When a friend of mine was a little kid, someone drove past, jumped out of their car, and ran over and grabbed him trying to kidnap him.
He was just confused about what the guy was even doing, but grabbed onto a chain-link fence and wouldn't let go, so the guy was yanking him and yelling at him to let go, but he was able to hold on. Eventually the guy gave up and ran back and sped away. While he was being yanked on the fence, he was worried because the ball he'd been playing with was rolling down the hill, and he was worried it would go somewhere he wouldn't be able to find it and he would lose his ball.
When the guy left, he went and retrieved his ball, psyched that he was able to get it back. He thought no more about it and kept playing, and then later that day told his mom about what happened.
She lost her mind. For some reason, he thought she had also been worried about the ball, and he kept telling her he'd been able to get it back after, so it was all good.
When I was 13 I helped the local burnout mow lawns. He was late 20's and hung out with us teenagers from the same block. Got us weed, bought us beer. The 16yo guys I looked up to were friends (?) with him, he'd hang in the backyard fort of the lead 16yo, and he basically ran the local lawn mowing cartel of all us kids. I wanted money and it was easy and fun, hangin' with the boys. We shoveled walks in the winter.
One snowstorm morning he wasn't at the fort where we'd meet so I volunteered to run across the street to his house. Knock. Knock loud. Try the door, he didn't mind if we came in his basement entrance to his parent's house. It's dark, light on in the bathroom. 13yo me saw his first dead body that day; full bathtub with slit wrists and neck.
E: oh, reason for suicide seemed to be that he had a DUI wreck a couple months prior where a young girl (like 7 or 8) didn't die but wouldn't ever be the same... like couldn't walk or brain damage or something. He couldn't handle what he did, I guess.
When I was a kid (18?), one night a friend of my friend called us to come give this drunken girl a ride. They said they were at a party and the guy took some time to babysit her and take her home but he couldn't handle her anymore.
We went and picked her up and were going to take her wherever in the area she wanted to go as a solid for this guy. She got in the car and started berating us and trying to turn up the volume and complaining about the music. She said she had sucked dick and whatever other mess and wasn't going to put up with our shit this evening. She was much more intoxicated than I thought she would be. She requested to be taken to her car and she started giving us directions. She said she was going to sleep it off in the car so her parents wouldn't know. We planned to take her keys and come back later or something. We were honestly blindsided by how ridiculous everything got so quickly.
Turns out her car was parked at a local recycling center or something and when we pulled in there, there was a brand new Cadillac, lights came on car started. She said it was probably her grandpa. We let her out and started driving away so that they could figure it out, we wanted to be done. Grandpa didn't even stop to let her in the car or get her in her own car or anything. He immediately started following us. He tailgated us all the way down the highway back to my friend's house with his brights on. We drove normally but tried to concoct a plan. We pulled up the driveway at my friend's place about 15 minutes later and he stops short a few car lengths into the driveway.
I kind of lost it at that point and walked down the driveway to ask him what the hell he was thinking and he steps out of the car standing behind the driver side door. As I come up to him to give him a piece of my mind he raises his hands and he has a pistol pointed right at me. I guess being young and full of adrenaline I absolutely went off on him yelling what the hell did he think he was doing pulling a gun on this we were just trying to give his granddaughter a ride we didn't even really know her. I mean I got right up in his face. I can't believe I did that in retrospect, I would never do that now. After I yelled at him he dropped his hands and looked confused. Said "What was I supposed to do?" I'll never forget those words.He quickly got in his car and started to turn around. I tried to block his car so I could call the police but as I started to get on the phone he punched it and ran over my foot. Thankfully I moved to just enough to the side that it didn't really do anything. Cops showed up later and the officer stood around for a while talking to us and getting statements. He said that we have to go down to the magistrate downtown to do anything about this.
We went there and the magistrate asked us a bunch of the same questions. He did some paperwork stuff and essentially concluded that the guy who pulled a gun on me had already come by and filed a report that we were threatening him and that the two conflicting statements would cancel each other out - nothing would happen to either of us. Come to find out later on that the man who pulled a gun on me was a retired police chief from the area, very well known, who owned a local car wash. He had a sketchy past and I guess this was just another day in the life of a police officer abusing power.
I look back and think what the hell was that girl doing? Was she actually being taking advantage of? Did the friend of a friend know that would happen so he set us up to take the fall for it? Was he the abuser? Was she just being sloppy and shitty and he didn't want to get in trouble? How in the world did those things cancel each other out especially with no investigation into it. They couldn't have. I'll never forget that. I never talked to that idiot friend of a friend again and I never saw police officers the same either.
I (aurally) witnessed a kindergartener get run over by her school bus. I was on a different bus and our bus drivers were talking over the radio, then there was this ungodly wailing from the other bus. The other bus driver just kept screaming "I killed her, I killed her".
Turns out the little girl barely missed the bus, ran alongside it to catch up, tripped, and fell under the wheels of the bus.
Once we got to high school, students on the killing bus were offered counseling. I, not being on the killing bus, didn't talk to anyone about it until I went to therapy decades later.
Yellow school buses freak me out still, for that and abuse reasons.
I witnessed a fatal lathe accident. The kind that would have easily been featured in rotten.com back in the day. They shut the whole shop down and noone worked for a month. It was awful.
I was very close to either dying or having permanent brain damage due to a stun grenade in a protest in my country. While being a completely unarmed, non-violent and basically running away/hiding protestor.
I was with a friend and a bunch of people outside our campus. Everything was peaceful and then, out of nowhere things got bad, with stun grenades and tear gas everywhere. We were used to it, but that time the tear gas was so bad that the neutralizer we brought was doing nothing. We took cover with a wall (bad idea, but we were panicking badly), and I wasn't able to breath, so I wanted us to run away from there. I told my friend to let's just run certain way, and I was so full of adrenaline and ready to run, but he stopped me. 1 second later, a stun grenade fell from the sky just 1 m away of us, in the direction I wanted us to run; no doubt it would have hit me in the head.
After that I just took his hand and we ran away, not able to see nor breath. Me holding his hand was a huge saver for both of us, as we could, more or less, guide each other. We ran some 20-30 m and just fell to the ground, but in a somewhat safe place. We crawled some 10 m more and just rest there. It took us some solid 15 minutes to catch our breath. Never said a word to my family about the whole incident.
Fun times.
Once put one of those plastic wrapped potatoes in my uniform apron to put back in produce at my first retail job (got abandoned in the mac and cheese section). I then completely forgot and took it home. Took it out of my apron and put it on my desk next to my car keys because "I'll remember to take it back". I did not. Lived with me for a week or something when I finally put it in my apron again because I wasn't remembering. I took it to work. I completely forgot about it and never returned it. It made this trip several times. I put it back on my desk because this wasn't working out, surely I'll remember if I see it.
Then I forgot about it for like three months. One day I look over at my desk and it's a shriveled potato with a new potato growing from its own husk...
In essence, potatoes are amazing and horrifying. Just like my short term memory lol.
I stole some bullets from my workplace once.
I was unloading a truck at work one day, many years ago. One of the items on my trailer was a pallet of rifle ammunition. Whoever loaded this trailer on the other side of the country did a shitty job of it; plastic wrap was shredded, several boxes were torn open, the cardboard "do not stack" cone was crushed under the weight of a car engine, among other things. When I managed to exhume this pallet from the trailer, the plastic gave way, spilling dozens of boxes and hundreds of loose bullets all over my trailer and loading dock. While I was cleaning up the mess, I impulsively pocketed a few bullets for myself. Nobody ever asked me about it. I don't even own a gun. But I have a few bullets.
After taking a car door to the head during heavy winds, I experienced immediate and recurring night terrors/sleep paralysis for two years. They started out pretty extreme, with me waking up on my stomach with some kind of creature pinning me to the bed. I'd struggle enough to lift my head a few inches, only to find my pillow was filled with distorted, open-mouthed faces stretching out at me from the material.
As time went in the hallucinations gradually waned in extremity, though never becoming anything comfortable. I would open my eyes to see a phosphorescent grid encompassing my walls, or millions of flies on my bedroom ceiling. Once my cat was staring up at them too, and I believed what was happening was real, only to wake up a moment later facing a different direction, and my cat fast asleep at my feet.
Eventually it's as though my soul became heavy or something. I slept on the top floor of a two-story home, with a very old colonial-era basement below it. I would constantly find myself one or two floors directly beneath my bed, all but glued to the ground and trying with all my might to crawl out of the damp, dark cellar toward the stairs, but too sluggish and/or paralyzed to do it. I felt terrified down there in the darkness. Eventually the adrenaline would wake me up safely in my bed.
Throughout the entire ordeal I would somewhat frequently open my eyes to see some sort of ghostly or transparent entity looming over my bed, leaning over or staring down at me. The last night I ever experienced an episode, I woke up to see that very entity, but I realized suddenly that the entity was me. It was me standing there, looking down at myself. I became angry. I felt like these episodes had ruined my life, and made sleeping something I no longer looked forward to. The rage came to a head. I activated every nerve in my body to try to break free of the paralysis. I gritted my teeth as I succeeded, groaning the words "FFFFRUUUUCKK YYRRROOOOUU!!!" as I bolted up from my bed and lunged through my own ghost. Then I never saw it again. In fact, I never had another night terror since. It's been years now. A decade at least.
Okay, so I have a mechanical heart valve. One time, while I was in the basement of my childhood home with one of my brothers, I was close to him as he was playing The Godfather PS2 (I'm pretty sure it was that game). It was pretty quiet, so he somehow heard the ticking of my valve and his mind went to some sort of explosive like a pipe bomb being close by.
I have the suicide disease. The worse, TN2 version. That is not a sly term for mental illness, it's a nerve disorder that has pain so great that people kill themselves rather than face yet another day of it. I am rarely below 3 on the 1-10 pain scale (at 4 right now) and I've reached 10 more times than I can count. This is with medication keeping it at the level where I can function.
I am such a bad judge of pain that the trauma from my not realizing for half a week that I had kidney stones and not taking any painkillers and then being stuck first in a clinic and then the ER for 14 hours writing in agony until they finally decided I did, in fact, have kidney stones and gave me some fentanyl, caused severe trauma and gave me an eating disorder called ARFID, unrelated to body image issues, and I have not eaten solid food in a year and a half.
Explains a lot, doesn't it?
https://arizonapain.com/trigeminal-neuralgia-suicide-disease/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avoidant/restrictive_food_intake_disorder
Hey, you asked.
P.S. If you try to give me medical advice over the internet, I may just block you. I am so fucking sick of that. And no, "I know you said you didn't want medical advice, but..." does not count as a way around that. And I am fucking sick of having to say that and having people ignore it too.
This is probanly way too boring and mundane for this thread, but I can't feel hunger or fullness. (Never had a doctor look at it because it doesn't make my life worse)
My mom when I was a baby asked the doctor how much baby food I should be given after breastfeeding time was over. The doctor said "just give him enough, he will stop". After many jars of food, my mom had to stop because I wouldn't stop.
To this day I can feel my stomach expanding before I will stop. At my university all-you-can-eat cafeteria (back when I was super fit and tracked every calorie) I ate about 10kcal and didn't feel full so I stopped. I also did a 21 day water (and salt+vitamins) fast without that much trouble (but my mouth would still water and I would still have taste cravings)
Fucks up my relationship with food though because I eat when I am bored, just eat whatever is in front of me without realizing it, or if I am busy I will just forget to eat.
As I said, probably not really unsettling or scary, but not a fun fact lol.
I was in a locker room three months ago minding my own business when this oddly looking guy next to me struck up a conversation. He looked old and incredibly skinny, but you could tell his face was younger. Maybe it's a skin condition like Ehlers-Danlos, I thought.
Well, the guy was in his early thirties and said the reason for his condition was that he had been recently freed by a cartel. He had been kidnapped for years, kept without food or proper hygiene, basically working as a slave. And then he showed me a picture of himself from three years ago on his phone. He has the incredible phisique of a Greek god, beautiful face, with a six pack and well developed muscles. And there he was, skinny, thin as a pencil and with loose, aged skin.
He recounted how he had used his smarts to survive. He had been forced to kidnap others, forged friendships with his captors and even made important suggestions to the leaders to create alliances with other cartels. He was damn good at the job making people fall into the trap, schmoosing the right people and getting out of situations. He said he was honestly one of the best they had, according to him.
He went on about how he had been tortured, kept in a cellar, worked tirelessly from dawn til dusk, and then released one day. And then he told me he he still had friends in the cartel to this day.
That's when I found a break 20 minutes in of this guy trauma dumping on me and I noped the fuck out of there with some bullshit excuse. Never in my life have I ever been so scared, sad, sorry and flabbergasted of someone recounting their life story.
Working in IT, I see far too many of your passwords, and you suck at passwords.
With that being said, if you use Windows and your hard drive isn't encrypted, it is ridiculously easy for me to break into your account, access all of your files and take full control of your computer.... Provided I can get physical access to it.
Stop using the same passwords for everything. Do you want to get "hacked" because that's how you get "hacked". Disclaimer, this isn't hacking, it's social engineering attacks with extra steps. The people trying to exploit you and steal your accounts put little to no effort into getting your stuff specifically. You just happened to get caught in their net.... Good luck, you're fucked.
Probably should have had a backup, and used a password manager huh?
Also it's ridiculously easy to lock yourself out of your own accounts by enabling 2FA/MFA. Most people have zero idea what is even involved in 2FA/MFA and the vast majority do everything in their power to turn it off. They would rather expose their account to the risk of it being taken over by some scammer, than be bothered to enter a six-digit code sometimes.
The reality is, as an admin, I can, with a fair amount of ease, monitor everything you do, when you do it and for how long you do it. The only reasons I don't is that 1. I'm pretty sure there are laws about it (but you'd have to prove I did it to have those laws enforced... GL, YF.) 2. Morally it's "wrong" to do so. And last but not least, I wouldn't give a single shit about what you do with your computer, whether it's a work machine, or personal system. Just don't make it my problem and we'll get along splendidly.
Also, the number of you people who use company laptops and cellphones for your personal correspondence and/or your only computer/phone is kinda ridiculous. Understand this: any company assets, and all the data held within, are wholly, immediately, irrevocably and perpetually, property of the company. So any texts, including sexts, dick pics, nudes, lude messages, personal banking info, emails sent to you personally,... All the data that is sent to, and stored on, the device that work provided to you, is property of the company.
Given that, and what I've seen when these devices are ripped from your hands when you inevitably leave the position, whether voluntarily or not, you all should be more ashamed of yourselves.
Y'all need Jesus or something. IDK, I don't believe in the guy, but you need something to straighten you out. Holy fuck.
Just a few
- a childhood friend and neighbour got killed by his mother, his sister managed to flee the scene and call the cops
- my elementary school's director got arrested for paedophilia, he killed himself in his cell before getting judged
- my sister in law died in her sleep less than a meter away from me (a wall was between us still) and my partner and I were the ones to find her, I've had to call and tell her parents
I had a friend a few blocks away growing up and we'd walk over to each other's house all the time. One day when I was 9 or 10 I was walking home and there were a dozen cop cars outside a house. Next door to them was another kid we knew but who was a grade above us so we weren't close.
When I got home I told my parents about all the police at this house. They did some digging around and turns out the guy who lived there was a child molester. I didn't really know what that meant at the time other than it was bad.
I still hope that the kid who lives next door wasn't one of the victims.
When I was in the emergency services, I was first or among the first on scene to serious mass casualty events on multiple occasions. The most any of them got in the news was local papers and traffic disruption reports, because unless it's terrorism the nationals aren't interested. If any of us died in a car crash tomorrow, the world wouldn't care.
I have stupidass heightened perception and seem to repeatedly find myself in extraordinary unbelievable (and often traumatic) situations which no one believes at first, because the situations are so absurd, and my silly brain rights itself so I seem "too okay" in spite of it all. Then I have to deal with it on my own until it directly impacts others and they cannot deny the situations exist. Then they act like shocked Pikachus (which is massively infuriating at times). This has been escalating throughout my life—in spite of the fact I do everything possible to keep my stupid little existence low-key and healthy. I'm working on accepting this.
One day, I missed a train. The next one had to stop one short of my home station due to "personell damages" or something similar, which I didn't really grasp, but I was annoyed that I had to take a detour to get home.
I later found out that a guy at my home station jumped in front of the train I was supposed to get.
I'm so sorry that some people in this thread have much worse nightmares than I have. I don't recall having any nightmares that you might call visually grotesque.
When I was in High School, I apparently discovered that looking at a person signals interest in the person, and that it's possible to look at something in this way on accident, or at least without conscious planning. From this I concluded into a mild obsession to basically be conscious of what I am looking at at almost every point in time. In hindsight, it feels kind of like the "you are now breathing manually" meme. This basically only happened with two people, along with it slightly reinforcing my bias against looking at girls, because I'm probably gay anyway, let them not get any ideas.* (this thought is completely stupid in any other way than being moderately considerate. it probably didn't do anything anyway, because I'm not very socially active and had approximately 1-2 friends.)
- The girl who sat on the mirror-opposite side of the room from me in math class, which, If I didn't change seats on purpose, which I did when possible, basically put her in the center of my default field of view when not looking at the teacher. (Seating and desk arrangements in my country are very exciting.) She was really good at staring back, which is basically why I noticed that people care when they're being looked at. I don't really know whether she did this on purpose. I had nothing in common with her that would count as knowing her personally, but we did look pretty similar, so much that some people just told me this without being asked. She's the only person wearing a tie on one of the photos from graduation. I didn't feel a legitimate reason to care much, but basically, I cared because of how much I was constantly thinking about not looking at her. To my friend, I expressed myself as being kind of scared of her, though I never really said that I was scared that anyone capable of critisizing me would find out how much space this bullshit took up in my mind sometimes, or misrepresent this as being attracted or something. I also remember believing at some point that she was behind me on my way to school, (in some parts of europe, people bike to school,) as well as just actually seeing her on some paths beyond doubt, and thinking a moderate amount about what path she takes the least, which might just have been all of them, because of how rarely I saw her on the way.
- The other guy isn't really at fault or anything. He's still really nice to be with now that I've gotten over this somewhat, though I see him rarely, which probably contributed to the brainworms spreading.
*(I cultivate an off-internet bonus genre of brainworms where being asexual reinforces my faux-antiquated fear of being perceived as attracted to someone, which may or may not make sense)
This whole thread could use a whole lot more of spoiler tags and Content Warning. And I shouldn't have read all these stories. Luckily, I noticed my anxiety soon enough and just stopped.
