12 Horrible Moments People Realised They'd Made Terrible Mistakes
by Benjamin Dzialdowski · BuzzFeedRecently, u/Wonderful-Sundae-480 asked r/AskReddit, "What's a moment when you straight up afterwards knew you had made a really horrible mistake?" So we thought we'd share some of the top responses with you.
1. "Moved in with a guy I hadn't really dated all that long. Woke up cuddling first morning, said, 'mmm, this is nice' and he responded, 'don't get used to it'."
2. "When I was 11, I was having some stomach issues and my mom kept me home from school."
"The one day the pain was so bad, I was hyperventilating so my mom took me to the ER for oxygen. Ran some tests, figured out what’s up, got sent home with meds.
Two days later I had to return to school and really didn’t feel like it. I decided I’d fake hyperventilating this time, probs just go get some oxygen again, and get to chill the rest of the day.
Haha... nope. The fact that I 'still had pain' was so concerning, they did a laparoscopy and decided to take out my appendix 'even though there was nothing wrong with it'. At no point did I admit to faking, not even as they put me under. Two scars to learn the lesson: just go to fucking school."
3. "I once sent a message to my wife apologising for my family's terrible behaviour during a family trip. Except I actually sent it to my sister."
4. "Messaged my 'friend' that my boss was trying to get me fired (he was my direct superior but didn’t have hiring/firing power). Sent it to my boss. I was fired."
5. "Unloaded a heavy shelving unit starting from the bottom shelf. It collapsed on me and nearly killed me. Broke my femur and several bones in my face. In retrospect, that was a really stupid way to unload a shelf."
6. "Had bats in my attic."
"The space was too small for people to climb in to and I couldn’t seal the crack from the outside until the bats left. I stupidly listened to my mother in law who said mothballs will chase them out and tossed handfuls of them into the attic space.
Within minutes the smell was so strong you couldn’t go on the second floor of my house and that was when I realised how bad I fucked up. There was no way to get the mothballs back out of the attic. Two weeks of the second floor being unusable later and the bats having not budged an inch, I had no choice except to remove the entire ceiling of the master bedroom and the insulation to get the mothballs back.
That of course opened up the entire bedroom for the bats to have access to so we had to move out of the room until winter when the bats finally left to migrate to their winter nest. Once they left I had to fully disinfect the bedroom and replace one entire wall they had shit on and part of the floor along with the ceiling I removed and all the insulation.
I did not have a company remove them because at the time the species of bat was protected in my state due to a fungus that had been killing them in large numbers so it was illegal to remove them from their nests. Hence my attempt to get them to leave on their own by making the nest unpleasant. Had I done nothing, they could have coexisted with us for the rest of the season and I would have only had to replace the small section of ceiling and insulation in the one area they were originally clustered."
7. "When I was 10 years old I was playing with a magnifying glass and started a 100 acre fire in a hayfield."
8. "On our wedding night, sitting at dinner, I looked across the table to my first husband and something hit me in the gut. You know that feeling. Right then I knew, this isn’t going to work and I started thinking about how to get out of it."
9. "I once threw a lit match into an almost-empty petrol barrel. I knew it was a mistake the moment my eyebrows and eyelashes were singed off, and the skin on my face started to peel away. Didn't seem too bad once the morphine kicked in."
10. "I was hired to do weed control on someone's yard. I sprayed weed and grass killer chemical on their grass instead of weed control chemical by mistake."
11. "Walked into an open book philosophy exam after two weeks of revision. Was handed an electromagnetics paper I thought was in two weeks time..."
12. "Yesterday, when I decided the burgers were 'done enough'. Today isn’t fun."
H/T to u/Wonderful-Sundae-480 and r/AskReddit for having the discussion!
Any of your own moments of regret to share? Let us know in the comments below!
Additional thumbnail credits: NBC, Warner Bros. Pictures