If you ever find yourself in the position of second-guessing anything you are about to say, you probably shouldn't say it.
Unless you're one of those people with integrity who cares to be truthful all the time (or have a particular death wish). Then, by all means, speak your mind and risk ruining a few days, every now and then.
(Content has been edited for clarity.)
‘Just Shut Up And Take The Picture’
“I hate myself every time I think about it this one:
I’m a photographer, and I get animated and enthusiastic during my portrait sessions. So I’m shooting an engagement session one day, and it’s going well, and as I snapped off one with an amazing backdrop and the perfect light I shouted, ‘This is the kind of photo your grandkids are going to go MAD over!’ As this was leaving my mouth, I remembered that the woman suffers from infertility and is sensitive about it. You can pretty much see her heartbreak between one image to the next. She didn’t cry or stop the session and wasn’t rude about it at all. In fact, she was a doll, who regained her composure and we finished the shoot nicely. It was just a flicker on her face where I knew I’d stuck my thumb in a tender spot.
Ah, then at their wedding I was lining everyone up for family portraits, and I turned to an older lady with a sour look on her face and said, ‘And you’re the groom’s grandmother?’ Nope, that was his mother.”
No One Not Noonie
“When I was a teen, I was watching our next door neighbor’s house for the weekend and watching her pets. I left a note that said, ‘Everything went great and noone called’.
You see, I spelled ‘no one’ wrong. Unknown to me, several years back she had escaped a violent marriage to a man named ‘Noonie.’ My letter made her think that her abusive ex had tracked her down and she rightfully panicked.”
On My Way To Work
“I was 16-years-old and going to work at Chuck E. Cheese (I fixed the games, and yes, I had to dress up in the god-awful wretched-smelling rat costume). One day, I decided on my way to work, I should take the back-way, which cut through a neighborhood. Of course, my gut told me to just stick to the highway and that it wasn’t worth the effort. In about the middle of the neighborhood, I pulled up to a four-way stop, looked to my left and used the peripheral for my right.
Well, I should have made a more concentrated effort to look to the right. I missed these kids on gas-powered, stand-up scooters zipping around on the street. I guess they were also thinking about crossing the four-way stop (although I never got that impression), because right when I made it to about the crossroads in the four-way stop, they raced right in front of me.
I clipped one of them around the headlight of my Chevy Blazer. His scooter ratcheted up underneath my right front tire and it caught part of his ankle. I immediately stopped, got out, and assessed this situation. He was alive, thankfully, and wearing a helmet. But his ankle looked bruised. He could stand and walk around. He said he felt okay. A neighbor ran over and called the cops.
I was issued a ‘violation of the right of way’ ticket. I should also mention that I was ghost white, sick with grief, and convinced that I was going to prison. The kids got tickets (handed to their parents) for operating their little stand-up scooters in the street and operating a motor vehicle without adult supervision since they were so young.
The kid turned out alright, I guess. He fractured his ankle and apparently had a decent concussion. They tried to sue me for like $75,000, but since they weren’t supposed to be in the street in the first place, it fell through.
This was about 10 years ago, so that kid is well into his 20s now. I always think about him. Does he tell people how some jerk hit him with a car? Is he afraid of certain activities now, like riding his bike and stuff? I think about how I’ve impacted his life from time to time.”
The Poor Cat Lady
“I ran over a cat.
I had been doing business in this tiny town, and I was used to the cat when I went in to plan or pay. The cat wasn’t in the office. The lady was on the phone, and all I had to do was hand her a check, so she waved me to leave it on the desk.
I went back to my car, backed up, went to drive through the parking lot and saw something squirming where I had been parked. The cat was on a long leash attached to the building. When I parked, it went under my car. When I backed up, it clearly tried to run away in the wrong direction.
The leash was fully extended directly under my tire path. I took one look at it. Still squirming. I ran into the office. Lady still on the phone. And I yelled, ‘I just ran over the cat!’
She hung up.
We went back outside and watched the cat die.
I mean there was absolutely no way to help it.
So when it stopped squirming and its body was all over the pavement, the lady went to go get something to pick the cat up. I said, crying, ‘I have a box in my car. I should help. What can I do?!’
She insisted she use her own box and we went inside, got the box, she unleashed the dead cat, picked it up and put it in the box. She had to scrape up its eyeball.
Then I saw a hose and I started to wash it down the pavement as she carried the dead cat away. I was crying. Disgusted. Confused.
And then it was over. In about 10 minutes. Just done. Nothing else to do. And I looked at the lady, crying, and asked, ‘What do I do? What am I supposed to do now? Just drive away and ‘have a nice day’?!’
She said yes.
So I drove straight to the humane society and donated $20 in the name of the company. But I’m pretty sure I ruined the cat lady’s day.”
‘It Turns Out She Was Allergic’
“I brought a dish to a company potluck that I erroneously said was nut-free, but it wasn’t. A co-worker got sick.
I used a sauce that came in a ‘regular’ and ‘nut-free’ version and bought the wrong one. I have never felt so bad in my life.
I guess the good thing was that my co-worker was only mildly allergic and vomited, and didn’t go into full anaphylactic shock. I had been planning on serving this exact dish to my husband that evening, and he definitely would have gone into shock. So her illness gave me a warning.
I’ve spent the last year apologizing to her every time I see her. She was such a sweetheart about it, bless her heart.”
‘I Don’t Know’
“When I was young, working the late shift at a factory, I thought it would be hilarious to sneak up and scare the quality technician who was taking measures of the product. She was a particularly large woman. I snuck up and touched her shoulder and yelled ‘BOO!’
She freaked out and yelled at me, ‘You should NEVER scare a pregnant woman!’
I said, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were pregnant!’
Her, ‘How could you not know? I’m eight months pregnant!’
I just looked at her with an ‘I don’t know’ shoulder shrug, not wanting to say it.”
There Goes Valentine’s Day
“Right after college, I worked in a copy/shipping/print shop (like a FedEx store with more services, basically.) The day before Valentine’s Day, this college-age guy came in and said he wanted to get something laminated. It was a Transformers Valentine’s Day card he made for his girlfriend when they were in grade school, which he recently found and now wanted to give it to her a second time, years later.
Pretty sweet, right?
I was in the middle of a large print job, so I told the guy it would be around 30 minutes before I could get to it. He paid, handed over the card, and left. I finished my current job and proceeded to go laminate the card. I put the card in the plastic sleeve and between some heavy cardstock, fed it into the machine’s rollers, and the machine ate it. It got caught between the rollers and the machine started twisting and ripping it all up, melting the plastic together and crushing the card. I try to reverse the machine and get it out, but it was jammed in there. I wound up having to take the machine apart to get it out.
The card was trashed. Singed, crumpled, ripped, and sealed in lumpy melted plastic. When I told the guy and showed him what was left of the card, I felt like I was kicking a puppy. He just had the saddest, most helpless expression on his face.
I managed to extract the remnants of the card from the plastic and scanned it all in, then spent the next two hours doing my best with Photoshop to fix all the damaged spots and creases, then printed it out on cardstock and laminated that. It looked good when I was done, but, I know it wasn’t the same.”
‘I Don’t Even Know His Name’
“I kissed a girl at a bar one night, we exchanged numbers and that was that. A week later I was at the same bar, and there was this guy who had too many drinks acting huffy, and his friends were telling him to chill out. I didn’t think about it until I saw him walking towards me yelling gibberish. He reached out to grab me, and at the same time he walked into a bar stool, and I raised my arm fairly quickly to keep my distance, and he tumbled to the floor.
His friends thought I punched him and they ran over to apologize and got him out of there. It turns out the girl was his girlfriend, and they broke up the day I hooked up with her, but they had since gotten back together. She then ended things after hearing he tried to attack me. So this guy thinks I hooked up with his girl, ultimately ended their relationship and knocked him out in front of his friends.
So, I’m sure this dude hates me, and I don’t even know his name.”
‘Hey Kid!’
“When I was 15 years old, I had ACL reconstruction on my right knee and used crutches temporarily while it healed. During this time, I went to a movie with some friends and found myself in the ticket line behind an attractive girl my age who also had crutches due to an ankle injury. We eyed each other’s crutches and I said, ‘Hey, nice crutches.’ She said she liked my crutches too and my friends and I just thought this was the funniest thing ever, to compliment someone on their crutches while on crutches yourself. So the rest of the day as we walked around the mall and saw people with crutches I’d hobble past them and say ‘Nice crutches,’ and it got a good laugh.
Fast forward to that evening. My friends and I were driving through the mall parking lot and it was dark, but up ahead on the sidewalk I saw a boy, maybe 10 years old, hunched over on his crutches with his parents at his side. Instinctively, I rolled down my window, leaned half of my body out, and yelled as we passed them ‘NICE CRUTCHES, KID!!!’ The second after I said this, I realized to my horror that his crutches were not temporary. They were the permanent kind for disabled children with grip handles and bands that wrapped his arms for support. The worst part is that this kid, nor his parents, had ANY idea that it was just teenagers being immature and not intentionally cruel. They couldn’t even see my crutches because they were laying on the floorboards of the car. All they saw was a car filled with teenage boys and girls, one of them yelling out the window to make fun of a disabled kid, then drive off with all of us erupted in laughter.
My friends all shook it off as an innocent mistake, but I cried myself to sleep that night and several more times since then, even years after, when I thought about it. I still get these terrible images in my head like maybe it was his birthday and his parents took him to the movies because he didn’t have any friends and then THIS happened. I imagine him being sad for the rest of the night and his parents trying impossibly to comfort him, then his mother crying in bed that night asking her husband how kids can be so cruel. I tried to tell myself that he might not have heard me, but I know I’m lying to myself. I stopped being a teenage jerk at that exact point in my life and conduct myself more respectfully to this day.
Over 10 years later, this still haunts me. I still wish I could go back and make sure it never happened, or at least explain to him what happened and tell him how sorry I am. But I don’t even know who he was.”
‘Let Me Know Next Time, Will Ya?’
“About six years after the last Harry Potter book had come out, I was discussing it with one of my best friends – who was a huge Harry Potter fan and book reader as well. So I mentioned that I thought the epilogue was stupid because it’s unlikely that everyone ends up married to the person they dated in high school. And apparently, she hadn’t yet finished the book and got super pissed. I felt awful, but in a way, I was like, ‘girl it’s been out for six years. Either read it or let me know you didn’t.’
But apparently, she had, but just didn’t read the epilogue because she ‘wanted to save something for the movies’, which is all well and good, but maybe let your fellow Harry Potter fan friends know that. Because I had no idea she hadn’t read it until she just turned white and I was like, ‘Well, darn’.”
‘She Has A Boyfriend’
“A guy friend was chatty with a female friend at a party. They didn’t know each other prior to the party. The next morning I said something about her leaving early to pick up her boyfriend.
It turns out my guy friend didn’t know about the boyfriend, and she had spent the night with the guy.
He falls for women easily, and he was devastated.”
‘I Like Your Body…Hair’
“I’m notoriously bad at compliments. I once told a woman how nice her body hair looked, which was true. She was partially wet and just glistening in the sun, and that’s how I complimented her.
Later, my buddy told me she had a hormonal condition that made her have more than usual body hair, and she was extremely self-conscious about it.”
Wrong Way
“I was traveling on the last train on the Newburyport/Rockport line, which switches lines at Salem or Beverly. Two guys asked where they needed to switch trains. I had one too many drinks and told them North Beverly, the stop after the one they needed. I have no idea what happened to those guys, but I am going to assume it was a crappy night.
I wish I could meet up with those guys to make it up to them. I remember one guy looked like Danny Tamburelli (Little Pete).”
The Look Of Horror
“I was eight-months pregnant with my daughter, and it was the middle of summer and hot outside. I don’t know what it is about being pregnant that people think they can walk up to you, a complete stranger, and rub their hands all over your belly.
Anywho, I was in the grocery store, and some random lady did just that. She walked right up to me with a big goofy grin on her face and just started rubbing away like she was polishing me or something. I stood there while she got her fill, and when she was finished, she asked when the baby was due. Having had enough of the strange belly rubbing phenomenon, I told her that I wasn’t pregnant but thanks for the massage.
The look of horror was priceless.”
Back In Grade School
“During an art period in third grade, my friend and I were just laughing nonstop at how funny our pictures were. He stood up to show-off his hilariously drawn picture of something. I had the brightest idea of holding a pencil upright and he basically sat down perfectly onto it and the next thing I knew, he was screaming for his mom with a pencil stuck in his butt.
We were still friends until he moved to another school, but I don’t think he ever felt comfortable sitting down anywhere, ever again.”
‘My Friend Signalled Me To Shut Up’
“A guy I work with went on paternity leave (which is usually five weeks). I walked in about a week and a half later, and I saw him chatting with one of my friends. I said to myself, ‘Well, he’s back early.’
So I walk up to him and go, ‘Hey buddy, congratulations on your baby, I hope…’ and then I see my friend signaling me to shut up.
The co-worker looks at me with the saddest face and says, ‘The baby died.’
I felt so bad! Mind you he was at their lowest point, so I didn’t technically ruin it, I just enforced it, which is just as bad, if not worse.”