Usually, people will wait a bit after meeting someone to tell them something huge or important about their lives. It can take some time to build up the necessary amount of trust. However, that was not an issue for these people!
People on Reddit share the most messed up thing an acquaintance shared with them. Content has been edited for clarity.
An Uncomfortable First Date
“I was in a new band that had a few backup singers. We had a rehearsal one night, and the singer said that one of them was into me, and I should ask her to grab a drink. This girl was a 10 in my book. She was way out of my league. I sacked up anyway and asked her if she’d like to join me for a drink. Off we go.
Halfway through the first drink, she tells me that her father murdered her mother while she and her sisters watched. I was absolutely dumbfounded and just fumbled through trying to be understanding. I was terrified.”
His Reputation Preceded Him
“I was out with a group of friends, one of whom brought along a guy she was good friends with. I don’t think she saw him as a date, so she was dancing and flirting with other guys. The guy got wasted and told me he intended to ‘bury that brat in the ground.’
He then paused briefly, got up in my face, and repeated for emphasis, ‘in the freaking ground.’
Usually, I would write something like that off as venting, but that dude had a reputation within the group for being creepy. I was on the fence about whether he was off, but that moment sealed it for me. I got her out of there pretty quick after that.”
A Very Confusing Phone Call
“I work for a congressperson, and about one month into the job I got a call from a lady asking if smoking was legal. To which I respond that yes it is legal, just not indoors (it is illegal to smoke indoors in my state). She then told me that she was discriminated against when she applied for a job because she was a smoker. I told her she should seek legal counsel if she believed she was being discriminated against.
She then completely changed topics and asked, ‘is it illegal to sleep with someone 18 or older?’
I was a little taken back but then told her no that is the legal age in the state. She then went on to tell me that she was also discriminated against by the people of her city, because she sleeps with married men who are above the age of 18. I just stayed silent.
She then went back to the smoking topic and wanted to know what the name o the law or bill was that outlawed smoking indoors in my state. I told her to seek out her state representative which she believed to be the congressperson I work for. I explained my boss was federal, and she needed the state. She then told me my boss was at the state level. Again, I told her she was incorrect but I could get her the number of her state representative.
She then shouted, ‘Get bent!’ and hung up.”
At Least She Can Joke About It
“A friend, by way of her introducing herself: ‘Hi, I’m [name]. What’s your name? Sorry if we’ve met before and I’ve forgotten. I had a traumatic injury when I was young that caused some minor brain damage which affects my memory.’
It was the most awkward introduction I’d ever experienced, and all I could think was, Why wouldn’t you just say, ‘Sorry, I’m bad with names’ instead?
Until about an hour, when she introduced herself to me again in the exact same way, at which point it made perfect sense.
After we’d know each other for a while, I mentioned it to her and she said just laughed and said, ‘Did I? Yeah, it’s a little weird. I mean ideally, I wouldn’t want to tell someone the first time I met them, but then I don’t really know whether it’s the first time or not.'”
His Nickname Makes Sense
“I worked as a landscaper for many years and ran into many characters out on the crews. Nothing will ever beat when I meet Calamine Bob.
I had started at a new company and was sent off in the morning on Bob’s crew with two other guys. It was residential work, so there was a lot of truck time.
After about the second job, Bob asks,’ Hey Rando, you ever got poison ivy?’
To which I respond, ‘No, I actually think I’m not allergic or something, but I’m not about to stick my face in it to test it.;
At this point, I notice that the other two guys are violently rolling their eyes, and I’m all like, Well, darn, I didn’t think I said anything that crazy?
But then it began:
Bob: ‘Ahh, you lucky guy. You know, one time I was raking out some bushes I had just trimmed and I got it all over my hands. But I didn’t know it, see? Because it was all mixed up in the clippings. And then right after I went to take a pee, and that night I woke up with a poison ivy rash all over my freaking member!’
Me: ‘Uhhhhhhh……..that sucks?’
Bob: ‘You bet it did! Can you even imagine?! All that itchy burning all over your private parts? I couldn’t sleep it was torture. So you know what I did?’
Me: ‘Ummmmm, what?’
Bob: ‘I went and got a bottle of Calamine lotion and I just shoved my member right in the freaking bottle! It was the best feeling ever, man. I’m telling you, that relief was freaking amazing.’
Me: ‘That was……smart, I guess?’
And I thought it was over. I thought that was the last I would ever hear of a man penetrating a bottle of Calamine with his manhood. But Lord in Heavens was I wrong. You see, the other guys were rolling their eyes because they knew what was coming. It was not just I, who would be regaled with this tale. It was every freaking person Bob ever met. Ever. Within an hour or so of knowing Bob, you and whatever poor souls were around would hear his tale of what he did to that poor bottle. And thus, the name Calamine Bob.”
A Touching Memory
“I used to work on a college campus and would play Sudoku on my DS and chain-smoke between work and class. This security guard on his bike came by one time, had a smoke, and started to chat. He asked me what game I was playing, and I told him Sudoku. He told me his fiancée would play that game a lot… before she died.
They dated over ten years before, but it never worked out. Four/five years later, he was on sixth street in Austin (out of town for us) partying on New Year’s Eve and ran into her. They fell in love like nothing had happened before. Six months later, they were living together, engaged, and ready to live their lives. Shortly after, she was diagnosed with cancer and had a tumor in her brain. She began losing function and memory. She would play mind games like Sudoku to keep her mind active, but she was slowly slipping away. It had been a few years since her death, and he told me that he still hadn’t put her things away. Her toiletries were still on the bathroom counter and in the shower. Her shoes were still by the door.
I normally hate being bothered when I’m busy being a recluse and chain-smoking on my phone, but I felt really touched that he shared such an intimate story with me. We hung out on campus for the next couple of semesters until I graduated.
That was like five years ago. I wonder if he’s still there.”
A Big Story In Five Minutes
“When I was in high school, my friends and I would often go to the Burger King just down the street to hang out after school. Anyway, I was in line waiting to order one time, and this elderly lady came up to me and said she liked my Beatles shirt. I thanked her, and then she proceeds to tell me that she saw them once with her husband who is dead now because he was murdered by the Zodiac Killer. I apologized for her loss and tried to start ordering my food, but then she started telling me that the police were part of it.
Apparently, when they came to tell her the news about her husband, two male cops attacked her over and over again and a female cop recorded it. She said they did it over and over again for the whole investigation, and would beat her and starve her, and that they were actually the Zodiac Killer(s).
All of that in about five minutes of waiting in line at Burger King.”
Left Completely Speechless
“I work as a waiter, and the restaurant just hired a new girl, so I decided to chat with her. I asked where she was from and she said Houston. She told me she was trying to move back to town but was waiting for her ex to leave the town first.
Unknowingly I replied, ‘relationship problems eh?’
To which she responded, ‘Yeah when I was pregnant he beat me so bad that it killed the baby’ with a completely straight face.
I was literally speechless like my mind went blank and I couldn’t think of anything to say. She’s a really nice person though, just went through some crazy stuff in her life.”
An Unforgettable Meeting
“It was my freshman year of college, within the first two weeks. I was walking around the dorms with a friend when we met a girl who turned out to be his neighbor. Her name was Bridgette, but when she introduced herself she said we could call her ‘Buffalo.’ Like any normal people, my friend and I were curious as to why she asked to be called ‘buffalo.’
So when we asked she told us this story: One Saturday, she said she met a boy at a party, and they left together to go to the food halls ‘late night window,’ which was pizza and wings served from 12 am-2 am. She said they ate and went back up to her room, where things got heavy.
She said he ‘put his hands where boys tend to put their hands with girls.; It was all good for a moment until she started to feel incredibly hot down there.
It turned out that this guy had forgotten to wash his hands after eating all those wings, and she got buffalo sauce inside her.
This was within five minutes of meeting this girl, and I’ll never forget it.”
He Got To Meet Her Special Friend
“I met this cute girl in one of my math classes at community college. She asked me if I was interested in getting lunch with her. We went immediately from class out to lunch. We sat down at the restaurant, and the VERY first thing she said to me was, ‘Would you like to meet my friend?’
She was very attractive, so I assumed she was trying to introduce me to a cute friend of hers. She goes and digs into her backpack, and pulls out a weird PVC pip apparatus that looked like a cube, but with a handle on top and a weird piece of rope hanging off it. I don’t really say anything because I’m super confused about what was going on and how this related to her friend.
After the apparatus is on the table between us, she digs into her sweatshirt pocket and pulls out a live freaking parrot. She puts it on the cube and clips it in so it can’t fly away. She looks me dead in the eyes and says ‘This is my friend Petey, I’ve had him for years!’
I was in awe, THE PARROT HAS BEEN IN HER POCKET THE ENTIRE TIME, SINCE BEFORE CLASS! Before I can say anything, she asks if I want to see Petey do a trick, I, of course, said yes, and she proceeded to tell Petey to ‘Go, I need help.’
Petey the parrot then starts talking, ‘a2=b2 +c2 -2bc X cos(A).’ I almost lost my cool. Did this bird just repeat the law of cosines? She saw the look on my face, and began to answer all my questions before I could answer them. She brought the parrot to class every day, and kept it concealed in her sweatshirt. She always sat in the front, so the parrot could listen to what we were doing. She would then go home, get the parrot to memorize specific formulas depending on what we were being tested on.
From that day on in the class, I would sit and watch her. She always wore a sweatshirt no matter how hot, and now and then during a test or quiz, I would see her slouch down and try and put her ear in her sweatshirt pocket.
She was something else.”
He Didn’t Remember It Happening
“In my first quarter of college, I was drinking in a buddy’s dorm. It was getting late, and people start heading out. One other guy and I are still going strong. My buddy passed out, and I finishing my drink and getting ready to head back to my room. His roommate was always a little odd but out of nowhere he starts sobbing, just crying uncontrollably.
He started to tell me about when he played football in high school. Apparently, this guy’s dad was gay and when playing against his high school’s rival team, a kid was making fun of his dad to his face. The roommate proceeded to tell me that at a certain point he saw red and couldn’t remember anything until he was being pulled off the guy by his teammates. The guy didn’t get up and needed to be taken off the field in an ambulance. The kid died days later in the hospital.
Turns out he killed a kid in high school.”
How Does One Respond To That?
“A couple of friends and I met this girl when we were out for another friend’s birthday at a pub. She got really trashed rather quickly, and her boyfriend was still to arrive. It wasn’t even nine pm, and we had arrived at about eight pm. We were almost convinced she was faking her intoxication. Anyways, we’re talking and stuff you know pretty chill and suddenly she starts blurting out how she can’t wait for her boyfriend to arrive.
We’re like, ‘Okay then… Looking forward to meeting him,’ and kinda brush it off.
Apparently, she wasn’t getting enough attention so she then stated that she had slept with almost 23 guys in one night at a pretty young age (I think it was 15 she said), and gave the impression that she was proud of this. We just burst out laughing at how ridiculous her behavior was. I mean, how do you respond to that? She barely even knew our names and she wasn’t even hammered to the point she could barely stand or walk, it was so cringy. A short while after, her boyfriend arrived and she was all over him and we can’t help but give each other those looks like Do you think he knows? Is she always like this? What the heck is going on?
We ended up leaving pretty early.”
A Wild First Impression
“I bought my first house in a very quiet neighborhood. I began moving in, putzing around in the house and outside in the garden. That’s when I met my neighbor to the west. (West Neighbor; ‘WN)
Me: ‘Hi! I’m Vern.’
WN: ‘Welcome to the neighborhood! I’m ‘WN’, my husband and I have three kids. He’s not their dad. I was married to my kid’s dad but he was a addict and died of an overdose. So I married his brother. The kids call him Uncle Dad. Isn’t that great?!?
Me: ‘Umm, yeah. Sorry for your loss.’
WN: ‘Don’t feel sorry for me, the neighbor to your east (East Neighbor) had her baby die. They accused her of suffocating it. Her husband was a detective but drowned himself in drinks and lost his job. Now, they have two adopted kids. One is good, the other is a crack baby who started trying to kill himself when he was five.’
Me: ‘Oh.’
(Enter EN)
EN: ‘Yeah, he tried to hang himself in the shower. But we cut him down in time. He’s on medication now but we let him take a break over the summer.’
Me: ‘Oh.’
I spent the next decade disarming the crack baby, breaking up fights, and applying life-saving measures to several suicide attempts.
It’s truly quiet now. They have sold their homes and moved.”
A Very Awkward Thirty Minutes
“While working at a call center, we had new hires that would have to sit by us and listen in to learn the job. Well, the first time I had a side by side with one, it was this 26-year-old woman. Everything started off normally when the supervisor dropped her off at my desk. That is, until she started talking.
She proceeded to tell me while waiting for a phone call mind you, about how she had moved here from Oakland because she and her husband had got caught up in gang violence. Even though she loved selling dope and other related activities, she and her son had to flee because her man was killed in a gang-related drive-by to get vengeance on him for moving into another gangs’ territory. Having to tell her six-year-old son that daddy died for his crew and he should be proud was the hardest thing she ever had to do. She also added about how every day, she worries the other gang will find her and kill her because she was the only witness.
Yeah, that was the most awkward thirty minutes of my life.”
So That’s How He Got The Nickname
“So this was back in our senior year of high school. My friend was waiting for the bus, after school, when a short kid (who we later learned was a sophomore) with a very pimpled face and unkempt spiky blonde hair walked up to him and started talking with him. More accurately, he was talking at him, because my friend wasn’t even looking at him. My friend was just staring straight ahead in confusion while the kid rambled on about his favorite restaurants back in his hometown before he moved to my high school.
After about ten minutes of this, and my friend not having spoken a word, the kid goes silent for a few seconds.
Then all of a sudden he says, ‘If anyone here tries to mess me, I’ll crush their balls into jelly, put it in a jar, and bring it to my dad. I’ll tell him ‘Hey dad, this is a jelly made from balls.’
And then he walked away, leaving my friend in wide-eyed horror. From that day forth, the little guy was known as ‘Jelly Balls kid.'”
Was He Telling The Truth?
“I was out at an oil rig site in the rainforest of Papua New Guinea, I got into a conversation with an HSE officer who had just walked up beside me as I checked out the rig (my first time on this particular site). He was at the back end of his 28-day FIFO shift and was looking forward to getting out. Though this time he wouldn’t be going home to the States, but rather to nearby Indonesia, to meet up with his wife who was there visiting her family. All good so far, nothing unusual.
He then proceeds to tell me that his wife had to go to her family home because it was a special anniversary of her mother’s death; her family/clan/religion/something had special requirements to memorialize the dead at certain days afterward. Then he says he was still mad about his mother-in-law’s death, thinking it was unnecessary. Having found some lumps on her throat, she had seen a local doctor who diagnosed her with cancer and put her through an aggressive (and expensive) treatment, but she had died less than three months later. Obviously, this had upset his wife and her family, and so he got his hands on her medical file and took it to the US to have another doctor look over it. Turns out it was probably not cancer, but something more benign. But the local doctor had figured out that there was a wealthy American in the family (the guy I was talking to), and so scammed them into paying for the unneeded cancer treatment, which in all likelihood killed her.
That’s not the crazy bit though. Bearing in mind that we’ve only been talking for 10 minutes or so, and he has no idea who I am and how I would react, he then proceeds to tell me that he had the doctor killed. When he was next in Indonesia for one of the many memorials the family required, he arranged to have the doctor captured and killed.
‘They slit his throat, I heard,’ he tells me, like he was describing what he had for lunch.
He also told me he had no qualms about this since he was sure the doctor had scammed and killed others before and there was no way the local authorities would do anything about it since they were notorious for closing ranks against ex-pats.
‘He caused my wife so much pain, so I fixed things to make sure it wouldn’t happen again,’ he said matter-of-factly.
So I’m sort of just standing there, nodding politely and smiling and hoping like heck he can’t see that it’s a mask for my actual thoughts: _I’m stuck at this site for at least a night or two now before I’m scheduled to fly out, and it’s a small camp and I don’t want to be in the same space as this man anymore. Either he’s a crazy guy making up a story just for laughs and giggles, which is bad enough, or he’s telling the truth, and he’s the sort of person who boasts to strangers about a murder he organized. _
Thankfully, I survived my time there, obviously, and I never mentioned it to anyone at the site or at that company – what could I say? It sounded crazy like he was just pulling my leg, but there was never any point where he gave any indication he was kidding and I never saw him again.”
A Huge Responsibility
“On my first day in the dorms freshman year, I met my new roommate. She was a nice-ish girl, but her face looked kinda small for the size of her skull (this is relevant), and she had a large scar across her throat, so I figured she had some sort of medical condition, but didn’t want to be rude so didn’t press it.
One of the first things she says was ‘Do you know how to use a syringe?’
My response was, ‘Uh what? No, I am deathly terrified of needles.’
She responded, ‘Well you need to know how to use one. If I get sick and throw up my medication, you need to inject me with this needle and call 911. Otherwise, I will be dead within a few hours.’
Nobody ANYWHERE had told me I was going to be responsible for my roommate’s life in college. Turns out she had brain cancer when she was six. They removed the front portion of her brain as well as most of her nasal cavity. Somehow, her brain adapted fine, so cognitively she is all there, but she doesn’t produce the hormones you need to live. This means if she were to throw up, aka her pill hormone supplements were to leave her body without being absorbed, she could die within a few short hours. Due to the lack of hormones her skull didn’t grow properly, so her face stayed small and they had to take bone from elsewhere to artificially expand her skull as she grew older. The scar on her throat was when they had to take a vocal cord to fix her heart as well.
I never had to use the needle, but boy was I not ready to be responsible for someone’s life straight into college.”
