How would you feel if you left a room for a few minutes, maybe even a few seconds, only to come back to find utter chaos? No one likes to be absent when something wild and crazy happens, but for some of these Redditors and their experiences, they might have retrospectively wanted to be there at the right time or not at all. It's time to grab some popcorn and dive into these stories that will leave you saying "What in the world just happened!?"
(Content edited for clarity).
Don’t Bring Your Husband Around Japanese Tourists
“My husband and I used to work at a resort in Alaska known for great views of the Northern Lights. Seasonally, bus-loads of Japanese tourists would come to see them. Obviously, it’s a long trip so they would stay up all night waiting for the Aurora to show up. The resort had a large rec room that could fit 150-ish and visitors would use it to stay warm while they waited.
One night, after a few hours of heavy drinking, my husband and I were walking back to our cabin (I was slightly soberer than he was at this point), and I needed to use the restroom. We walked into the rec room and it was packed, like probably close to 200 Japanese tourists in there shoulder to shoulder.
I went to the restroom and left my husband swaying amongst the tourists. When I came out, he was alone. All 200-ish people and their belongings are nowhere to be seen. I don’t know what happened, but I’m convinced he did something to make them leave.”
When You Leave Dad Alone With The Baby
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“First baby. Wife has never left our little girl but decides to run an errand leaving me (dad) alone with her. I assure wife all will be well in her short absence. Kid is sleeping in my arms. All is quiet. Give wife a kiss and she heads out the door.
Walk back to sofa with sleeping kid. Notice kid could use a diaper change. Set baby on changing table. I take off old diaper. Baby wakes up. Proceeds to ERUPT WITH A VOLCANO OF PROJECTILE DIARRHEA. It’s all over me, changing table, wall. I panic. Pick up baby still hemorrhaging an unending spray of baby turd-mist. Take her to the kitchen sink and flip on water. Water is cold. Set baby in sink. Baby screams like a demon.
Wife opens the door. Forgot her purse. Poop all over the walls and floor. Desperate poop-covered husband wrestling with desperate freezing poop-covered baby. Wife was gone maybe 90 seconds. Max.”
One Smart Cat
“One night I was on my own and decided to make a nice meal for myself. I spent about half an hour preparing and baking a delicious chicken strip with sun-dried tomatoes and brie cheese.
So I got everything ready, set up my dinner and my brew on the coffee table and sat down to eat and watch some TV.
At this point, my cat waltzed in and sat on the couch next to me. Then he dropped something out of his mouth next to me. I turned to look at it; it was a snake.
OK, no big deal, it’s not a big one. So I got up and grabbed some snake-wrangling tools (a dustpan and brush) and scooped this little guy up. I walked out the front door and tossed the snake back into the bushes, hoping the cat won’t go after it again.
I was gone for about 15 seconds.
I came back inside and my dinner was gone. The cat was under the table, hunched over a half-eaten chicken strip, and growling every time I came near.
And that’s the first time my cat distracted me with a snake in order to steal my dinner.”
Room Swap
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“I live above the pizza place that I work at, I’m also full time in college. One night they called me in just for an hour or two to help close, no big deal. After a full school day and going into work for a bit I was exhausted. I walked up the stairs and into my apartment. There were new decorations everywhere, my furniture was gone, and my bedroom door was open. I screamed HOLY MOTHER OF GOD and kicked open the door to see who was in my room. I was only gone for an hour. How could someone move in and move out all my stuff?! As I made contact with the girl laying in bed watching Netflix, I realized I was on the second floor, not the third floor. The apartment below me has the exact same layout as mine, and this girl happened to have her door unlocked like I usually leave mine (multiple roommates). I simply said ‘OOPS WRONG ROOM’ and ran back to my room. I’m going to go down today and apologize for scaring that poor girl half to death at 11 pm.”
So Much Can Happen In Such A Short Time
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“Went to work one day. I literally lived right across the street from my job, so I walked to work each day.
By the time I got to work, my boss told me I needed to go back home, it was an emergency.
Apparently, my power had been cut off, my stepdad had flipped and scared the crap out of my siblings, and attempted to kill my pregnant mom.
Some details:
The power department came out and cut off our power due to non-payment of bills. My stepdad started screaming and cussing about it, which scared my siblings. My mom got into an argument with him, telling him to calm down and demanding to know why the power was cut off. He revealed that instead of paying our bills, he’d been blowing all of our money on pot. This led to more arguing.
Stepdad got angrier and started choking my mom, which is when my siblings called my job to have me come home. I had to fight him off.
We all got out of the house, went back across the street and call the cops.
Cops come out 45 minutes later, question us, take pictures of the marks on my mom’s neck, then go question stepdad.
Cops come back and take us to the house, tells us to pack bags, and for us to leave. Stepdad gets to stay in the house, even though he wasn’t on the lease. They don’t arrest him. Tell us we can’t come back until my mom has a restraining order against him.
We leave, stay with my aunt, and it takes 2 weeks to get a restraining order. Only then are we allowed back in the house, and by then he’s trashed most of our stuff. Nothing is ever done to him except the cops finally make him leave.”
Complete Chaos Erupted
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“So I’m in high school and it’s lunchtime. After I quickly ate my lunch, I threw out my pudding cup, packed up the plastic bags I brought to school and went to my locker that was located a couple of hallways away from the cafeteria. At my locker, I put away my lunch bag and grabbed a book. As I make my way back to the lunchroom, ditzy me hears shouting and banging. I pick up my pace and find half the cafeteria in a brawl, a quarter of it screaming approval, and the final quarter trying to scramble out of the chaos. We’re a smalltown school, we don’t have security, so it’s up to the elderly principal, a janitor, and a few teachers to try and pull them away from each other. The cops get called, several people go to the hospital, and quite a few people get arrested. I was gone for 2 minutes.”
Take The Chips With You!
“Me and my cousin literally last minute decided to change going to Ensenada to Vegas while midway driving to Ensenada, but we had very little money. So we rented a room on the way there at the Venetian since it was somehow the cheapest place on the strip. When we got there, our room had been given to someone else. Since they had no more double bedrooms, we got upgraded to a crazy suite with a big jacuzzi, a big bar, the whole works.
We decided things were looking up, but we had about 160 bucks left to party on, which is pretty much nothing in Vegas. We decided to go bet all of it slowly on the roulette via a pretty safe technique a friend had taught me even though neither of us gamble much. It’s pretty slow technique,as it took us until like 5 a.m. while drinking at the table. In the end, we had hit $1,100!
So I stand up and tell my cousin to rinse and repeat while I went to the restroom. To my surprise, I come back to find we had $200 dollars left I ask him how he lost $900 so quickly with our safe technique. He said he lost, so he doubled then lost again. So he quadrupled, then lost again. So he octupled and lost again. We stopped playing and just had some poolside beverages in defeat the next day. That day my cousin learned that if roulette math was that easy, Vegas wouldn’t make so much money from it and I learned to take my chips with me to the restroom.”
Near-Tragedy By The Pool
“I was at the pool with my daughter – she’s 2, doesn’t know how to swim. But this is a graded pool, where the depth slowly inclines up to a shore-like edge. She was jumping up and down splashing in the ‘puddles’ and I was sitting about 10 feet away watching her while talking to a friend. I was watching her and talking when he said something funny and I turned to give him a look. I looked back, and my daughter, in a matter of a few seconds, had taken a few steps to the deeper water, (about 1.5-2ft), and was UNDER the water silently rolling around.
I never cleared 10 feet so fast in my life.
I scooped her up and set her on her feet. It was shallow enough to stand, I’m guessing she just lost her footing and couldn’t right herself and panicked. No coughing up water. Barely a sputter, she was fine. But man, when they say it can happen in seconds, they aren’t kidding! Whoever they are.
I was barely fazed by it too. We continued our day like normal. My friend said, ‘I know you’re okay now, but it’s gonna hit you later. If you need to talk, call me.’
He was right. That night I replayed events in my head and kept thinking, ‘I looked away for a SECOND. What the heck happened?’ I just couldn’t get the image of her flailing so silently in the water out of my head. No one else noticed her. What if I hadn’t? I cried pretty hard at the idea of losing her to such a tragic accident and vowed to be more vigilant at the pool or around any other body of water. I also got her a life jacket that she hates wearing.”
Confused X-Ray Tech
“I was an ER nurse at the time and a trauma came in where a guy broke both legs after jumping from a second story. We had the x-ray technician bring the portable x-ray machine to the trauma room and snap a couple shots of his legs. When this is done, the guy goes straight to the OR. X-ray tech leaves along with the rest of the docs, and I’m left behind with a few other nurses cleaning up to prepare for the next trauma to come in.
Our trauma coordinator comes down for a walk through and we begin chatting casually. While this happens, EMS rolls in with a guy and they say they found him unresponsive underneath a parked car, so no way the car hit him. He’s not responding to anything. I give him a huge purple nurple, but not even a peep comes of him. Trauma coordinator notices blood coming from his ear, and just mutters ‘skull fracture.’
This is where all heck broke loose, as we were not prepared for what was to come. Trauma coordinator shouts at the clerk to stop registering other patients and send an overhead page for an attendee to come to the trauma room, along with the Level One Trauma team–which is the highest level–and a respiratory therapist while we wheel the guy into the trauma room. At this point, it’s all nurses so we all know what to do, but the EMT’s are confused as they suspected it was just a guy who had drank too much just sleeping it off. They were way off.
As our doctors walk in, the guy finds new life and becomes slightly combative, but we can handle. Doctors hear the story and says that they’re glad we called a Level One, but not sure why we paged the respiratory therapist. The guy took a turn for the worse when he begins to have a massive seizure. Our trauma coordinator says, ‘That’s why.’ Doc shrugs his shoulders and says ‘Alright, let’s tube him.’
The room is packed just for this one guy and we tend to throw things on the ground as we’re working so it’s a bit of a mess. The x-ray tech is called to confirm tube placement before we take him for a CAT scan. The guy decides to put on a show. He starts to wake up and reach for his tube. We try to get restraints on, but this man has somehow become The Hulk, so equipment is flying as we hold on for dear life. We sedate him, but these meds are not working. The guy has enough in him to put down a couple of horses. Everyone is sweating, the room is a mess, some blood has been spilled from the patient, but the patient is stable.
Outside we hear the x-ray tech.
‘Why are they paging me? I just left.’
He walks in, sees everything and just shouts, ‘What the heck? I just left 10 minutes ago!’
He had a fractured femur and a massive depressed skull fracture. The seizure might have been his brain shifting from the pressure. I saw him in the ICU a month later still on a respirator. He most likely has permanent brain damage and might be a vegetable. The sad part is that he had no identification, so he was labeled as unknown. The following month I saw him, he was still unknown and no one has come to claim him.”
The Legend Of The Giraffe
“A few friends and I were traveling; road trip style. Making our way westward.
Two of three of us run into our motel room to use the bathroom. I was gone maybe 3 to 4 minutes. I run outside to relieve the third person guarding our open vehicle. When I get outside, she’s standing there with her jaw open and staring wide-eyed into a field. I ask what was wrong?
‘A giraffe just ran by me!’
She proceeds to tell me she saw a giraffe run by in the parking lot and go into a field behind the motel. We all look – nothing. So naturally, we joke about her being high, having licked some colorful stickers and other substance-related jokes. I mean, come on, a giraffe?!
We literally grilled her: Was it really a very tall dog? A horse? An alpaca? Do you know what an alpaca looks like?? She’s cursing us out insisting she saw a freaking giraffe!
We’re there for two days, maybe three. No giraffe sightings.
We are leaving early the next morning and I’m sitting in the back of the car enjoying coffee and the morning sky. Out of nowhere, I see a tall giraffe hidden behind a run-down building, calmly eating something! It’s just standing there, perfectly still, with its lower jaw rolling around like a cow chewing cud. I scream ‘The Giraffe!’ But by this time we’re already on the ramp to the highway and we cannot stop or pull over. By the time we got off and circled all the way back around, it was gone.
And so lives the legend of the giraffe. Never did learn where it came from or what happened to it.”
Being Bored At Work Can Have Disastrous Results
“The graphic design company I interned for in high school had a pretty big fish tank in the meeting room. I got up, went down to the break room for coffee, and came back literally three minutes later. The fish tank was totally shattered. Water was pouring everywhere and the poor fish were flopping around on the carpet. My coworkers were all running around filling anything they could get their hands on with water to put the dying fish in.
Once the chaos died down, I got the full story. Two of my coworkers had been goofing off, pushing each other around in a swivel chair. Coworker A pushed coworker B on the swivel chair into the fish tank way harder than he intended, breaking it and destroying the meeting room all in one go.
They didn’t get fired and no one was injured, besides a few cuts. Wish I could say the same for the fish, all of which died beside like two.
After that, there was a lot of cleaning…and the removal of the swivel chairs from the office.”
Sneaky Woman At Kmart
“A co-worker of mine at a Kmart was working the register in the garden center. He watched a woman bring a cart full of electronics, covered with a pillow to ‘hide’ what was in it, outside into the gated section. The outside area was completely surrounded by a 14ft chain-link fence and the only gate was locked. He had been warned to watch out for people doing this due to a recent run of thefts, even though there was no way out of the fenced section.
Just before he left to investigate, another customer approached him, asking for help. He thought, ‘Eh, it’ll only take half a minute’, so he left.
When he got back to the fenced section – only 30 seconds later – the woman managed to chuck half of what was in the cart over the fence to the getaway car on the other side, scale the fence herself, and drive off with her accomplices.”
When The “Cool” Aunt Has To Babysit
“I was once left in charge of babysitting my 2-year-old godson for the weekend. I will preface this by saying I’m the aunt with no kids, just pets, so I do not have that savvy parental awareness of the mischief children can get into. But I learned. Ooohhh, did I learn.
My godson is exceptionally tall for his age and even then, at 2 years old, he was quite adept at getting out of his car seat once the car stopped. So after grocery shopping, I loaded up an armful of groceries and left him with car doors open to get out of his seat while I went inside to unload. I was not gone more than a minute, maybe a minute and a half.
When I returned to the car, he had closed the car doors, locked them, and had turned on the ignition! He danced around in the driver seat gleefully waving at me. I’m frantically trying to get him to open the car door to no avail. He then proceeds to take off his diaper and smear the contents on the window.
At this point, I’m trying to recall where the spare key to my car is if there is even a spare key, and how much his mother is going to kill me when she finds out. In a panic, I eventually call the police to come unlock my car door to get him out.
When the cop arrived and saw the situation, I was terrified I was going to be arrested for having a kid locked in a car. I think he probably was laughing for a good five minutes before he got the car unlocked.
When I told his mother about what happened, her response was ‘Well, glad you got the crappy car and not me.’
Moral of the story? Keep children on a leash at all times. ALL TIMES!”
He Really Hated That Recliner
“In college, a few friends and I lived in a house located immediately across the train tracks from ‘the strip,’ which was an area chock full of restaurants, bars, etc. We had a dozen or so people over one night and at some point we ran out of brews, so a couple folks and I walked across the street to buy more. We grabbed a couple cases from the cooler, purchased them, and started walking home. Mind you this couldn’t have been more than 100 yards.
As we approached the house, something looked off. It’s dusk, so I thought maybe the light was playing tricks on my eyes. As we got closer, I realize something is shining on the trees in the backyard.
Turns out my roommate had decided that the recliner from the living room had to go. So he tossed it in the fire. He then proceeded to call the owner of the said recliner (another friend) to let him know.
‘Hey, I just wanted to tell you that someone burned your recliner. Just chucked it on fire, but I wanted you to know that it wasn’t me!’
It was him.”