Spare the rod, spoil the child. Well, how about adults? These folks share the most grossly entitled behavior they’ve ever seen from spoiled people.
“Well, That Was Anti-Climactic!”
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“A few years ago, I was waiting with my daughter for her to have an MRI scan. She had been in a lot of pain with her upper back and neck and so as it was a long wait at the clinic, and we were worried, we decided to pay for a private one and put the cost on a credit card.
After 40 minutes or so after our scheduled appointment time, we still hadn’t been seen. I went to ask if they’d forgotten my daughter somehow, but the receptionist explained that a patient had been taken very ill in the scanner and doctors had been called to attend to them.
Knowing what had happened we said, ‘Ok, no problem. We’ll wait. Hope the person’s ok.‘
After another 10 mins or so, this lady of around 30, came in and went up to the receptionist. She was dressed from head to toe in designer clothes and had a handbag worth way more than our car. She carried herself as though she thought she was very important and strutted up to the check-in desk.
Her appointment time was after ours, and she was now about five minutes over. She was already furious about being kept waiting at all and when the Receptionist told her how late they were running, she was incensed!
The receptionist patiently explained about the emergency and it being unavoidable, she offered her tea and even a chance to reschedule, but the woman was not to be reasoned with and she went nuclear! She said she didn’t care what the problem was and demanded to be taken in right now! She was told again that unfortunately, this just wasn’t possible.
Now spitting bullets, the woman then announced that she was going to count to 20 and she had better have been taken in by then!!
Obviously, there was no way that was going to happen, as my daughter’s appointment was before hers and crucially the scanner still wasn’t free!
But she was true to her word and began slowly and very loudly counting to 20. Everyone was staring. She made herself look like an absolute twit.
Finally, she got to 20. Unsurprisingly, nothing happened. The Receptionist said nothing and this petulant woman literally stamped her foot in rage.
It was such a tense atmosphere. You could have cut the air with a knife.
Then my daughter said, ‘Well that was anti-climactic!’
And everyone burst out laughing!
Then my daughter was called to get changed and as we got up the Receptionist approached the petulant woman to ask her for her form and how she was paying.
After all that showing off, it emerged that the woman hadn’t called the insurance company to authorize her scan and had to go and phone them, so she wouldn’t have been ready to go in for her scan anyway.”
The Underground Underwear Selling Ring
“When I was in college, my middle-class-roots fiance lived in a fraternity house with some relatively wealthy people.
One particular person sticks out for me as the high bar for spoiled behavior.
He had a penchant for wearing Calvin Klein Boxer Briefs.
They were roughly $25 each, (and this was before you could buy them at Costco.)
He sent out his laundry to be washed and folded (and dry cleaned), and never did any of it himself, but he absolutely *refused* to have anyone touch his underwear. In fact, because of this, he *refused* to wear the same pair more than once.
So, every single day, he would open a brand new, $25 pair of underwear.
And, every single day, he would throw out yesterday’s underwear.
If someone happened to touch his underwear for any reason, there would be another change.
He was ordering them by the case.
No one else has ever even come close to this on my spoiled-o-meter.
How do I know this?
His fraternity brothers, always happy to scrounge through the garbage, noticed that perfectly good underwear was going to waste. So they all stocked up. And then when they all (and I mean all) had more than enough underwear to go around, and there was still an endless supply, they started an underground underwear selling ring.”
He Spent $10K In Five Minutes
“I was shopping at a Hugo Boss store in California for a new belt in 2012 with my girlfriend at the time when all of a sudden a 17-year-old walks in with a private butler. The kid announces to the store attendees and everyone present in the store that the entire mall is not ‘high-end’ enough for him and that he would rather be at his father’s penthouse in Las Vegas. The Butler (wearing formal butler attire, with a bowtie and everything) looks visibly embarrassed to have to follow this kid around and hold his shopping bags!
The kid then starts buying many suits and other clothes without trying them on, and the store attendant decides to bring out some merlot for him. I’m pretty sure he spent $10,000 in 5 minutes.
I was curious how they brought him out merlot but didn’t ID him, considering he didn’t look 21. I asked the store attendant if I could have some merlot too, but the kid interjected to say that ‘clearly I wasn’t spending enough money to deserve merlot’. I jested that I left my visa black card at home and wanted to shop in other stores too for varieties sake. He said I clearly don’t know fashion…
The kid then turns to my girlfriend and says ‘Dang girl, those boots are fierce, where did you buy those?’ She replied, ‘I got them at Ross….’ (FYI Ross is a budget store for those who don’t know — those were $10 boots). This brat then exclaims ‘Ross! Don’t tell me about Ross, don’t even talk to me with those cheap shoes’ and proceeds to storm off…
This was my unusual encounter with the most spoiled person I have met in my life. It felt like from a movie or reality TV show, but sadly it was not.
I never did get that glass of merlot either.”
Some People Really Think They Matter More
“My college roommate rushed me to the ER one afternoon after I collapsed on our bathroom floor crying and shrieking in pain.
Even though I was obviously in distress at the ER, it took a few minutes of people running around attempting to decide if I should be taken to an exam room, taken immediately for tests, if so what tests? (I’m not complaining about this, I get it!)
It was finally decided a couple of tests should be run immediately. I was put in a wheelchair (I had too much lower abdominal pain to lie on a gurney). As I’m curled upholding my knees tightly to my chest weeping, a very well-dressed woman decided to bypass the reception desk and engage one of the nurses who was about to wheel me away for my tests. Her issue? She was on her way to a very important meeting and had managed to practically rip one of her acrylic nails off, along with the natural nail underneath. It was a very important meeting. She could not be late. She needed to be seen *now*!
The nurse pushed her away and yelled at her to go check-in at the reception desk, and off I went for the first of God knows how many tests. Less than two hours later I was in emergency surgery. A tumor had collapsed my ovary. If the tumor had burst, I would have had full-blown ovarian cancer. The weight of the tumor also could have torn my Fallopian tube, instead of just causing it to atrophy, and could have caused internal bleeding.
My life was on the line because this woman didn’t have the balls to just finish tearing the nail off, which is exactly what the doctor did when she was finally seen.
Yes, I do realize I shouldn’t know that, but the nurse thought I would get a good laugh out of the ‘anonymous’ woman in the waiting room …”
A Self-Made Man Begets A Spoiled Son
“My old university housemate.
His father was a self-made man who came from grinding poverty to create and run (and eventually sell) a highly successful business. This man along with his wife retired at 45 and have spent the last 15+ years traveling the globe. He has seen both ends of the social spectrum and on the occasion when I met him had an air of humility about him.
His son (my former University housemate) was the polar opposite, however.
He never experienced poverty as his parents were already rich when he was born. He never wanted for anything and had the lifestyle as a child that I could only dream of as I came from very humble beginnings (bus driver Dad, factory worker Mother).
I thought at first that his father had instilled humility into him, but sadly I was mistaken. During the first summer break, I was planning to go to Australia to visit my Aunt and then have a whistle-stop tour of the country.
‘You can’t afford it’ sneered my former housemate.
I actually could afford it as I had a little in my savings account and had squirreled away any leftover money that I had earned from my part-time job. I went and had the most amazing time, albeit on a budget. When I returned home, my housemate ignored me for the first fortnight for having the temerity to go away despite my perceived poorness. When he finally got over his sulk he demanded a forensic account of my trip and then deemed that I must have had an awful time as I did not stay in five-star accommodation. He was pleased with this incorrect declaration as in his mind he’d concluded that my trip was completely hamstrung by my lack of wealth. When he summarised to me after he’d heard a detailed minute-by-minute account of the trip, he made it sound like I’d lived on the streets the whole time I’d been in Australia.
‘You can’t afford it’ was something I heard espoused from him to me many times over the 18 months I lived with him.
I worked part-time whilst I was studying and was able to buy an old rust bucket of a car (which incidentally was my first).
‘What a piece of sh*t’ was my housemate’s reaction when he saw it. ‘My Dad bought me a Mercedes for my first car’ he mocked.
He had no qualms getting into said ‘’piece of sh*t’ when he needed a ride and was too wasted to drive himself.
At the time there was a popular football game on the PC which the whole world and his mate was playing and my housemate had a copy on his all singing and all dancing Apple laptop that his father had paid for.
I was present when in a fit of temper he threw the laptop across the room where it hit the far wall and smashed into many pieces.
‘Why did you do that?!’ I asked whilst not quite believing what I had just witnessed.
‘I lost a f*cking match’.
He smashed his brand new laptop computer up in a fit of rage because he lost a football match on the game that he was playing.
Within a few days a delivery had arrived: his Father had replaced the broken one.
This cycle was repeated throughout the time I lived with him ad nauseum.
On top of this, he was also a bully and would torment me and anyone he felt inferior to him – and there were many. He figured out early into our tenure at University who he could be sycophantic to (mainly those who were from a wealthy family) and who he would treat with contempt. If you were deemed to be poorer than him but he decided you were not for bullying, you’d be expected to act as a servant to him, otherwise, he’d personally see to it that you were literally destroyed at University and ostracised by all until the day you left.
I had a very strange relationship with him. He hated me for reasons that were only known to him, but he could also act as my best friend when there was no one else around. I’d be dropped like a hot potato once his rich friends were back on the scene.
Oscar Wilde’s quote about knowing the cost of everything and the value of nothing couldn’t be more true to my old housemate.”
Spoiled Parents Make Spoiled Kids
“Well I’m a teacher, and encountering spoiled children is a part of the job.
I’ve taught in private schools in wealthy suburbs, where most of the students were oblivious as to just how privileged they were compared to the average child their age. These kids, for the most part, did not act spoiled. They would just sometimes unintentionally say things that let everyone around them know just how wealthy their parents were. Things like, ‘I’ve never been to O’Hare. We always fly out of Wheeling.’ (If you’re not from the area, O’Hare is the huge airport in Chicago, and Wheeling is the private airport north of the city, where the Lear Jet crowd keeps their planes, but to the students I taught, they didn’t realize that only rich people used that airport. They just thought it was a smaller airport closer to their houses.)
I just made a mental list of the top five most spoiled students whom I taught who acted spoiled, and all five of them have one thing in common: they were boys who were being raised by very young single mothers, and weren’t spoiled by wealth so much as they were spoiled by their mothers’ inability to tell them ‘no’ and a tendency to believe their children could do no wrong.
Two of those boys were brothers. Their mother was a city worker, which is a highly paid, highly sought-after position here in Chicago. In the three years I taught those boys, they frequently mentioned how their mother went on dates a lot in the evenings and just let them do whatever they wanted. They thought the freedom to do whatever they wanted extended to the classroom as well. They had major behavior issues on top of failing every single class due to not doing any work, and time and time again, the mother stood up for them and their actions. They were her little angels, and they could do no wrong.
Eventually, the principal gave the younger son an ultimatum (the older one had already moved on to high school): pass a single core class, or take summer tutoring from a third party. Since it was a private school, they could make ultimatums like that. The mother was livid that the administration wouldn’t just pass her son along like they had done for her older one. That’s because the administration had changed in the meantime. The kid failed all of his classes, didn’t do summer tutoring, and, when the mother tried to re-enroll him the next year, his enrollment was denied. She threatened to sue, but didn’t.
A different spoiled boy spent his weeks living with his mother, who was a pharmaceutical sales rep and looked and dressed like a model. We had several meetings with her over the years I taught her son, and every time she looked like she had just come from a photoshoot. The boy spent his weekends with his father, where he’d often ‘forget his book bag with all of his work in it.’ He loved to laugh as he told us that every Monday. He laughed at everything, really. Everything was a joke to him. His parents tried to one-up each other by being overly permissive to him. Want to stay up all night on a school night playing video games? Sure, why not? Want to call your teacher a b****? Well, if they’re being a b****, I guess they deserve it. Speak your mind and we’ll have your back!
The final two boys were in similar situations: being spoiled by their moms’ total lack of parenting skills. The moms wanted to be friends with their boys, not parents. One of those kids was obese by the time he was in fifth grade, which made me feel bad for him, because I, too, was like that when I was that age, and I know what’s in store for him if he doesn’t get it under control. But, again, his mother never said ‘no’ to him on anything, including what he was eating. The other spoiled boy is in juvie, the last I heard. Got busted for dealing pills within months of getting to high school.”
A Look of Disgust
“In 9th grade, during PE class we were just sort of milling around waiting for class to start. The guys were all standing around discussing chores.
Our PE teacher was a southern blue-collar kind of guy. He worked as a fixer-upper worker on the weekends too, repairing homes, bathrooms, kitchens etc. This is a guy who probably earned every penny he ever spent.
And here he was stuck in a room with a bunch of spoiled rich kids.
He jokingly said something to the effect of, ‘Man, you guys are all spoiled. I bet your parents pay you to do chores.’
And all the guys start nodding yes. ‘Oh yeah, my mom gives me $20 to mow the lawn.’
Another says, ‘I get $5 to clean my room.’
The teacher had poorly concealed disgust on his face.
For the record, I didn’t get paid for chores. Again, I’m from a military family. Being paid for chores is preposterous.
I cleaned my room or else.”
The Bridezilla That Wasn’t
“Allow me to reposition this question a little. Spoiled brats are a dime a dozen. They don’t even have to be rich. Prince and princess wannabees are ubiquitous, but once in a while…a true princess emerges like a phoenix out of ashes.
Many moons before I became rich and famous (yeah, right), I was a wedding DJ as my weekend avocation. I performed hundreds of them for over a decade and was successful at it. Some were really expensive weddings in the $100k range. Having control of the mic, the DJ often appears to be in charge of a wedding reception, and thus becomes the focus for anything that could go wrong. And, of course, there have been some occasional bridezillas, as well as some ‘out of line’ grooms. But most people are very well behaved.
I had this habit of interviewing the bride and groom, or sometimes a nervous mother and bride before the reception day. One of the parting comments I would say is, ‘You know there are hundreds of details being worked out by dozens of people to get this special day right. And if we could all predict every possible issue that could come up, we would certainly fix it and your day would be perfect. But, almost every wedding has something unforeseeable that doesn’t quite go right. Sometimes you just have to remember, what’s done is done, and then roll with it.’
Most don’t remember that advice or take the hint. Now, I have forgotten the names/faces of 90% of the brides and grooms I worked with. But there were a few that I will never forget. This quick story is of a bride with all the indicators of a spoiled brat but wasn’t. And this memory is well worth a few molecules of my limited gray matter.
It was time to cut a beautiful and expensive cake. It was sitting on one of those foldup tables and was decorated with a black cloth to hide the frame underneath. Positioned in a historic property on an old floor, it exhibited a little bounce every time a group of people walked by. You know exactly what is about to happen, don’t you?
When the cake tumbled, just as the bride and groom were about to light up the floor with some toasts and dancing, I thought to myself, ‘oh no, somebody is about to get an earful and it isn’t going to be pretty.’ The gasps in the room were audible, even above the music. All eyes were now on the bride, who was standing only a few feet in front of the globs of the cake-covered floor. And it seemed like the whole world was silent. The mere anticipation of what she was going to do next was louder than the still playing music. What kind of princess would she be? She caught my eye for a twinkling moment, then she just kind of giggled a little, turned toward the groom, shrugged, burst out laughing, and said, ‘let’s dance’. With that, the whole wedding party started laughing and joined in.
Venue staff sees a lot of weddings. For the rest of the night, the basic message I got from the staff was: ‘Does her husband have any concept of how utterly and ridiculously lucky he is?’ I am sure they lived happily ever after.”
Brats In Thailand
“Here in Thailand, we have what is often referred to as the HiSo crowd. This high social class of people naturally has children who often attend any of the top international schools in Bangkok. I retired as an elementary teacher from a well-known school a few years ago and have seen plenty of spoiled brats. Here are a few stories.
One year I had a set of twins (girl and boy) in my class. We, teachers, knew these kids and felt it would be better for them to be in separate classes, but the parents wanted them to be together in school. After finding out that the parents had made a large donation to the school’s building fund, I knew that the twins would be in my class for the rest of the school year.
Right off the bat, I noticed that the young girl was always on time for class and ready to begin learning. Her brother not so much. He would invariably show up tardy about an hour every day. Why? Well, because he liked to sleep in. One chauffeur would deliver the girl to school on time and the other chauffeur would have to wait until the young boy had gotten out of bed. Let me just say that the parents were difficult to deal with. Incidentally, both mom and dad also had their own personal drivers. HiSo and not one Toyota in the fleet.
Me: ‘Alright class, everyone turns in your homework.’
Brat: ‘My nanny forgot to pack mine in my bookbag.’
Me: ‘But who is actually responsible for turning in assignments?’
Brat: ‘My nanny.’
Another spoiled brat story that has stuck with me for years involved a saxophone. A tenor sax to be precise. One day while teaching I looked out the windows and saw a gentleman carrying a music instrument case down the hallway. At the time, I thought nothing of it as I could see the visitor pass hanging around his neck and the Band Room was nearby. But after a week or so of seeing this guy tote the case back and forth, I began to wonder what was going on.
One morning between classes, I saw him once again and decided to ask what he was doing. It turns out the gentleman was a driver for one of our middle school students. His job was to chauffeur little Tommy to school every day and carry the tenor sax from the car to the Band Room for Tommy to play and after class was finished, back to the car.
I politely asked this young teenager why he didn’t carry his tenor sax by himself instead of the driver. His response was “But, that is what my father pays him to do.” Later he complained to his father about the mean teacher. The father then complained to the administration. I got called to the Principal’s Office.
Little Tommy was a true character and brat. Last I heard he was attending Stanford University. So if you see a Thai student on campus with a gentleman carrying a tenor sax case behind him, please say hi to little Tommy from Mr. George…”