It's always strange walking in on someone doing something you probably weren't meant to see. Even if you try doubling back and leaving as soon as your brain processes the awkwardness - it's too late. By that point, you feel it, they feel it and you've both officially entered the awkward zone. Congratulations.
For more strange moments, you can find the original thread post at the end of the article.
A Little Gift
“I worked as a waiter in college and that was in the late 80’s. The third floor of our place was tiny and held four tables. Normally, for lunch, we weren’t busy enough to put people up there. We had a couple come in and request a table on the third floor. When I bought their drinks, he told me to take my time coming back because his date had to run to the store for smokes. I come back about ten minutes later, and she was gone. This guy had a cell phone, and it was the first one I had ever seen. I asked him about it, and we talked for a few minutes about how it worked. He showed it to me and let me call my roommates, so I could see how it sounded. I thanked him for showing me it and went back downstairs. As I walked downstairs, my eyes got level with the floor. I glanced over at his table, and I could see her shoes and knees underneath the tablecloth. He was receiving a little ‘present’ while calmly and patiently explaining to me how cell phones work.”
Father – Son Bonding
“I think about 10 years ago, I went to a public bathroom and saw my father washing his hands. He saw me and pointed to the middle stall implying that the stall was empty.
When I entered the stall, I saw an old man peeing and looking shocked.
I could hear my dad laughing in the background.”
Way Before Smart Phones
“I had a roommate once who was sheltered. Sheltered as in she went to a school run by nuns before she came to university.
By the second week of university, she started coming out of her shell (realized she didn’t need to do much to get boys). It was fun, but it was also annoying because at night I could hear her whispering sweet intimate nothings on the phone while she thought I was asleep. These were the old days, way before tinder or smartphones, so there were no photos. Only her whispering voice, and her dirty descriptive words.
Anyway, one day she was in our room, and I walked in on her with a digital camera… my digital camera… taking photos of herself with a cylindrical perfume bottle half inside her.
It was also my perfume bottle. It later became known as ‘Eau de puss’ spray.”
‘I’ve Never Seen Anything Like That Before’
“A friend of mine has an audio entertainment system in his bedroom at his parents’ house, but he couldn’t get the Skybox to work. It seemed to turn off the other equipment, or you would get the sound with no picture. So, he decided to call an engineer.
The engineer turns up and begins fixing the problem, and as it turns out, some of the cablings were incorrect. As he’s fixing the problem, he begins testing some other bits like the stereo and DVD player to make sure he’s found the issue. His parents come home and curiously wander in to see how it’s all going. My friend is now standing there with the engineer and his parents when the DVD player flicks on to reveal a woman with a cage gag in her mouth surrounded by men (you could imagine what he was watching).
Everyone looks and gasps. The sky man realizes the error and frantically starts clicking buttons and remotes and pulling cables to get it off, but the surround sound kicks in and starts pumping out these odd sounds at 100 decibels. The parents are just standing there in shock. Eventually, the engineer just pulls the plug out the wall while my friend just stands there wishing the ground would open up and swallow him. Everything goes quiet as the system shuts off, and the engineer apologies for the error.
My friend looks at his mom and all she says is ‘Well, I’ve never seen anything like that before’ and wanders off downstairs.”
Stepdad Caught Red-Handed
“One morning, I woke up about an hour before my alarm was set to go off because I needed to use the washroom. My oldest brother was taking a shower so I had to go outside. It was about 5:30 am when I stepped outside to relieve myself and I saw my step-dad touching himself in his bedroom with the curtains open. He doesn’t see me but what gets interesting is that he begins to motion and signal to the window facing the neighbor’s house, I look over to who he’s talking to and it’s my neighbor showing him her lady lumps. This jerk was currently with my mother and having an affair with the neighbor who was married and had 3 kids. One of which we found out belonged to my stepdad.
The rest of the will sound unbelievable but this happened, unfortunately.
The following night after getting home from school, I contemplated whether or not to tell mom. She was with this guy for 6 years after leaving my abusive father. She loved him and he was a good dude to us growing up. At this time of the story, I was 16 years old (2006) and I just didn’t have the courage to break my mom’s heart. I decided to make sure that what I saw was really what I had seen. So, I set my alarm to 5:30 am instead of my usual 6:30 am to well…catch my step-father in the act. Sure as heck, there this guy was spread like an eagle on the bed facing the neighbor’s house, and who’s on the receiving end? The neighbor again all exposed. I really wanted to throw my dumbbell through that window since it was right outside the window. I resisted big time. Seeing his face the following days repulsed me enough to get me to move out of the inside house and into a shed we had built without a permit (without a permit is the term you want to pay attention to because the following part of the story is ludicrously the unbelievable part). The shed was aluminum on the outside and office like on the inside just one door no windows. Air conditioning and heater also. The walls were just sheetrock. This was my home away from home for 1 month. That’s how long it took me to decide to tell my mom.
She got home early from work one day since it was raining. She worked as a manager in the grape vines harvesting grapes. I got home from school at my normal time. I sat at the table and asked her if we could talk. She sat beside me and said, ‘ask away’ I began to shake nervously and it was a very new sensation for me, so I kinda felt like I was convulsing into an exorcism and couldn’t speak. It blurted out. I said, ‘mom…James is cheating on you with the neighbor. I saw him touching himself with her in the windows.’ She looked at me with a look I had never seen my mom make. She got up and kinda laughed and said, ‘you’re sniffing some strong stuff’ (jokingly) and walked away. I just sat there in disbelief that my mom reacted like that. A week later however she caught it for herself.
It was a Saturday night and I was just hanging out in my room. My mom had left to go to the casino with her friend and my stepdad stayed at the house. At about 10 pm, I see the lights from my mom’s car pull in since my shed was on the side of the driveway. I start to think of reasons why she was home early if they had just left at 8 pm. She must have won. She had won about $5000 that night on the slot machines and came home so she wouldn’t spend it. Unfortunately, when she went inside the house she noticed that her bedroom door was locked and there was music on low. She could hear him talking to someone but it must have been a conversation on the phone because there was no voice she could hear talk back. She picks up the other house phone and listens to her partner tell the neighbor all the things she wants him to do and the things she wants him to do to her, again.
Now, I’m in my room and I begin to hear shrieks of ‘get the heck outta your house woman!’ I run outside, following the noise and my mom is banging on my neighbor’s door with pruning shears, I panic and call my older brother who lived about 10 miles away. I’m yelling at him on the phone, ‘David, mom’s going to hurt the neighbor!’ He didn’t believe me till I ran behind my mom holding the cell phone up so he can hear her yell, ‘Te Voy A Matar!’ (Spanish for, ‘m going to end your life in a scarier way). My brother gets there and controls the situation, he was on duty at the time (he’s a police officer) and my mom had thrown everything of her husbands out the house that night. It was a long night. The next day was quite an interesting one, my mom was somewhere in the house and I was walking with my buddy and our video camera to get to the corner of the street where there was a Subway restaurant.
We had planned to use the camera to get some poetic night shots of black silhouettes walking under the orange streetlights. As we walk into the parking lot, I see my stepdad’s truck parked but he’s nowhere to be found. We get a couple shots of the truck on camera and make our way back to my house. Inside, I tell my mom hey look, and show her the video. I told her he wasn’t inside. My mom immediately grabs a hammer and runs out the door. Back to banging on the neighbor’s door. I and my buddy run outside and guess who comes running out the back door? My stepdad. We catch all this on camera! He runs past my mom and back towards his car. My mom with a grin, asked if we got it on tape. The very next morning my mom caught my neighbor’s husband getting home from work (3 am) and showed him the tape. He was calm and relaxed about it, so my mom said.
It was about 11:45 pm when I was laying in my room, sound asleep.’BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG! OPEN THE DOOR! WE KNOW YOU’RE IN THERE!’ I wake up completely startled, more than I have ever been in my life. I grab my pocket knife and walk towards the door. ‘OPEN THE DOOR! WE HAVE YOU SURROUNDED!’ I am immediately pulled towards the door to the outside and am blinded by big bright lights. ‘DROP THE WEAPON! I peed on myself, dropped the knife and started crying. Six police officers drew weapons on me with one police dog being held back and a helicopter circling above. My brother David luckily stayed at the house that night to comfort my mom. He ran outside in his underwear screaming to the guys that I’m his brother and asked what was going on. My sister in law runs out to comfort me and brings me back into the house. My brother comes into the house a little later to explain.
My neighbor’s husband had apparently abused my neighbor. He had kidnapped both of his own kids and left the one that wasn’t his. She had told him everything that night. He fled and she was able to call the police who were on a manhunt to find him. Apparently, the police helicopter caught my body heat imaging in the shed. Since there is no permit or registration for it on file and the fact that it is a shed gave them the green light to think that I was the estranged husband hiding in the neighbors shed. I got free breakfast by the officers the next day. That was cool! 6 months after everything happened we moved out to a different city. My neighbor’s husband managed to flee to Mexico with the kiddos. Wild what catching your stepdad touching himself can lead to.”
Two Peas In A Pod
“Two friends (that had a little too much to drink) were trying to get their genital piercings unstuck from each other. They asked for help, I declined.
It was a man and woman. The gender of those involved didn’t matter. I’m cool with handling swords and sheaths. I just had a lot of issues with physical intimacy at the time. I wasn’t a virgin, but my experience was limited, and the prospect of manhandling my friends’ genitals and ever being able to make eye contact with them again wasn’t something I had the confidence to do.
They got stuck together likely because they were too gone and that made them clumsy. They eventually got unstuck. As far as I know, it wasn’t that painful for them, which was likely due to the drinking.”
The Things That Went On In My House…
“I was sitting on the couch when my sister came downstairs. She must not have noticed me since I was originally working that day. While she was waiting for something to heat up in the microwave, she just kept turning in circles in the same spot. She did this for about ten minutes. Got her food out of the microwave and immediately threw it away and went back upstairs. I’ve never mentioned to her that I saw this, and I have no idea what in the world she was doing. My sister was 22 when this happened.
Another time, I walked into the guest room upstairs and found my dad lying underneath the bed sleeping. He was still breathing, so I just left him there.
I eventually asked my dad, ‘What was up?’ and while he didn’t remember the actual incident in detail, he had a headache and was trying to get rid of it. Under the bed was dark and lying on his back helps him. My sister doesn’t remember, but her explanation is that she was likely just using her phone and spinning, so her body was doing something. As for the food, she doesn’t remember what it was. It was just a brain fart on her part or maybe she burned it. But she doesn’t have an eating disorder.”
The Music Kids
“I used to substitute teach after I graduated from college. I was a music major, so the band and choir directors would usually put me on the top of the list when they took a day off since I would force the kids to sing and play their instruments.
One day, I got called in to teach a high school band class. When I showed up, I was left with a note telling me to break the kids up into their sections to work on parts individually.
So, I’m sitting in an office browsing Youtube and listening to a miasma of noises from woodwinds, brass, strings, etc. NO DRUMMING whatsoever. And for you non-musical folk out there, drummers never stop drumming unless the sky is falling.
So, I go into our drum storage room where they were supposed to be playing and discover the token girl drummer showing her lady lumps to the boys in exchange for cash.”
A Strange Guy
“I’ve got a two-for-one deal here. Back in elementary school, the classes each had one bathroom. They’re those small one person kinds, like a house bathroom, the kind you’d see in a really small restaurant and such. A toilet, a sink, and a door that locks. One day, in about the second grade (so I was 7 or 8) I needed to drain the pipes if you will, and the door was ajar. So I walked in. On a kid peeing. The door wasn’t barely ajar either, but pretty wide open. This kid looks over at me, and just said: ‘Ah, I was hoping someone would walk in.’ I decided I could hold it a while longer.
Part 2: A year or three later, this same kid has gotten in trouble a few times for reading instead of doing his work. Some reading is good, but you’ve got other stuff to learn also. Anyways, one particular day, I got an urgent need to use the bathroom. Every minute became a struggle. I had been waiting for like half an hour (I remember watching the clock) and this bathroom door was locked the whole time. I start getting desperate, so I listened in at the door to see if I can hear, you know… auditory indications that something’s happening. But I didn’t hear anything. The pressure was really building, so I go tell a teacher what’s happening. I think that somehow the door locked itself and that the bathroom is empty. It sounds plausible enough to her and I’m clearly feeling the heat, so she gets the master key and opens up the bathroom. Lo and behold, there that same kid was, sitting on the floor reading. A whole load, deposited in the toilet behind him. Unflushed. What a guy. What a strange guy.”
‘The Smell Hits You’
“College administrator here. I used to work in campus housing, so the number of times I’ve knocked on a door to a student who was very clearly doing the deed is more than I could count. I’m not even phased by it anymore.
It always happens the same way. You knock on the door because you need to check a maintenance report or something. Then you hear the rustling and the whispering. Then you realize there’s no light coming through the bottom of the door. You hear the music turn off, and you silently curse under your breath. The door opens. Now, usually, it’s the guy answers the door. You see the girl in the bed with the covers pulled up to her neck.
The guy tries to act all casual about it, but you know he knows you know. And you know he knows you know.
Then the smell hits you.”
Points are edited for clarity.