Whoops...

A girl at work was newly single and looking to get back in the saddle, so to speak, so I introduced her to a good guy friend of mine who'd had a bad string of shitty relationships. They hit it off and I felt like the ultimate match-maker.

...Until I got the angry voicemail message from him asking why I set him up with "that crazy bitch that gave me herpes".

Oops.

 

Also along the lines of not funny.

After finishing a night of dollar drinks I went to a coffee stand to sober up. Some guy comes and asked me for a ride and by that time my common sense was far gone.

We took off and not 5 min later I rolled my car while taking an exit. Pretty simple single roll over. No airbags deployed and everyone seemed fine. A couple weeks later I get a call from a lawyer saying a passenger in my car had gotten a broken neck.

Along with the Dui, reckless driving, reckless endangering.. I also got an assault 4 for injury from the accident. I had to be on an ankle bracelet for 4 months, 68k restitution, 16 weeks alcohol class, 4 years probation, 1 year driving loss (starts after I got of the ankle bracelet) plus the 3 months manditory for dui. Once I start driving I have to get a breathylizer installed in my car for a year.

This guy tried suing me for $1.3 mil but settled for $35k.


I learned tons from this

 

Yeah, that greed will turn a perfectly reasonable individual into a being that doesn't even deserve to be called a douchebag, because it would be a dis-service to bags filled with douche.

FOCUS: This story switches roles a bit.

I was driving four friends to a party. They were pre-gamed, I was still sober. It's around 1am, back in my home town where the town dies down at 9pm, meaning next to no traffic and whatnot. We're nearly there when three of the four open their respective doors and the fourth pries open the sunroof. They begin hanging out of the car, screaming and hollering and being assholes in a quiet neighborhood. I tell them all to stop fucking around or I'm going to get pulled over. They don't listen, and just as we top the crest of a hill a cop passes by us.

Fuck.

I pull into a driveway only two doors down from the party. The cops come over to my window and the passenger side and ask what's going on. One guy says that the doors on my car are fucked up and hard to close, which prompted to cop to look him right in the eyes and ask, "Did you all have to be hanging out of them to get them closed?", followed by the other cop who says, "And the sunroof gets stuck too?" Strike one.

Everyone shuts up for a minute and the cops ask where we're going. One of the guys says we're headed to a party. Strike two.

The cops ask where the party is. Before I could give a bullshit answer another one of my buddies pipes up and points in the direction of the house, where music can be faintly heard, but no cars are present because they're all parked around back in the alley for obvious reasons. Strike three.

I was asked to leave the car and talk to the cops one on one where I was able to convince them I was sober and just trying to DD, after which they gave me a warning. They understood the situation but told me in no uncertain terms that this shit had to stop, and that they were issuing a warning only because I hadn't lied, and there wasn't any traffic around to endanger. Wouldn't have been so bad if the cops didn't bust the party up right afterwards, ruining a good part of the night for over forty people, which is some serious, non-lethal collateral damage when you're 16.

 

Once upon a time there was a tall, handsome, intelligent, witty, urbane, carefree, and generally all around wonderful guy. We shall call this young man LargeHuman4343. One day BigPerson, I mean LargeHuman was at work when an attractive young woman came in looking for a job. LargeHuman, being the type of guy who likes to help out others, told his boss that the young woman seemed a nice enough sort, and would probably make an excellent server.

(LH's recommendation had absolutely nothing to do with the young ladies large, and very well pert chestal region. LH is of far to high a moral character to want to work with a woman just because she is well formed physically!)

Like all good deeds, this completely altruistic, and selfless act by LargeHuman did not go unpunished. Dear reader, I'm sure you think the young woman would be overcome with gratitude. Unfortunately you would be wrong. Instead of giving the humble LargeHuman a simple thank you (which is all the sainted LH would ever ask in return for a kindness) she used her feminine whiles to lure our kindly protagonist into an emotionally abusive marriage. A relationship that was highlighted by violent outburst, emotional black mail, and no sex life to speak of.

Unless one were to count the sex she was having with various partners while LargeHuman was away at basic training paying for her, and her children, to live bill free, and have no hardships from her pregnancy. There was quite a bit of that kind of sex!

Eventually LargeHuman got out of his horrible and destructive marriage. But he was a changed man. A little sad on the inside. A little slower to trust women. A little of the sun had left LargeHumans life, and little of the light had left his eye. All because one kindly person tried to help out another.

 

I'm going to go against the mold here a little bit and post something that (I hope) is actually funny. Unfortunately, this story takes a place at a bar nearing the end of the night so my memory isn't exactly spot on, but I'll do my best.

I was outside the bar smoking a cigarette, when this girl walked up to me and started flirting with me. This normally would turn into a completely different kind of story had it not been for the gallon or so of whiskey turning over in my stomach transforming me from a generally charming and delightful guy into this.

Spoiler

It also didn't help that the girl, who wasn't an all around fatty to be sure, had a few extra inches on her belly, I believe it is affectionately referred to as a paunch. Anyway, unfortunately over the course of her attempt to woo our trusty hero, she pulled up her shirt to show me her belly button piercing, which is where this story goes south.

When I saw that little piece of metal glittering in the moonlight, a million things ran through my mind. Should I kick her in the shin? Tell her I'm gay? Tell her it's Ramadan and it's against my religious beliefs to have sex right now? But in the haze of whiskey only one involuntary reaction fought it's way through the labyrinth of my nervous system. So I reached out, gently squeezed a little roll of fat between my thumb and forefinger, and said-

"Boop Boop"

The hurt and rage visibly welled up in her eyes, and before I could react or apologize for what my god-damned drunken body had done to her she screeched out like a chicken being stabbed and called to the bouncer, who apparently was a friend of hers, and I was kicked out of the bar on the spot.

Then a friend of mine went up to her to try and apologize for me, when she yelled for the bouncer that he was bothering her too. When my friend tried to explain to the bouncer what had happened and that he was just trying to apologize to her the bouncer decided to push him and try and drag him out of the bar. What the bouncer didn't know is that this friend of mine had recently gotten out of jail and for obvious reasons did not like being pushed around. A fight broke out, and while I was drunkenly staggering back to my house, this dear friend of mine was getting stomped on by five bouncers.

 

This isn't really my mistake, but it's still a relatively small mistake with pretty large and largely unforseeable consequences.

So this one time we arranged a meet with of my buddies from the army (we've got the draft over here .. it was 12 months of boot camp, made a few friends there). We decided to meet up in my home town.

I was excited about meeting my two old friends, we hadn't seen each other in at least a year!

Unfortunately the day before we met one of them caught the flu ... so it was down to two people.

I met up with my friend at the railway station, and he had gotten thin. He was jittery, thin ... bad teeth .. a bit jumpy. So we talked for a while, and decided it was time to go get something to eat. We go into a Baltic restaurant (or actually it's more of a grille) near my place and order a couple of meals. My friend orders his with an extra egg .. We get back to my place, and he doesn't have an egg in his meal.

I saw indignation in his eyes .. the kind of indignation you'd expect to see from someone whose five year old daughter you've cockslapped during broad daylight. The guy just got up, got out and went back to the grille .. and because the people at the grille didn't speak anything but broken English and their own language .. he didn't get his point across with words and started throwing plastic tables around, throwing punches, choking the manager's son (who was working at the grille) out and all kinds of crazy shit before we managed to stop him.

I apologized profusely to the manager and promised on my honor that all the damages would be paid for and so on and so on. I'm still on very good terms with the manager and I'm a regular at the place, and we didn't need to involve the police. (A few days later I gave him a few bills and conjured up some nice excuses to my friend's behavior and told him he had mistakenly taken alcohol with his meds .. and so forth.)

I got my friend out of there, he told me he'd picked up a tiny meth problem after he broke up with his girlfriend and was just really on edge .. he was apologetic and I let it go without making a huge number of it. I let him stay at my place, we had a few beers .. He went back home the next day and I haven't really heard about him since.

If only the dude had remembered the fucking egg.

 

Not my mistake, but a mistake a took part in.

I used to work on the Lehman bankruptcy, doing document review stuff, and we were mismanaged to a tune of at least $1 million in bills to our client.

I'll skip the details (because it's really dull), but here's the best way I know how to explain it: Imagine your job is to remove the seeds from an apple. Odds are you'd core the apple, discard the 90% of the flesh that obviously doesn't have seeds, and then take some time and remove the seeds from the core. We did the equivalent of putting the apple in a food processor, hitting blend a half dozen times, and then dishing out little bowls of apple puree, and asking people to pick out the seed bits.

I probably billed an extra 200 hours because of our crappy procedure, and I billed at about $300/hr for the work (I was a first year, so this was the lowest rate of anyone on the doc review team). Multiply that by the 10-15 people working on the project, and I think you hit $1 million. And this is just the very first step in the process.

 

Not sticking to my guns and completely severing ties to my parents years ago. I knew it would come back to haunt me (and it did), but I capitulated. Lesson learned: trust your gut, not your family (not referring to the Mrs.--she's one of a handful that I do trust completely).

 

We always went to the bar after work, and one night the new guy tags along. He's good people, a nice enough guy, but for whatever reason, he's not drinking. So, I start badgering him about the harm in a drink or two. Quite persistently mind you, as the idea of a non-drinker was out of my realm of possibility at the time. He keeps telling me, "I don't drink." Now, he never goes further than that in telling me why not, but eventually he caves and he becomes a regular at our after work shutting down of the bar.

Fast forward a couple months and his roommate (who was there with us at the time) fills me in the guy was already a recovered alcoholic and has been in AA, and guilt starts to settle in. He just didn't want anyone to know.

A few more months pass before his roommate is calling me to tell me this guys getting hauled off in an ambulance in the middle of the night. He literally would lock himself in his room at night, drink one of those big plastic bottles of vodka and a case of beer, all alone. Nightly. His liver had quit on him and we never heard from him again. He made contact with the old roommate once, so as far as I know he lived through that, but I feel like an ass for arguing a recovered alcoholic into drinking.