From pretending to be something they’re not, to “live streaming” their problems on all social media platform everyday, in this article, people share the most infuriating things others do or say just to get attention.
[Source can be found at the end of the article]
Had an ex girlfriend do this. I was feeling bad about a friend who’d passed in high school that I’d been really close to for a few years. She found a way to turn it around and started bawling about a guy she claimed to know who had passed about a year prior. Her friend was there and was like “why are you crying? You didn’t even know <guy> let alone ever talk to them…” Turned out she only felt bad because she liked the guy and never got a chance to ask him out before he passed. I ended that relationship faster than any other I’ve ever had.
Anonymous
Post super-dramatic social media updates that don’t go into detail.
“I’m so upset and betrayed … can’t believe things ended up like this! Feels like my world is ending.”
And when someone says, “What happened?” they go, “Message me.”
WHY.
CursesandMutterings
My best friend in college was a great dude to hang out with, but he always had to be the center of attention and the subject of compliments – he’d try to edge himself into every conversation whether it was relevant or not. When he ran out of stuff to say, he’d just start singing (he had a decent voice), and people would compliment him on his voice, which would make him happy. Then he’d run out of things to sing and just start making random noises.
gyozaaa
Every Sunday, without fail. At about 9 am, this guy opens his garage door, and starts his motorbike. then just revs it. for a minimum of two hours. He doesn’t get on the thing, he doesn’t ride it, he’s not working on it, he just stands next to it revving it.
He does this for hours until the whole street (even inside our houses) absolutely reeks of petrol, it’s disgusting.
Yes, we get it, you have a motorbike!!!
Anonymous
Facebook post that is of a sigh or clickbait. My sister does this all of the time and I am embarrassed for her.
“I CAN’T BELIEVE IT!” “AFTER THIS, I NEED A GLASS OF WINE”
She and her friends are idiots.
[deleted]
My niece (10) is an attention seeker. Everything she does is for some, extra or prolonged attention.
Ask her for something right in front of her face? She will play dumb so you are interacting with her just a bit longer.
Your baby laughs randomly? “Omg she’s laughing at the noise I made.”
“Look I just put this sock on this doll, isn’t that silly?”
Don’t let her injure herself, dear god.
I blame her mother.
only4thenite
On sister’s wedding day our aunt put herself into diabetic shock on purpose (ambulance came … she could have died), sister had to administer to her until ambulance showed up (sister is a nurse). All because people were paying attention to the bride instead of her.
[deleted]
Freshman year, so this totally should’ve worked. This very cute girl, who had plenty of guys flirting with her, randomly starts talking about her nipple piercings. (The conversation hadn’t been about tattoos or piercings.) No one says anything. She starts kind of cradling her breasts, and tells everyone that she’s got charms on the piercings. No one says anything. She asks us if we want to see them. No one says anything.
Spent the next few minutes looking really sad, still cradling her breasts. I almost took pity on her, but if the guys didn’t want to see, and I actually didn’t want to see, why bother?
turingtested
A girl my friend knows pretended to have cancer for 6 months, convinced everyone, got sympathy from everyone, got her friends to drive her to the hospital, shaved her head. The whole thing fell apart when someone phoned her mum to ask how her treatment was going, the mum had no idea what they were talking about. She even had get-well pages set up on Facebook.
voze
A girl I went to school with, called Loren, had lived in Cyprus for a year when she was about 8. When she went to uni (college) she obviously wanted to reinvent herself. She started introducing herself to everyone as ”Lorenza” and called herself a Cypriot. She would get really angry whenever any of her old school friends would visit and call her Loren.
rhubarbcrumble
Speak out loud into the ether in an attempt to lure people to respond to their remark. Like someone on the computer will say, “oh, that’s cool” out loud instead of looking to the person they want to talk to and saying, “Hey, check this out.”
It’s so minuscule but I see it constantly, and it drives me nuts. I’ve got a social anxiety disorder so talking to people is hard, I get it. But engage me if you want to talk. Don’t set a trap like a social-predator.
PackageOfOats
There’s a girl in the office who likes to slowly go round all the other women in the office and say to them in a hushed tone “I hope no one has noticed I’m wearing the same outfit as yesterday, I didn’t have time to go home and change this morning after meeting this guy…” We pay no attention to what you are wearing, so none of us have noticed. That’s probably why you needed to confide in all of us.
Emily_Starke
People who pretend to have a food allergy because it’s trendy.
I know people with actual allergies and see the sacrifices they have to make with food on a daily basis. Yet some chardonnay mom can’t have bread because she’s gluten intolent yet will order a pizza… like, what?!
Kyokudo
I generally don’t like it when people are self-deprecating for non-comedic purposes. Poking fun at the expense of yourself to get a laugh? That’s okay. “I’m so ugly, I’ll never ____” is not, especially if it seems like the person is deliberately looking for sympathy. However, this is not the case if the person is genuinely depressed and not seeking positive reinforcement.
CaptainBetts
The stand-and-stare.
I understand that sometimes there isn’t a good spot to jump in and get attention, but the longer you stand in the doorway just out of my sight and stare at the back of my head, the worse it is. Just clear your throat, tap my shoulder, something!
brandnamenerd
If you really do have depression, anxiety, high functioning autism, and ADHD, you need to go to counseling and get necessary help. These are serious conditions. The fact that people think they can merely diagnose themselves with, say, ADHD just adds to the stigma around mental health (i.e., that people just make it up, they can just “get over it”, that it isn’t serious enough to require medical assistance).
murder_kitty
My coworker will loudly mumble something to herself right as you’re walking by her office. If you fall into her trap and ask if she was talking to you, or acknowledge that you heard her in any way, she’ll launch into whatever conversation she wanted to ensnare you in.
Example:
Her: “….mumble mumble so stupid…”
Me: “Hm?”
Her: “Oh, I’m just looking at this new health insurance policy, and it’s so stupid! It’s like, why are you giving us the summary of benefits if you’re not even going to include the full details of it, right? They’re not showing any of the important stuff.”
Ugh, Cheryl! I was just on my way to take a piss, but now I gotta figure out whatever response is going to end this conversation the fastest.
So_Motarded
Asking half a question thus leaving you no choice but to ask for further clarification. My manager is the shining example of this.
Manager, without looking up from her laptop: Hey, could you hand me those?
Me: …Those?
Manager looks up angrily: The scissors!!
Me: Of course, of course the scissors, what else could you have meant?!
notsoneutral
I know a girl who constantly goes on social media. When she’s feeling a little down, she’s writing a sob story. When she’s feeling good she wants everyone to know how awesome her life is and how absolutely thankful and blessed she is. She is constantly fishing for compliments.
Makes me want to puke.
Pallmeister
There was this kid at middle school who used to make up stupid lies in a pathetic attempt to get people to like him. He wasn’t the typical ‘cool’ kid – nerdy but pretty smart although lacking social skills.
He’d create people and scenarios which were usually easy to figure out were just LIES – invented a brother, pretended to have stuff that he didn’t, etc. It just seemed to go on.
I think he was just desperate for any attention – good, bad or indifferent because of continually moving schools and having no apparent friends.
Thankfully, he started to turn things around after leaving school and developed an actual personality of his own otherwise I’d never have put up with him for so long.
2FishInATank
We went to camp during school and our first activity was BMX bike riding. The sizes of the bikes were small and this girl got the biggest one which was perfect for her height and I got the smallest so I kept falling off mine/running into trees and bushes. She turned a corner ahead of me and her bike kind of tilted and came to rest very gently, kind of pinning her under on some bushes. The instructors were coming from behind us and as soon as she heard them coming, she started bawling her eyes out saying she had broken her elbow, etc. She ended up getting a lift back to camp and then a helicopter ride to a hospital. In the end, she just had a few scratches, nothing else. The best part? Because of her “injury” she wasn’t allowed to participate in any other activities.
aditim28
My sister lied about getting an abortion. She called me out of the blue one night, crying and frantic, and explained that she’d gotten an abortion for her 5th kid. She’s only in her early 20’s, never held a job, can’t care for the other 4 … so I figured I’d just try to be supportive, nothing to be done about it after the fact, right?
Turns out she was lying. She was just curious about how I would react, so she kept me on the phone acting suicidal for most of the evening. I guess she didn’t have anyone else to talk to.
m_bishop
Worst one I’ve got is an old ‘friend’ who lied about being in the Parachute Regiment (British Army). He spouted his usual, “Yeah, Yeah, we parachuted into x and y with GPMG’s and that” yadda yadda (No tactical drops have been executed in years.) I just let him roll with it, I couldn’t be bothered to argue with him on principle that he was an arse.
Anyway, we end up going out one night and a couple of my friends who happen to be Para’s and went into the regiment roughly the time he said he did… come drinking with us. Anyway, sparking up some conversation (The two were in on this) about Army days… he starts chucking it in “Yeah Yeah, was this and that” and then the two guys, stop deadpan and go… “So… you said you jumped in Nation x… 1st Batt never jumped there…” This being said as they both rolled up their right sleeve and there, proudly displayed was the Para logo with “1st” underneath.
I’ve never seen someone retract into his chair so quickly. After we left the bar, he decided to go home as he wasn’t feeling well… always funny to remind him of that when his ego gets a tad too big.
[deleted]
A guy I was friendly with in high school boasted constantly about being a published author. Having read his work myself (he would constantly shove it under the nose of anyone he was around…a red flag of a terrible artist) I knew that no publishing house in their right mind would ever put their money behind his terrible piece of work. Turns out he just paid a huge sum of money to some guy on the internet to print out 300 of his “books” which sat in boxes in his room.
In college I came across another repeat attention seeking offender in the form of a really good-looking girl that ran with our group. Being really hot her whole life, she simply assumed that the attention was to be focused on her at all times. She also drank heavily (shocking) and whenever she was drunk (always) she would literally scream over other people who were talking, pull girls out of guys laps so she could sit there, take out her boobs when no one was looking at her, and cry for hours over “injuries” (scraping her knee on the carpet, for example).
She left school and I couldn’t be happier.
[deleted]
Purposefully hurting themselves.
My aunt if the focus isn’t 100% on her, she will fall down or other ways to hurt her self to attract attention.
Story time: we went skiing as a family and I was still learning to ski so my parents were focusing on me. I was 5 years old. My aunt out of nowhere trips and my parents ignore her. After a while, she gets back up. Maybe an hour later she starts her new plan falls face first then rolls down the hill a while, this was powder snow so not too painful. This was enough to get my parents to go check on her. She says she can’t get up, so we call the paramedics to come get her in the middle of the ski hill on a stretcher. She is in paradise 6 medics giving her full attention trying to figure out what is broken or what hurts, she says the left leg.
They sled her down the hill where they start talking about calling a helicopter to emergency fly her to the hospital. My dad leans down asks her hey while they take you to the hospital was gonna go have dinner, if that’s ok. And that’s when she mysteriously heals saying her right leg (even though she said she hurt her left) was fine now and she wanted to go have dinner with us.
worktillyouburk
In college, I was walking to class one day and there’s this guy going the same direction in front of me. Coming the opposite way is a very attractive woman in business attire. She was a bit older than the average college student, maybe late 20s, early 30s and about a billion times classier than this guy. So this guy stops the lady and starts trying to chat her up, asking for her number right off the bat. He’s hitting on her like she’s a freshman and not understanding why he’s making no progress whatsoever. After a brief exchange and a polite dismissal from the lady, she continues on her way leaving the guy dejected.
Then I see the wheels start turning in his head. He’s standing there with his hand on his chin pondering how this woman could possibly have not been seduced by his charm and suddenly his eyes light up as though he’s had the most brilliant flash of insight in his entire life. He removes his shirt, shouts “Hey!” and when the lady turns around, flexes with all his might. She rolls her eyes and resumes walking away.
I absolutely lost it at this pathetic display. I got a smile and a wink from the woman as she walked passed me, almost crying from laughing so hard. I’ve never seen such an absolutely pathetic expression on a person’s face as that guy afterward.
lukeatron
This person on my Facebook is basically ‘live-streaming’ her issues now. First it was about how her paycheck had been next to nothing (casually mentioning that she hadn’t shown up for work for most of the month) and could someone please help her financially?
Now it’s constant rantings about ‘hating life’ and ‘what would happen if I died right now?’ with instructions about what to do with her body (there was someone with her and this person attested she was NOT about to kill herself) and ‘my significant other knows what to do’, and then later a simple ‘Ugh :'(‘ without any explanation (or interaction, I guess at this point nobody really cared anymore), and it makes me cringe that people will go so far to get attention and sympathy from random people.
SatansLittleHelper82
I don’t mind people wanting attention. It’s natural. What I hate is people who lie about it. “I have a completely cultivated aesthetic because it’s so deep and meaningful,” “I’m a vegetarian and wear shirts that let everyone know because I’m really down to earth,” “You can tell how shy I am (because it’s over the top and fabricated),” etc. There are also “I hate drama” people that manufacture drama in all areas of their life with poor decisions
Pinsandballoons