I'll do it later. My mom will do it. It'll work itself out. The excuses we tell ourselves to justify our laziness!
These Redditors shared stories that can teach us all a lesson in energy conservation.
[Source listed at the end of the article.]
A laser show every night
“I have a dog and a cat, and I HATE sleeping with the door open. Sometimes the dog wants to sleep in the bedroom, other times he wants to sleep outside the bedroom. But he never decides until I’m comfy in bed.
Solution? Keep a laser pointer on my nightstand. Once dog decides where he’s sleeping, I’ll shine the laser pointer on the door so that my cat’s paws it closed. It has now become a routine that my cat will wait by the door for the laser before laying down.”
A useful prank call
“I was laying in bed with the light on and wanted to go to sleep, but didn’t want to get up. So I called my house from my cell phone and asked for myself in a disguised voice. When my mom came in to bring me the phone, I asked her to turn the light out when she left. I then hung up both phones and went to sleep.”
Hamsters in college
“In college, we hooked up those upside-down water bottles that people put in hamster cages to our headboards with a wire. The idea was that we could drink from them when we woke up after a night of partying. It enabled us to just open our mouth instead of having to move any other part of our body.
We didn’t get much water out of it.”
Anything but the stairs
“I drove to class. Saw the escalators up to my third-floor classroom were broken. Stared at the stairwell door for a moment. Went home.”
He’s got it covered
“The passenger seat floor in my cars have become basically waste bins that get cleaned out when they rise to be level to the bottom of the seat, or a little lower if the stars are aligned and I’m dating someone.
Until it reaches that height, I throw a towel across the mess to cover it, and then it just looks like I have something on the floor–something that’s not a small landfill of Red Bull cans, water bottles, and the paper that covers the straws at Dunkin Donuts.
It originally started as having a towel there for mud and snow, but I found myself occasionally tucking garbage under it when I had to give someone a ride. Eventually it became a habit of towel covered trash piles. I recently got a new car, so I’m really planning to not start doing that again.”
Halfway there
“I actually managed to wash my bed sheets for once. The problem is I didn’t put the sheets on my bed until 2 months later.”
This guy deserves a single clap
“I used to have one of those ‘clap on, clap off’ lights in my room. I hated clapping, so I just made an audio recording of me clapping and mapped it to one of the programmable keys on my keyboard.”
Sharpshooter
“I shot about 10 nerf darts at my light switch while lying in bed. I missed all of them and slept with the lights on.”
The future is here
“I once attached my dog’s leash to my RC monster truck car and walked her around the cul-de-sac with it… all from the comfort of my living room. Please don’t judge me.”
Small screen vs. big effort
“My TV was on my dresser and I didn’t have a remote. I had turned off Netflix in an effort to go to bed. I decided a few minutes later that sleep is for the weak, and decided to go for more Netflix.
I never got up to turn my tv back on though. I watched hours of Netflix on my tiny phone to avoid getting up for 5 seconds.”
Just call it zen style
“Last semester I went to class from Monday to Thursday. I had yoga class Tuesday and Thursday, which gave me an excuse to wear yoga pants all day on those days.
By the end of the semester, I was wearing them every day, disregarding my jeans completely on Monday and Wednesday. It got to the point where I would sleep in them, roll out of bed, throw on a bra and t-shirt, and call it a good outfit.
Every day.”
Pizza problems
“I lived in a loft apartment and was having a lazy weekend with a friend. We decided to order pizza but neither of us wanted to go downstairs and answer the door.
So, we did what any lazy girls would do. We found a basket, an old jump rope, a bathrobe sash and a scarf, tied them together, and lowered the money down in the basket. We had the pizza guy tie the rope around the box a couple times so we could bring it back up.
We tipped him well enough to make it worth his while, but he still called us ‘weird’ before he left.”
He gets an ‘A’ for laziness, though
“I was in a class called OJT (On-the-Job Training) in high school. Every day, the last period of school was dedicated to me being able to leave class to go to ‘work.’ We were given grades by our employers, which would then turn into grades for the class.
As a high school senior, I convinced the teacher that oversaw this program that because I had my own ‘corporation’ that I used to sell stuff on eBay, I should be able to be my own boss. She agreed.
I failed that class because I didn’t bother to fill out the paperwork to give myself a grade.”
He broke the golden rule
“Not me, but a buddy of mine confessed this. He was laying in bed one morning. He picked his nose and had no where to put it… so he put it back in his nose.”
Go with the groove
“One of my best friends and I determined that we share a common thread of laziness. We bump our bodies off of walls and other tall rigid objects in order to make 45° or greater turns in the house. It’s not anything we did intentionally, we just kind of discovered one day when we were back in high school.”
This is why cell phones were invented
“I was once at a huge restaurant, sitting in a corner and getting terrible service. Instead of getting up to find my waiter, I pulled out my phone and called the restaurant to send the waiter back to my table.”
How heroic
“I was watching TV with a roommate, and the TV remote was right in front of us on the floor. Instead of just leaning over and grabbing it, we use pillows, hoodies, and feet to finally get it close enough that we literally didn’t have to move to get the remote.”
Whatever, I’ll just hack it
“I accidentally clicked on my CD drive in Windows, and the disc drive opened up because where was no disk. The tower was out of reach. Instead of standing up and walking four feet to close it, I Googled how to write a software program to close it.
10 minutes later, success.”
Creative, but still lazy
“I was laying on my bed and I had to search something on Google on my web browser. Unfortunately, I had a wireless mouse, my keyboard was across the room, and I had no will to get up.
I literally scrolled around the web page I was on at the moment to find and copy each letter of what I needed to search with my mouse and paste it in the web address bar.
I will never forget. It took a good few minutes to do my search. I was ashamed of myself that night.”
We all try this once
“I was about 12 years old. I was sitting on my couch watching cartoons and eating buffalo wings. I didn’t want to get up and throw away the bones, so I just shoved the plate under the couch. I then (from the couch) began throwing each and every eaten wing and bone into one the corners of the living room, somewhere in between the bookshelf and the TV, until my dad walked in.
He was both baffled and ashamed… and so am I.”
Teach me, master
“I’m a pretty lazy guy so I’d say it’s tough to narrow my actions down to just one choice. A couple of examples:
I have literally mastered the art of picking things up with my feet.
In high school, I used to pay a kid a dollar every day to sneak into the cafeteria and buy me my lunch, so I could skip lines come lunchtime.”
Two birds, one pizza
“I was about to head home from work, but first went to a pizza shop and ordered a pizza for delivery to my house. I then asked if the driver could drive me there as were going to the same place. It was cheaper than a taxi.”
Be like the sloth
“For about 6 years of my youth I used to pretend to be asleep so people had to carry me everywhere instead of me walking. I became a pro at this, and I’m a small guy so people wouldn’t make much of a fuss.
I’ve also done this at least three times since becoming an adult, while completely sober. Thanks to good friends for carrying me upstairs, tucking me in, and not making fun of me.”
This is so 2017
“I downloaded a movie on the Internet instead of going upstairs to grab the DVD.”
Bending down is for suckers
“When I was a sophomore in high school, I would tape metal BB pellets to my pens and pencils and carry a telescoping magnetic pointer so I didn’t have to bend over to pick them up if they rolled off my desk. It came in handy in the hallways too.”
Sometimes laziness can inspire innovation.
My light switch in my bedroom is on the opposite wall of my bed’s headboard. Every night I would be browsing the internet in bed (either from my laptop or my phone) and be too tired or too lazy to turn off the light. I used every method but most were unsuccessful. Then one Saturday, after lying in bed for a couple hours, I walked outside to the apartment complex being built across my street and grabbed a long wooden pole when the workers weren’t looking. Then I went home and pondered how I was going to sand it down. So I ordered from a local Chinese restaurant and paid the guy an extra $30 to go down the street to a hardware store and have it sanded. Now I keep it stuck in my ceiling fan (at an angle where it is caught between the fan blade and the ceiling and doesn’t fall), which I never use so I can easily access it with minimal limb movement. It failed the first few times, so I decided that it needed a larger object on the end to smack things. So I took a traveling pillow (the closest thing to me at the time), and some masking tape and voila! my very own Fing-longer is born!
Desperation meets laziness.
When I was 11 I took some leftover pie from Thanksgiving into my room and didn’t finish it. It then sat in my room for 3 months and I never took the nasty pie in its dish back to the kitchen. One day I was hungry in my room, and didn’t feel like going all the way to the kitchen. Then I spotted the pie. It was rock hard and tasted like death. I am not proud of that.
When laziness is inconsiderate.
Back in high school, me, my friend, and some other guy were assigned a science project based on atoms. The teacher gave directions that all 3 of us in the groups would be graded the same so we had to do our best.
My friend and I worked really hard doing our part but our partner wasn’t really doing much. He just sat there browsing his iPhone most of the time we were doing actual work. We got annoyed because of this and we threatened to take his phone and smash it if he didn’t do any work. He finally complied and came up with an idea that we should incorporate a powerpoint into our project and he said he would do that part.
We worked endlessly and put a lot of time into this project and finally the day of the presentation came. That day, we presented most of our work and got to the end when our partner presented his powerpoint. Here’s how it went: His powerpoint looks good so far. His title looks nice and the next page describes an accurate explanation of atoms. Here’s the thing though – the next slide features a video which he took from some chemistry show featuring the atomic process. After the video ended, so did the powerpoint. Me and my friend both had stunned looks on our faces as he sat down like the whole thing was gold. So basically all he had done was the title, and then he incorporated a show he had filmed from his TV.
The teacher gave us a 75 on the project. We were angry at our partner for just filming some show. How lazy could he get? We could’ve done a whole lot better had he created a normal powerpoint like everyone else in the school. I still can’t believe we got a 75 on that project just because of that one guy.
The importance of having friends.
Back in high school I drove a ’94 Ford F-150. It’s a Ford so of course something was going to go wrong. That something was reverse. I was too poor and too lazy to fix it. My solution was, if I was going anywhere I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to park on a hill or pull straight out, I would call up one of my friends to come with me so they could push me backwards out of a parking spot. I never told them that’s why I invited them to doctor appointments or a quick trip to the grocery store. If I couldn’t find anyone able to ride along I would just have to call the day a wash and do whatever I intended to do later.
Laziness can cost you.
Once I had a pressure cooker and a separate rice cooker so that I could make curry in the pressure cooker and rice in the rice cooker. One day I made curry, decided it’s not that great and keep it on the slab which is right next to the kitchen sink and the trash can. Every single day I would go into the kitchen, look at the cooker and just leave it there. A few weeks down the line I made a little too much rice in the rice cooker, and decided that I’d throw it out since I wouldn’t be using it. Now, the slab next to the sink already has the other cooker with the curry I made 2 weeks ago still sitting there. I then decide to keep the rice cooker with the rice to be thrown out in one half of my kitchen sink. I still have the other half free to wash my glasses and cereal bowls, etc.
Now 2 months have passed by, and I can barely enter the kitchen because the rice cooker is completely covered with fungus. The other cooker with the curry thankfully has been tightly closed and I don’t dare open it to see what creature has started living in there. So I decide finally that I will open my trash compartment right below the sink and place both the rice and pressure cookers there, thinking that I will toss them out the next time I take out the trash. It’s been nearly three months after all of that and I have taken out my trash at least 10 times and I still haven’t got rid of the fungus-infected cookers under my sink.
Also, a new rice cooker and pressure cooker set will set me back by about $60, which is not a big deal. For the past 4 or so months I have not cooked dinner or lunch at home and have been going out to eat daily, or if I’m too lazy to go out, just sit at home and think about the good times I had with those cookers…
Hope she at least got a date out of it…
Yesterday, my mom called my phone 20 minutes after I told her I was going to have a nap. I had a terrible week with little to no sleep and she knew this. The reason for her call was because she was downstairs, too busy chatting with men on a dating site and needed cigarettes from a store 2 minutes walking distance from where we live. So she asked me to get them. Yes, she’s that lazy.
This is laziest as an art form.
I’ve had over a month to do a 5 page essay that’s due in 3.5 hours. I’m on page 2 and don’t intend on moving to the computer anytime soon.
In one year alone, I racked up over $1000 USD in parking tickets because I was too lazy to park on the right side of the road or pay my tickets in a timely matter. I bought a beater car for the winter 3 months ago. It had a flat and I have new tires. The car has been driven once and jacked up for 3 months now. I now have it in a parking lot and continue to get tickets because I’m too lazy to park my car properly. I shouldn’t even be driving.
My phone doesn’t get charged because my arm is too short or I’m too tired to roll over and grab the charger. I keep my fridge at freezing temperatures so I don’t have to throw garbage away and food doesn’t go bad. I need to reevaluate what I’m doing with my life.
These comments have been edited for clarity.
