I had a friend in college who had a tendency to act before thinking, but he was generally fun and well-meaning. After I graduated, he got tangled up with a woman he was trying to sleep with, and she pressured him into trying heroin just once. He refused at first, then caved because he felt cornered. He overdosed and died.
That was it. One bad decision ended his whole life. A former acquaintance of mine, Mike, was playing around with a homemade crossbow that I’d helped him build. I was really into archery and fletching back then, and he seemed serious about it.
I usually made him leave the crossbow with me because, you know, deadly weapon. He agreed to it, but he didn’t really. To convince his parents to let him join an archery club, he wanted to show off the crossbow we’d made. I thought it was a decent plan, so I let him take it home, but without any ammo.
Turns out he was gaming me the whole time just to get more playtime with his favorite toy. He’d gotten his hands on some bolts and was screwing around shooting at his shed. Somehow he fired a bolt that missed the shed completely, passed between the slats on his fence, and hit his neighbor’s daughter in the spine. She hasn’t walked since.
Her unstable older brother beat him up real bad with a crowbar, broke his femur. They both did jail time. Mike was disowned by his family and ended up homeless. I’m not sure where he is in life now.
We were eighteen at the time. The girl was twelve. Her brother was twenty-one. About fifty years ago, my great-uncle was in his early twenties.
He drove home so drunk that he ran over and killed two college students and didn’t even realize it. After his initial incarceration, he couldn’t figure out how to function as a free citizen, so he kept getting himself sent back to jail. He got out about a year ago and couldn’t make his first month’s rent. His solution was to walk to the convenience store, steal a beer, and sit on the curb waiting for the cops to arrive.
I knew a guy who dropped out of a very good college with a full scholarship his family could never have afforded otherwise, all because of a World of Warcraft addiction. He gave up three years of a free education for that game. I managed my own addiction responsibly, so I get it, but I also get that it’s different for different people. I played WoW from release through Cataclysm and never really had a problem walking away from it to focus on life.
After I quit, I had intrusive thoughts about relapsing even eight years later, but I never felt like I gave in. I had a friend years back, always kind of an odd guy, but he had a good heart. One day I was hanging out with him and a few other friends, and he told us he was going to get a tattoo tomorrow. He had this super cool idea, but he wouldn’t tell us what it was because he wanted it to be a surprise.
We saw him about a week later. He had three-quarters of his face green. Like, no design or anything. Just solid dark forest green.
He left the top right quarter of his face normal, and the rest was all green. He was fired from his job the day after getting the tattoo. I kind of lost touch with him after that since he moved to another city. I heard he wound up living in his car.
He’d had a very good IT job at a pretty big company and was making decent money. No clue why he thought permanently turning three-quarters of his face green would be super awesome. I was there when my older brother tried heroin for the first time. Fast forward fifteen years, and he’s constantly going to the hospital for abscesses on his arms and legs, and he’s almost completely cut off from the rest of the family because he’s robbed our parents more than once.
Every few years, he swears he’s going to kick the habit. The first few times, we pooled together cash to send him to rehab and tried to be as supportive as we could. After the tenth relapse or so, we’re too exhausted to even pretend to be hopeful about his newest attempt to get clean. In the Air Force, this new guy joins and goes out to a bar, then decides to drive home.
Gets a DUI. Loses all his rank, has to pay a ton in fines. Leadership fought for him, and he was allowed to stay in. Two months later, as he’s paying tons of lawyer and legal fees, he does something really stupid.
Drives home from the same bar drunk and gets arrested. Loses his license and gets kicked out of the military. So he loses all his income while he’s thousands of dollars in debt. That’s not even the worst part.
A few months later, he celebrates being a civilian again by going to the same bar, then driving home drunk. Arrested and put in jail for a while. I can’t imagine he has many future career opportunities with a less than honorable discharge and an arrest record. I had an acquaintance who was pretty successful.
Early thirties, good job, house, all of it. His next-door neighbors had custody of a sixteen-year-old cheerleader who was home alone all the time. They struck up a friendship. Need I say more?
Actually, yes. The cops stopped him randomly with her in the passenger seat. They pulled her because she looked young. Called her guardians, who denied that he had permission to take her anywhere.
Here’s the thing, they had crossed a county line. Kidnapping charge. They broke him in an interrogation, and he admitted to six counts. Statutory rape charges.
They convinced him to unlock his phone and found her nudes in his inbox. Child pornography charges. Boom goes the cell door. My boss has a saying.
You’re only one more drink and one stupid comment away from losing your career. That being said, I watched a former coworker pick up a beanie from the crown of his head and say, check it out, I look like Brian’s dick. Brian was his uncircumcised subordinate sitting right across from him. My former coworker was out of a job within a month, divorced within six, and living on the streets within three years.
High school acquaintances were partying underage, and some other kids with drama were buzzing the party in some stupid loud car. The drunk guy thought the best way to handle this was to throw a huge paving stone at the car on one of its passes. The stone went through the window and hit the passenger mid-body, basically splitting him open. The driver panicked and refused to take the passenger to the hospital.
Apparently everybody was under the influence. She bled out of internal injuries in the hours that followed. The guy who threw the stone is still in prison for manslaughter. Less than twenty-four hours between the throw and the life-ending consequences.
My ex-landlord’s ex-girlfriend went on a racist road rage rant that got filmed. It went viral on Twitter. I remember reading the news article and thinking about her for some reason. She wasn’t named.
It wasn’t until months later that I found out it was her. She was fired from her three hundred thousand dollar a year job the next day and immediately started getting death threats. She had to move in with her boyfriend. She tried getting a job, but people would look her up and be like, what the hell.
She spent ten thousand dollars on a reputation defender. Changed her name. Was shunned by many family and friends. Her boyfriend, who she wanted to marry, broke up with her because he couldn’t stand the months of depression.
She ended up leaving the state. I knew this guy in my twenties. He was kind of new to a little group. He brought this girl around, and she was trying to bang everybody.
I didn’t know him that well, but I tried to tell him about her. He didn’t believe me and took her side. We stopped talking. When she was trying to get with me one night, she told me he had a premature ejaculation problem and was really lame in bed.
She specified that she really needed some good dick because he seriously only lasts like a minute. I wasn’t interested in her and politely declined. Anyway, I didn’t actually see it, but a few months later, I heard he got her pregnant. The fastest I know of someone ruining their life was about a minute.
That happened about ten years ago. He cut our whole group off, so nobody knows any details. I suspect it’s fifty-fifty whether it was even his, but I’ll probably never know. I’m my own perfect example for this.
I started abusing meth and hanging with all the wrong people. Within three months, I wrecked my car, lost my home, my relationship went up in flames, and I caught some misdemeanors and felonies when I had only ever had speeding tickets before. Now I’m on probation for the next several years, or until I can pay off the thousands I owe the court. Stuck living with my parents at thirty-four.
Single, jobless, and struggling massively with anxiety and depression. Bad choices. Yay, consequences. I was a licensed firearms owner in Canada, and I sold a handful of handguns to my crack dealer when I was still smoking a few years back.
It caught up to me three years after I got sober. I’m going to court for sentencing in a couple of months, with the prosecutor seeking six to eight years. It may not seem like that much in the grand scheme of things, but since I quit smoking crack, I got my driver’s license, started my own construction business, and I’m in a four-year relationship with an amazing woman who was the reason I got sober. All of that is going to be gone.
And my grandpa, the only family who raised me, the only one I have left, will most likely be gone because of his being eighty-four. I’m not sure where you’d count the life being ruined. The second I made the decision to sell the firearms. The second the RCMP and local police pulled me over with twenty cars during morning rush hour.
My name being put in the newspaper with my crime. Or when I get sentenced in a few months. I’ve decided it was the second I made the decision. It helps to be insane.
I say that as someone who is certifiably bonkers. I worked with an engineer at a manufacturing facility at one point in my career. We’ll call him Bob Dobbs. We had defense related contracts with major players.
It was not this man’s job to design anything, but to do manufacturing stuff. At some point within a year of my arriving, he began answering the phone with customers as Bob Dobbs, engineering manager, and insisting that all communication go through him. He got away with this for nearly three months until someone called the actual engineering manager asking for Bob Dobbs. The engineering manager was understandably confused.
A review of Bob Dobbs’s work began. He had been redesigning customer designs before they went to production. There was almost a million dollars in scrap sitting on the shop floor. He was terminated and began a career delivering pizza.
My stupid ex-girlfriend, in an effort to pay back a loan shark, maced the opening manager of a Blockbuster and stole the bank deposit bags. Then she went and picked up her niece and nephews, all underage, ate, and casually drove around with them. She got stopped on a major roadway. Her photo was on the top stories at ten, leading into that evening’s news.
This happened during the NBA Finals that year. I think it was during Game six or seven, so huge viewing audience. Oh, she was easily recognized and apprehended because her best friend was the store manager of that Blockbuster, and she was there all the time, and she had ripped off an application the day before. She spent the next three years in a women’s prison.
I worked in the German social welfare system, a caseworker in a small town. A client of mine said he thought that my calculations would be wrong after his wife left him because he got not enough money. I asked him if he had any expenses I didn’t know about. He was sure he gave me all the info.
I asked him to bring me all his invoices, vouchers, receipts, et cetera, which he did a few days later. I read all his papers and found a pay slip that I didn’t know of. According to my files, he got social welfare at this time, and I had no info that he had a job with income, which would be social welfare fraud. I kept reading and found a so-called insurance policy for a five-series BMW.
You should know that back in the day, a car was a salvageable capital asset. He had to have his car sold to use that money for groceries, et cetera. It was mid-nineties. It’s different now.
Then I found the purchase contract for the car, expensive and with installment payments. Then I found the contract with the bank that gave him the loan for the car. So I called the bank and asked them why the hell they were giving a loan that big to an unemployed social welfare recipient. The woman from the bank began to panic because that was new information to her, and while she was trying to explain what happened, the loan had burst because my client didn’t pay.
See, I figured out that something was wrong with the pay slip. You should know that in Germany, the four-digit postal code including the sub local code, like 1000 Berlin 44, was changed to a five-digit postal code, 12345 Berlin, in 1993. The pay slip was from 1995, but the postal code on that thing was from 1993. He forged the pay slip to get the loan to get the car because his wife told him he needed a better car to keep her.
So he did all this, but the bubble burst because he couldn’t afford to pay the installments, and just because he asked me to recalculate him and brought all his info without sorting them out properly, I was able to prove that he committed some felonies. He told me the story, I said what I had to do now and what might happen in the next weeks. Both he and the bank person were charged and convicted of social welfare fraud, insurance fraud, falsification of documents, and sneaking bank loans using fake income information. When I was in college in the early 2000s, a sophomore drove his car into a bunch of kids out partying on a Saturday, a block and a half from where I was living.
He was going sixty, seventy miles per hour, swiping cars parked on the side of the road before he hit the crowd. I think four people died. He got out screaming nonsense before being tackled. He was on a handful of drugs.
Last I heard, he was in a mental facility. I was dating a girl whose little sister got knocked up when she was around seventeen. Six months pregnant, drinking straight vodka at a family party. I pointed it out to them.
Her family did nothing. The mother didn’t care, didn’t want to smell the bottle of water, said it was a lie. Baby mama trapped some guy with the other father speech. Around month eight of the pregnancy, I behind the scenes paid for a DNA test for him.
Baby wasn’t his. He mentally broke as soon as he heard it. Baby mama didn’t care, laughed it off. She was just trying to nail down someone with a job.
She had no clue who the father was. The baby was born with a bad type of fetal alcohol syndrome. She’s ten now, severely disabled. The grandmother takes care of her.
Baby mama still does hard drugs and passes out at birthday stuff. Many lives ruined. The one that sticks out the most was the guy who was supposedly the father. Watch joy disappear from one second to the next in his eyes.
The rest don’t care, and it’s sickening.