Humans are capable of greatness, but we're also capable of deep depravity and completely unhinged behavior.
The veritable mess of the last few years has done nothing if not prove that, as everyone reaches new levels of burnout and DGAF, for better or worse.
Witnessing how far other people will go can sometimes shine a mirror on our own deranged impulses, while also serving as a great example of what not to do.
I was in a bar when some guys got into an argument, the aggressor got kicked out and the guy who he's started a fight with went to the bar, and everyone continued.
As I'm going out for a cigarette I see the guy who'd had the fight started with him going out the door and the aggressor was waiting outside and jumped him.
Motherf**ker immediately stuffed his fingers down his throat and vomited on the guy. Straight-up defense mechanism puke. The guy who was trying to fight just ran away, one of the wildest things I've ever seen.
A few notes. 1) This was nearly 20 years ago 2) As is often the case it sounds better as a story, the guy pretty much just vomited over himself, either way, he was heading home to clean up, at least this was it was without a broken nose
3) The thing I'll never forget was this previously hard man acting like he f**king owned the place whining 'it's on my shoes' before running off was hilarious.
I saw a guy stumble safely across 3 out of 4 lanes of high-speed traffic.
Eye doctor here. Where shall I begin? I remember one young lady who came in for a routine visit but her eyelids were very swollen from her fake eyelashes.
The adhesive was laid on THICK and was literally blocking her gland orifices and causing massive infection of both eyelids. Despite the severe swelling, she didn’t seem particularly phased. It wasn’t even her reason for visit.
I looked at her under the lamp, then told her that those lashes are going to need to go.
So I turn around to grab some petroleum jelly and some qtips to work those adhesive clumps off slowly when I start hearing what sounds like Velcro being torn apart.
I turn around and she ripped out both top lids of fake lashes including every single natural lash she had. It was a startlingly clean job and she just looked at me completely bald-eyed and said “okay now what?”
Don’t forget, they were infected and swollen. Well, now they were even more swollen and had a ton of ripped off lash stumps. So I prescribed her antibiotics and told her that her lashes would probably grow back over the next few weeks.
Gal I went to culinary school with (early 90s) all of a sudden started juggling her knives in the hall between classes in front of one of the chef instructors. Yes, she immediately had her 8” chef knife stuck 3 inches in the middle of her palm.
Chef just sighed, shook his head, and pushed the gal to the office to get her to the ER.
Restaurant kitchen, middle of the busiest night of the year, something went wrong, not share what but I'm pretty sure it was a fairly small setback.
Sous Chef goes BALLISTIC screams at some people then reaches bare-handed into the blast oven and grabs out two scorching hot bowls of baked soup.
RUINS his hands, and throws them into the window with the skin from his palms visibly stuck to it in places.
He immediately calms down, walks off the line to treat his hands, came back out to try and direct from the front for a bit, then at some point just went home without saying anything. Came back a week or two later divorced from his wife.
I was sitting at a cafe once when a man sitting a few tables away from me, locked eyes with me. Maintaining eye contact, he leaned over to the vase of p*ssywillow stems decorating the table, and munched them.
Just took a whole bite of twig and fuzzy willow bud.
Worked in an ICU. The patient was being asked their goals of care and if they wanted to be resuscitated, the patient said yes. Her daughter said no. The attending said, 'well your mom is still competent so we have to follow her wishes.'
The daughter pulled the doctor aside and said, 'why don't you just give her some medications to put her to sleep, she won't be competent and then my word goes and you pull the plug?'
Silence for a while and then the attending just said no we don't do that.. very slowly and escorted the daughter out of the room. The patient made it out of the hospital ok that time anyway. I sometimes wonder how she did after that...
A lady on the bus screamed at me one time because she thought I had stolen her knees.
This kid a couple of years younger than me growing up used to sit alone at the breakfast tables in school, look kids dead in the eyes, and smash little jam packets and milk cartons.
We got older and he destroyed a computer in the computer lab out of complete nowhere. Fast forward to when he’s 17, he moved in with his grandparents because his parents couldn’t handle him anymore. One day he goes ballistic.
He kills his grandparents' cat with a club, beat the living shit out of both of his grandparents, and gets in a shootout with the police. They shot him and he died. The craziest part is how we found out about it.
After a day at the lake, my buddies and I were hanging out at my buddy's house. We were randomly reminiscing about how weird this f**king kid was, and wondering what had happened to him.
This sounds made up but I swear to god, in the middle of this conversation, I’m mindlessly scrolling Facebook and randomly see a link to a Gofund Me for his funeral by a mutual friend on Facebook.
The room went silent and we all immediately felt like s**t for laughing at this guy who we now knew had died. It felt like a sign from the universe to stop being a**holes. Then we looked into how he died and were like “holy f**king s**t.”
We then didn’t feel that bad for him, but we sure as s**t weren’t laughing anymore.
In a nightclub in the late eighties. Bloke sitting at a table on his own. He poured what he had left in his pint glass onto the floor, then took a bite out of the glass. Glass severed his top lip. He then sat there bleeding into the glass.
There was a lot of blood! Not pretty!
My algebra teacher was really frustrated with the class. She slapped herself across the face hard, whispered 'that felt good,' and walked out the door.
We also had a music teacher throw a metal music stand into the band...I don't think we were a pleasure to teach.
Driving past a suburban train station with a 40km speed limit during a quiet time of day, I saw a guy in a pink leotard and matching tutu doing a gymnastics routine on the grassed area.
OK slightly weird, until he did a handstand with his legs at 90 degrees out to the sides, and proceeded to do a shit out of a hole in the leotard that caught my attention enough to say that it looked like he was giving birth to a log.
He was also wearing a tiara and had a look of complete concentration on his face. I thought about calling the police for a welfare check until I realized that the police station was right next door, so I just kept driving.
I saw my mom paint her teeth with white nail polish.
I was driving down a highway and saw a car swerve to hit a dog on purpose and then it just kept driving. I stopped to help the dog and it just broke my heart and still does 30 years later.
I watched a guy chase down a goose on a golf course, rip it’s leg off, put the leg in his pocket and continue the round.