Luck comes and goes. Sometimes you’re riding high, and sometimes it feels like everything is going wrong at once. But then there’s a whole other level of unlucky where you just find yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time, and you just know that life is out to get you.
Here are 35 stories of people who found themselves in uncomfortable, insane, or dangerous situations.
1. I once got hospitalised because a flowerpot came down off a balcony and smashed me on the shoulder. It was an empty one so I guess it could’ve been heavier, but I briefly passed out from the impact and the pain.
Doctors said it was miraculous that I wasn’t seriously hurt (it fell from fourth floor, couldve been my skull, etc.) but you know what I think would’ve been more lucky? Not being hit by a flowerpot at all.
harjaster
2. When I was 16, I was standing up front at a punk rock show, as I always did, singing along to my friends band. At the climax of the song, a 400lb man jumps off the stage and lands right on me, a 85lb girl with both feet. That shattered my vertebrae and left me a quadriplegic for 6 months.
Wrong place. Wrong time.
Anonymous
3. I once almost got kicked out of high school. I was at my physics club meeting, it ran late, and I was heading to the car. Some girl popped out of a room, just as I walked by, startling me, I jumped a bit and gasped, kept moving. Next day, called to the principal’s office. I was accused of, get this, video taping girls changing. Now, being 17 at the time, I would have loved to have that magical video, but alas, it was 2002 and no one had any such recording device or a tape.
I was still made to serve a week suspension due to “how this looked.”
It was private, Catholic school, nothing at all could be done, ever, about anything. There are no rules or justice in those schools unless you are popular or have money.
Eagleheardt
4. This happened to a coworker’s son, he was outside smoking a cigarette and apparently there was a police chase going on that he didn’t know about.
The police dog jumped over the fence into his backyard and attacked him, really messed up his arm from what I understand. The cops end up throwing him in the police car, after realizing that they had the wrong guy they let him go and literally told him “Well maybe you should have stayed inside.” He’s currently going through a lawsuit with them and is probably going to get a big settlement, because they never even filed a police report or anything.
Vaginabond
5. A few years ago my girlfriend and I had just moved into a new apartment in a really nice area. About 2 months later, we had a brick thrown through a back window, but assumed it was some neighborhood kid being a douche. A few days after that we had 6 guys with guns break into the unit while we were there, pistol whipped us, and took most of our electronics/etc.
They robbed the place because the previous tenant was a drug dealer who apparently owed them a bunch of money and they didn’t get the memo that he had skipped town.
jarkyttaa
6. I have a friend who was an American businessman who was at a meeting in northern Beijing in 1989. What else happened in northern Beijing in 1989? The Tiannamen Square protests.
My friend managed to get on literally the last flight out of Beijing before martial law was declared.
Altcauseisuckatlent
7. I got hit by a bullet once right on my left shoulder. Didn’t hear any gunshots at all. It was a minor wound, it could have been worse.
There is an outdoor shooting range not far from where I was at the time and they were holding some plate toss-shooting event and someone must’ve shot on the air then it landed in me.
[deleted]
8. I was just about to head home after a night out in London, so I was casually standing at the coat check waiting my turn. However, I happened to be standing at the coat check when a guy was being thrown out of the club.
This guy happened to be a little off his rocker, because as he went past me, he grabbed my shoulder, went to head butt me, and at the same time bit a chunk out of my lip. I ended up needing plastic surgery on my lip, and about 5 years on I still have no feeling in that part of my lip!
dammitjason
9. Hiking with my son about 10 years ago. Nearing the crest of a hill with a good view, I heard a gunshot. There’s a hunting preserve a few miles away so I didn’t think much of it.
Got to the top and my son pointed out a guy laying on the ground. Thought he was drunk until I remembered the gun shot. I left my son at the trail and went over to look. Found a .32 caliber pistol on the ground with an entry wound above the right eye and a larger exit wound behind the right ear. Kid looked about 18 years old.
I called 911 and led the county sheriffs to the body. They took castings of our shoes and for an hour or two I was a suspect in a murder until they could figure out officially it what had happened. I sat in the parking lot and hung out with the deputies and they told me that about a half dozen suicides happen on that hill every year.
I always wonder if we had moved a little quicker if I could’ve changed his mind. My boy doesn’t even remember the incident, but it haunts me on occasion.
justec1
10. My school takes kids on trips around the world for march break. Guess who happened to be in Japan for that big earthquake/tsunami a few years back? A group of Canadian teenaged and teachers. One teacher that was there (all the students are probably in college now) tells of when they were in a bus when the quake hit, and the driver was swerving left and right a little, which they thought was a joke.
They were laughing until they noticed the skyscrapers flailing about. Apparently the Japanese were running up to them in the street mid-quake to apologize for the earthquake as well.
DisobedientAvocado-
11. There is never a right place to have bowel problems… but the wrong place is an airplane. Turbulence + diarrhea = …
Just_Walked_In
12. There was a serial bathroom floor pooper at my school (they seem to be in many) and I became a suspect for being in the bathrooms at the same time as the poop was reported.
-cDJ-
13. First quarter of college I went to a class for an entire week that wasn’t a class I signed up for. When I wasn’t on the class list, my professor just assumed I might have been a late entry. I even bought the textbook, did a few homework assignments and had a quiz before realizing my mistake.
And I didn’t even really realize my mistake, the professor had to go and double check his class list before finding the error of my ways. And that’s the story or how my $130 textbook became a $30 textbook in less than two weeks.
Yoinkie2013
14. Cops threw me and a friend in cuffs when we were walking home from lunch. Someone nearby had reported an attempted break-in so of course we were the most likely culprits.
proffelytizer
15. I used to play baseball back in high school. When it would rain we would practice on the basketball courts in our gym. My buddy and I are playing catch and at this point we’re at opposite ends of the court throwing fairly hard.
As I release a throw, I notice the door behind my friend opening. As it opens outward it pushes his arm forward causing him to narrowly miss the ball. On the other side of that door was someone walking to the girls locker room holding a cake and balloons, as it was her birthday.
The ball laser beamed through the doorway and nailed this poor girl in the forehead. She dropped sending the cake to the ground and the balloons to the roof of the gym. She ended up being okay, aside from having baseball seam imprints on her head for the next few days.
gabem12
16. Once I went to my dad’s house after going out with my mates. Wrong choice, I didn’t wake up to an alarm. I woke up to him and his girlfriend having sex on the couch. I couldn’t leave my room for so long.
Chicken-Mcit
17. I moved into my college residence in lower Manhattan on September 10th, 2001.
underwriter
18. What was almost the greatest moment of my soccer career? 90th minute, my team down 1, I let a shot go from well outside the box. Made great connection with the ball, more than enough pace to beat the keeper. The ball sails past the outstretched keeper… and over the bar striking a 4 year old girl in the head.
She was just eating ice cream looking at the grass.
19. On a packed train around 1AM where a good amount of people were drunk. Sat in front of someone who projectile vomited all over my seat and got some in my hair.
pumper911
20. It was when I went to the restroom in the middle of the night while staying over at a friend’s house. At the ripe young age of 10, I opened the wrong door and saw his parents ‘fighting’ in bed.
They were yelling at each other and there was a lot of slapping noises. Didn’t realize til later what I had actually walked in on…
TheMaxican
21. During my freshman year of high school, there was a huge food fight and a ton of actual fighting that happened. Just to give you an idea of how bad it was, a newspaper for the Southern California area wrote an article calling them “riots” and said they were over the election.
Neither of those were true, but we had a lot of police on campus, and they shortened our passing period to about 2 minutes. (story continued on the next page…).
(…continued from last page.) During the big food fight, my butt was just trying to get away from everything. That is, until some jerk decided to throw a rock the size of a baseball at my back. I had a huge welt on my back for about a year. And then some jerk teacher tried to give me detention for participating in the food fight.
SINCE WHEN IS A ROCK FOOD?
Broodd
22. Started working on a PC repair store here in Mexico, dangerous city in the south, Someone comes and wants their PC cleaned and a new OS, I decided to clean it first, then work on cleaning the HDD.
We got raided by a few of men with AKs, I trow myself to the floor, rifle pointed at my head, they take the PC and client away, guy is found dead hours later, Cartel member.
My personal theory is that the man was a member of a Cartel, and whoever kill him thought there was important info in that PC, but I’ll never know.
23. Guy got mugged in front of my house in Seattle. Used to be a rough neighborhood. I was bent down behind a trash can a few feet away, pulling weeds. Heard some scuffling and a struggle, stood up because I was curious and saw an older guy on the ground with a younger guy kneeling on his back, digging his wallet out of his pocket.
I happened to be holding my steel shovel. Mugger looked up, saw me looming over them with a huge shovel, yelped, sprang backwards, crashed into a telephone pole, bounced forward from it onto his face on the sidewalk while I watched, just standing there, holding my shovel. He looked up at me, terrified, as if I’d done all of this to him and started apologizing!
I grunted, “This is my street. Not yours. Screw off.” Dude scrambled backwards from me on all fours and ran off like I was shooting at him!
Wrong place, wrong time. Hilarious in retrospect, but at the time I was just puzzled, concerned and grumpy.
Eclectophile
24. Summer 1998. We were in Washington DC on vacation checking out various monuments and whatnot. Smithsonian, Washington monument, Vietnam Memorial, they had the White House open for people who wanted to check it out, it was kinda cool.
One day we go to the Capitol building for a tour. There’s a big area with a lot of statues of notable people donated by the various states, and that leads to another area and you can look down and see people entering the area with the statues. We hear two or three loud bangs and assume the statues had fallen over somehow, but people were panicking and hurrying to get out of there (story continued on the next page…).
(continued from last page…) Some poor girl gets knocked down and dragged out of the way. Turns out some guy had run into the building and started shooting, killing two officers before he was wounded. Got stuck there for hours. I was only 9 at the time so the severity of the situation didn’t really register. I kept asking my parents why we weren’t allowed to leave.
WtotheSLAM
25. I wasn’t in the wrong place, but it didn’t matter. Many years ago I was kicked out of my first university program. It happened after a particularly wild dorm party pretty much completely destroyed the building.
Every resident was asked to pay an insanely large fine and given the option to rat out other residents for a slight reduction in fines. That was sleazy enough, but they also did a bulk discount for bigger tattletales. Yup, they offered 10% extra for the second person you threw under the bus, 20% for the third, and so on.
The thing is, I had already gone home for the year a week prior. (story continued on the next page…)
(continued from last page…) I didn’t even know the party was happening. I had proof in the form of passport stamps, hotel receipts, and dozens of witnesses that I was at home.
To add insult to injury, I didn’t even get the infamous letter until after I had bought my non-refundable ticket to return in the fall… and long after the fine and my statements were due.
I didn’t get to go back to school, and it took seven years to fight the fines and the damage they did to my credit. Even when the university admitted they were wrong, they still were jerks about it. Witness statements about me, absolving me from dorm staff and campus security were finally released to my lawyers, and immediately the university apologized.
They apologized to my lawyers for holding up the case that is. The fines were dropped, a judges statement was added to my credit reports at their expense, and I was given the right to take my transcript to another school. Yup, I was still banned for living in the same dorm as the party. Best part? They offered to let me come back if I could rat out one of my friends, for old times sake I guess.
Anonymous
26. Just arrived in Naples Italy and I took a 1 am taxi to my hostel. The taxi driver took a left one block to soon. Told me my hostel was at the top of the building and left the scene. It was dark and an empty alley.
Having never been here, I just trusted every word. I went upstairs this shady building to where there was a single door, I open it because I saw lights and heard some commotion thinking it was the lobby of the hostel. (story continued on the next page…)
(…Continued from last page.) Well no, it was some sort of meeting between some gangsters. All which had guns already in their hands. Being the only teenager (and I look even younger) in the room no one shot at me. I got lucky… I got detained temporarily and ended up having to explain myself in the little Italian that I knew, I was nervous so I cracked a joke.
Eventually someone escorted me out at gun point, thought I was going to die… The guy just kindly said “I hope you get a good story from this, you are lucky you are funny” then pointed me to the building I should have gone into.
jcjavo
27. When I was younger and first started smoking weed, every time I smoked it felt like everyone around me was high too. It was always such a weird feeling, everywhere I went, weird things would happen when I was stoned.
One day I was having a particularly weird day. My buddy called me and told me to meet him and his place around 7, because he was getting off work at 7:30. I remember blazing and going to a gas station to get some food beforehand, and in the middle of the store, there was a crow just walking around.
It grabbed some chips and started walking out. I look at the guy behind the counter and he’s just standing there smiling from ear to ear. (story continued on the next page…)
(…continued from last page.)
There was always things like that happening when I was stoned that made you think, “Crap, this kind of thing always happens when I get high.” And the people around you always acted so weird that you were sure they were stoned too.
I head to my friends place with a bag full of food and my mind still thinking about the shop-lifting crow. I walked into his house (he was the kind of good friend you just walked into the front door), and in the kitchen I see his parents sitting around with him.
The closer I walked, I noticed some things on the table I never expected to see; a bong, bag of weed and other paraphernalia. Now, a normal me would have assessed the situation, but the stoned me could only come to one conclusion, and I smiled and said, “Oh crap, your parents smoke too?!?”
As you might have guessed, his parents had found his stash while he was at work and were having the talk. Me interfering just proved all their suspicions, and as a result, I got a nice phone call home telling my parents about my stupid stoned butt.
Moral of the story is, not everyone around you is stoned, you’re just really baked.
Yoinkie2013
28. As a teenager, I worked at a retirement home (doing IT stuff mainly).
There was a big blackout in Eastern US and Canada in 2003. I was scheduled to leave work at 4pm, and SHOULD HAVE GONE HOME ON TIME.
Instead I lolly gagged around, and the power went out shortly at 4, and didn’t come back till late into the night.
Because I was there, I got to witness the insanity of old people freaking out over the lights going out, but more than that, the panic when they realized they didn’t really have emergency plans of any sort for a prolonged outage. This meant no real power for lights, elevators, air conditioning, or you know, things like medical equipment that really mattered to those people.
It was pandemonium within 10 minutes of the lights going out! (story continued on the next page…)
(…continued from last page.)
Nurses were freaking out and losing their minds. In the end it was a really crappy experience, I literally had to go door to door asking people in the neighbourhood if they had backup generators we could borrow so people wouldn’t die (I’m not sure it was really that extreme, but that’s what they told me to say). In the end, we had people playing Bridge sitting around a generator all plugged into it in four or five rooms throughout the complex. There were others in ice baths to keep the heat down, and I have no idea where they found the ice. When the power wasn’t restored that night, we had some of them sharing beds so they could stay plugged into the power in central locations.
Anyhow, probably good I was there to help out, but it was a horrible experience. The worst thing was when I had to help them clean out the industrial freezer they had. Two-three days later with no power, all the meat and dairy thawed and went bad, along with anything else in there. The worst smell I can remember.
billbapapa
29. I was a pretty typical midwestern 19 year old guy. I had a crappy job at a restaurant, lived in a crappy house with some roommates, partied. The usual.
Well part of MY usual was to ride my bike to and from work, and I’d often stop by the river and smoke a bowl before I got home. So I’d just completed this bowl smoking ritual and had adopted some high volume “Atmosphere” on my headphones.
I was peddling my bike down the side walk, basically staring at the sidewalk in front of me. You know, living the life. I’m about three blocks from home and there is an intersection coming up so my attention shifts from the ten feet of sidewalk in front of me for the first time in blocks. I look to my left and see some movement of bodies wearing black. Look to my right and see a line of cop cars, and subsequently, a line of cops.
Guns drawn. I was pedalling through the very start of a no-knock, deadly armed, swat supported raid. My mouth opened just enough to show my surprise and immediate regret. Of the 6 cops on my right, one just slowly shook his head in disbelief the others stared in awe. I didn’t breath till I was out of the potential cross fire and didn’t look back till I got home.
zsatbecker
30. I was at a party the other night, and one of the guys there told me this story:
His dad decided to backpack from England to Thailand in 1979. By late December 1979, he had made it roughly half way to his destination, which put him in Afghanistan. On the morning of December 24th, 1979, he and his friends got up, and were planning to do some rock climbing.
They got in the jeep of a guy that they paid to bring them out to rock climb. When they got in, he told them that they weren’t going rock climbing that day, and instead he was heading for Pakistan, and they could join him if they wanted to. Why the sudden change of plans?
December 24th, 1979 is the day that the soviets invaded Afghanistan. This guy’s father has pictures of him standing on a hill with a few dozen or so soviet tanks in the field below him.
Andrew9623
32. Was looking for weed one day, asked a friend of mine and he says, “let’s stop at ____’s house after school” I knew this kid because he was pretty big into selling weed and all that shite.
Basically, we chill in this tricked out shed in his backyard. Has three locks on the door, a couch, heating, a speaker, and a small television. This was the first time I ever went to this dudes house/talked to him outside of school.
Thirty minutes go by, and the BAYANET team practically rips open the door, and cuffs me in ten seconds.
Apparently he sold to an undercover, and they had a warrant out to raid his house for like three months. The first day I decide to go to his house to smoke some weed, his house gets raided after a three month wait on a warrant.
zuzu4yuyu
33. Was standing around in high school looking at my class schedule because I was a lost brand new freshman. Couple of senior guys decide to do a mock fight to freak out the underclassmen. One does a huge overstated punch in my direction and his friend ducks at just the right time for it to lay me out.
JusticeRings
34. I was playing in the street with some friends in high school. One friend was having a gay ole time kicking his shoes off to see how far they would go. Well, Mr.Soccer man decided to kick it low and hard in my general direction, promptly nailing me directly in the nuts. I rolled around on the ground for quite a while writhing in pain.
nirvanna94
35. Decided to ditch school one day with a friend, went to his house to kick it thinking it was empty.
Walked in on his mother getting doggied with some old fella in the living room facing the door.
Arggghz
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