing. His poll numbers fell really fast. I’m a conservative and never supported Dean, but I never understood what the big deal was about the scream.
I thought it was a non-issue. I rode the bus with a guy who was pulled over for not wearing a seatbelt or something trivial. He felt it was profiling, so he went to fight it in court. The judge upheld it.
He flipped out and used profanity. The judge revoked his license for seven years. Two of my friends were against condoms. “It just doesn’t feel as good.
” They both have kids now, and I hear them complain that their childless friends can go out and drink all weekend while they’re stuck at home. Reddit thinks construction workers are poor, uneducated screw-ups. I have a degree in computer science and started my own remodeling company. So far, it’s paid a lot of bills, like all of them.
Lack of good financial habits is extremely easy to mess up, and I see a lot of smart people mess it up. It’s made worse because most people don’t want to talk numbers, like the number in the bank is equivalent to your actual human worth. Dad hit his daily withdrawal limit at the ATM, stormed into the bank in a tizzy to demand they let him take out more. The teller asked him what he was going to do with that amount of money.
He lost his cool and started ranting about how the IRS is never going to get his money, etc. Genuinely surprised he didn’t get the cops called on him. He’s no longer welcome at that branch. This happened at one of my old jobs about ten years ago.
There was an opening for a management position. A coworker who sat in the cube behind me applied for it. There were actually a number of guys on our team who applied. So, the VP did a lunch interview each day with the guys applying.
Two or three guys had already done it. One day, I was sitting in my cube, spun around facing my coworker’s desk. We were talking about whatever. The VP walked up and said, “Chicken Bones coworker, how about we go have some lunch?
My treat. ” My coworker looked him dead in the eye and said, “Oh, I don’t eat lunch. ” The VP said, “O-okay. How about we go downstairs and grab a coffee then?
” My coworker replied, “Oh, no thanks. I just finished a cup. I’m good for a bit. ” The VP looked at me like, what the heck?
He said okay and awkwardly walked away. I looked at my coworker and asked what he was thinking. I don’t really recall exactly what he said, but he was just clueless. Absolutely clueless what the VP was getting at.
They set up a formal interview, but he did not get the job. Not sure if that was the reason why, but I’m sure it didn’t help.