We’ve all encountered those living in their own little worlds. Imagine living next to someone who believed a simple ‘Hi’ during a mailbox encounter was an invitation to a grand love affair. Or picture that friend who was convinced their wild conspiracy theories were galaxies away from the truth. From creating their own realities to entirely missing what’s real, these stories will take you on an emotional rollercoaster.
One of my relatives “Joined the Illuminati” on Facebook…. On. Facebook. He was really serious too and excited about it.
Got a good one. I went to school At UBC for a year and lived in the dorms. One of the super-rich Chinese kids that populated my school lived on the same floor as me. On her first day there she took a shower in the public bathroom and then just left all her clothes strewn about. She assumed the maid would come pick them up and wash them.
My brother’s best friend married a pretty rich girl. He said the first time he saw her do laundry she was going through her pockets and throwing her loose change in the garbage. She had no idea that people kept their change. Genuinely thought everyone just threw it away.
I have a co-worker who once got visibly upset because I said he was about the same age as my parents.
He’s 51. My parents are 53.
I’d like to point out that I didn’t just say this out of the blue. He asked how old my parents were, and I knew his age, so I made the comparison. He also said things like “I work out you know, I’m stronger than guys half my age”. Very much a man-child in denial.
I used to work in a pizza place and my boss (the owner) was one of the strangest guys I’ve ever met.
He used to tell me that the world was run by “reptilian aliens” and that the moon was their base. He knew this because NASA once hit something off the moon and it “sounded like a bell” and thus must be hollow and full of lizard people.
Left that job after 3 weeks.
I work at a recording studio. The amount of people who think they’re going to be the next big thing is scary.
I’m a nanny and I’ve worked for some rich clients. Old money. These people know nothing about reality.
The best one I heard was this family I was working 12-hour days for. Good pay, a terrible schedule. At one point I was bouncing their baby on my knee and the Mom goes “Being a mom isn’t that hard. I don’t know why other women complain about it so much”.
While her nanny is literally caring for the baby.
We were at a table, 6 of us, eating.
The conversation turned to jobs/employment. One of the guys, a rich kid who had most of his life handed to him, including his tech job at mommy’s company, made the comment that he didn’t understand why if someone couldn’t find a job, they just didn’t go back to school, get a degree, and try some more.
He couldn’t understand two things.
One, most families cannot support an unemployed adult student for the time it takes to get a degree.
Two, the jaw-dropping one, as he thought that ALL colleges, EVERYWHERE, were FREE.
His ‘logic’ was that students go to college straight from high school and ‘they don’t have money’ so how else could they afford school.
We live in the U.S. and this guy was 27 years old!
And we had to tell him school costs money
I had an older woman tell me that I should “find a man to marry so that I don’t have to work.”
She told me this, while we were AT work.
This was a year ago.
I honestly wanted to say, “B*tch, we live in the Bay Area, EVERYONE needs to work just to live!”
Plus, I LIKE my job and actually make more than my S.O.!
“Aren’t you a bit too old to have a grandma?” A neighbor when I told her my grandma just passed away.
Some years ago, I worked in a mailroom. The boss of my boss was talking about one of her family members, who had some kind of emergency and had to come up with $30,000. She said to my boss and I…and I’ll never forget this: “I don’t understand the problem…I mean, who DOESN’T have $30,000 saved for an emergency?!?” …..B*tch, I work in a mailroom.
My dad collects coins because his extremely Hungarian immigrant grandfather convinced him that the Bank (capitalizing it because to him, all banks are just one huge world bank) is determined to steal all his money from him, so he has to have a backup plan. This in and of itself isn’t too extreme; plenty of people choose self-sustenance due to a distrust in government and economics, but the real kicker happened when he tried to roll his coins.
He has to order his coin rolls online because he doesn’t want to go to the bank and get coin rolls because then the bank will know how much money he’s hiding from them. I’m not kidding. Anyway, he ordered a bag of coin rolls and waited about a month for them to come before he started getting curious about where they were. He asked my mom to check the order tracking while he was at work one day, which led to this conversation:
Mom: [Dad’s name], it says here that the package made it to [town we live in] two weeks ago, but got sent back. It says you gave no delivery address.
Dad: Yeah, why would I do that? I don’t want them to know where I live, they might tell everyone.
“Why are you still living at home at 23? Just buy a house…” Coming from someone whose parents bought her a house.
One time I was at a friend’s lake house and they asked if they could come to mine next weekend. When I told them I didn’t have one they were actually floored. Everyone has one of those, right? A similar thing happened a few times with country clubs.
My boss’ daughter has 4 or 5 DUIs so they took her license away and installed the Uber app on her phone. She tells people she has a personal driver.
“My house isn’t that big, I only have 6 bedrooms” – One of my classmates.
Parents of a 35 years old woman, who was hospitalized after suffering severe anoxic brain damage 20 years ago. She had been in the same ward since, barely conscious.
They refused to get her transferred to a more suitable facility for 20 years, saying that there’s no reason to do so: those facilities are for “lost causes”, and their daughter is going to make a full recovery, finish school, get married and be totally fine.
Working in hospitals got me quite a collection of these stories, but this one I thought was one of the saddest ones.
Went on a trip with an ex to Asia. She didn’t like it because she couldn’t understand why people didn’t speak English. So she would just yell at them, I need a napkin! Bathroom, where?!
I pretty much told her to have some respect for people. Talk to them politely. She got all mad and fussy at me the whole trip.
I live in London as a welfare rep for American students. Knowing that American college costs a bundle, and the programme to come over costs a load too, these students tend to be the richest and whitest of suburbia.
One day the WiFi went down and I may as well have told them that there was no drinking water in the U.K.
About 40 students were knocking on my door telling me it wasn’t acceptable and that they were calling their ‘daddies’ to sort it “My daddy is a lawyer, so if you think you’re getting money for this accommodation when I haven’t had WiFi you’ve got another think coming.” (that sorta thing!)
I tried to calm them down, and let them know it would be back on in an hour or two when one of them said the following line;
“You can’t blame us for being upset, we grew up in ‘THE FIRST WORLD'”…
I was flabbergasted, not only did she talk about being from ‘the first world’ (who does that) but that is something to be proud of. But her entire argument was ‘Everything in my life has always been easy and perfect… how dare you take away the most minor of utilities for 3 hours’
I despair.
In college, I had a roommate from the most sheltered part of Long Island. We met an exchange student from Switzerland and I swear to god she said this in complete seriousness: “Oh wow I didn’t know people actually live in Switzerland, I thought there were just banks there!”
I’ve met a few people who are really brilliant in one field, yet lack even the most basic level of sense in certain areas outside of it. Sort of like the thing about Einstein not being able to tie his shoes (if that’s true).
My favorite was a university professor: absolutely brilliant knowledge of Middle Eastern politics, particularly around the Israel-Palestine conflict. He could remember insanely precise historical details going back thousands of years and seemed to understand the subtlest of nuances on both sides of the conflict. His lectures were amazing. Or they would have been if he had turned off his cell phone. He simply couldn’t figure out how to silence his phone, or even turn it on and off. He had let his TA do it for him a couple of times, but then he’d leave with it still off and couldn’t figure out how to turn it back on until he came back the next day, so after going through that twice he decided he would just leave it on. And it appeared that every telemarketer on earth had his number, because it would ring at least 5 times an hour at full volume, and he’d just talk over the top of it like it wasn’t happening. He also never answered his email, because he apparently didn’t realize that he had one or might need to use it.
One day he’d forgotten to bring his little water jug and sent his TA to the vending machine in the middle of a lecture to bring him a bottle of water. She brought it back and handed it to him, and he turned red in the face trying to get it open, before handing it back to her and declaring that something was wrong with it. She opened it quickly and easily: he’d been turning the cap the wrong way.
I should specify here that this was not a super old guy who you’d expect to have issues with technology and life in general: he was in his mid or late 40s.
My sister was just telling me this story…She went to a private high school in a very nice area with very rich kids. One day my sister sees one of her friends crying and quickly runs over to her to ask what is wrong. Her friend, through sobs, manages to say ‘Everything is just so unfairrrrrrr, I can’t even believe my life!!!’ My sister is so concerned because this girl seems on the verge of a breakdown. After calming her down for a bit my sister asks again what is bothering the friend, thinking maybe someone died, or her parents are getting divorced… ‘Well, you know my birthday is coming up, and so is my sister’s….and well sobbing some more my parents are getting us both brand new range rovers, and because she is older breaksdown SHE IS GETTING THE BLACK ONE BUT I WANTED THAT ONEEEEEEE!!!’ The only thing my sister could do was say ‘I am so sorry for you’ and walk away. We still do feel bad for her…so detached.
“The company owes you nothing, you owe the company everything” said my boss after I worked for 4 years in the company.
I knew a girl who thought credit card = free money
Here it goes, I was with her in a mall once and casually mentioned there’s a blazer I like but can’t afford to buy yet.
She: you don’t have a credit card?
Me: I have a credit card
She: then why don’t you buy it?
Me: I don’t have enough money, I can’t afford it
She: but you have a credit card!
Me: ??
And then it hit me! She literally thought that credit cards could be used to buy anything and didn’t know that you had to pay for it later. Her dad used to pay all her bills without telling her.
Last year, I lived in University Accommodations with a boy whose father was a high-ranking member of the Chinese government. Perhaps due to the fact that I was also Chinese, or as the result of the excess privileges lavished upon him from an early age, he immediately established me as his ‘best friend’ and started to stalk me to and from lectures, to the extent where I had to vary my routes every few days. I’m a girl, so it got, to say the least, a little disconcerting.
Anyway, this chap was intelligent, however, had difficulties using common household appliances. He did not know how to use a microwave or a toaster.
One day, at 10 pm, I heard a rapid knock on my door, which of course, was this guy. He had microwaved a bowl of ramen in a ceramic bowl and did not know how to get the bowl out because the ceramic was far too hot. Sarcastically, I replied that he had better let it cool. Half an hour later, he knocked on my door again and started whining, in the most piteous of voices, that now the bowl was cool enough to handle, his ramen had also turned cold.
My dad just died about a month ago. My company gave me 4 days unpaid off. I was really close to my father so this was hard for me to deal with. My paycheque was enough to pay bills, but I had to buy my groceries on a credit card to get by. My boss’s brother-in-law died the following week. All he talks about is how hard this is on his wife. Between the stress of her brother dying, and the reno on their million-dollar cabin he’s taking his whole family to Hawaii for 10 days this month to try to deal with their grief. Meanwhile, I’m pricing urns out on Amazon to try to save money, trying to sell my dad’s tools to help my mom, working full time and taking care of a toddler.
My co-worker’s 17-year-old daughter had her first job interview recently – it was at a movie theatre. When she got home, her mom asked how it went. Daughter: “I told them that I was only interested in a job that would let me work from home. That way, I can get snacks whenever I want.”
I would have LOVED to have been a witness to the interviewer’s expression at that moment.
My grandmother told me women especially moms can’t be alcoholics. It’s just not possible. Only men are alcoholics because no matter what women don’t have it in them and don’t have time to be alcoholics. And that everyone always knows who is an alcoholic and who isn’t. If someone is an alcoholic they always show it in some way you can’t act happy and be an alcoholic! My moms an alcoholic and obviously grandma is in denial and struggling to accept it despite the fact that her own sister died from health issues caused by drinking. But yeah women can’t be alcoholics.
My cousin was spoiled and sheltered her entire childhood through college. Then her parents stupidly cut the leash without any preparation and released her into society.
She quickly got in trouble for bouncing checks all over town. My mom picked her up and asked why the heck she was writing bad checks everywhere. Turns out my cousin was under the impression that as long as you had checks in your chequebook, you had money in your account. She didn’t understand that you deposit a number and then can spend or withdraw up to that amount.
Please teach your kids basic finance.
My girlfriend about politics.
“Why can’t we find someone young and attractive to be in office? That’s really what we need. All of these candidates belong in retirement homes, that’s why there’s so much drama and they can’t agree on anything.”
“Why don’t you just buy a house?”
What an absolutely terrific idea. Can’t believe I didn’t think of that. Let’s see, the cheapest house in my neighborhood is currently $335,000 and has plumbing and wiring left over from the 1970s, no central heating, mold, “foundation problems,” a roof that needs replacing, the oldest water heater I’ve ever seen in my life, a “gopher issue,” bad windows, a terrible location with a driveway that opens up right onto one of the busiest streets in town, and the smallest back yard ever. The bank won’t approve us for a loan on the mortgage because they think we can’t pay it, even though we pay $200 more than it is a month in rent even after the fees. That’s that idea in the garbage. What other brilliant fixes do you have for my life?
About 3 years ago and I had a young woman, probably early 20s, come into the cafe I work at. She ordered herself and drink and a pastry of some sort. Her total is around $6. She proceeded to hand me a 1 dollar bill and 6 quarters. I took the money and waited for her to procure more but she just stood there staring at me. I told her, “I’m sorry, it’s $6.87,” or whatever. She says, “I know I gave you 7.” I said, “No, this is only $2.25.” She took the money from my hand and counted each item in front of me like I was stupid, counting each item as $1. I pointed to the quarters and told her, “Those are quarters, not dollars.” Keep in mind this person was obviously not foreign or anything. She had no accent and seemed completely American. Anyway, her response was, “I know they’re quarters, but they’re dollars.” She then proceeded to pick up one of the quarters and point to the word “dollar” inscribed on the bottom beneath George’s head. At this point I was thinking, this is the single dumbest person I’ve ever seen or this is the worst con ever conceived, but she didn’t give up. She demanded to speak to a manager. I got the manager and he told her the same thing. She started getting visibly upset and holding back tears. She might have been embarrassed. The best I can figure is that she somehow never learned about money and change somehow and used it so rarely that she assumed quarters were dollars because technically the word “dollar” was on the coin.
I had a friend who was going to Greece with her family and asked me to come. I told her “Sorry, I’d like to but that’s too expensive.” She responded “Just ask your parents to pay, I’m sure they will.” I could not for the life of me convince her that no, my parents would not pay to send me to Greece. She literally could not wrap her mind around the fact that some people’s parents would not pay for them to go on vacation.
You should just go door to door to see if they’re hiring. And don’t take no for an answer! You need to call every day so they’ll remember you! – again, courtesy of my mother, who last worked in the 80s before being a full-time SAHM since.
My mom bought me a book called Baby Steps To Become A Millionaire.
The first few steps are just:
pay off your house with cash,
pay off your vehicles, pay off your debt,
pay off your children’s educations.
Then, “after you’ve done all of that, start investing 50% of your monthly income every month into a high-yield stock, with growth of at least 10% annually.”
It’s like, dude if I could pay for a house, car, and multiple college educations upfront with cash, why would I need to be told how to save money?
Oh, I forgot the most important advice. “Let God show you the way.”
The wife of the business owner complained to the employees about how she was underpaid for working there.
She literally owns the building and her family make 300-500k profit a year.
All while underpaying the rest of the staff.
Co-worker: “You’ll be able to buy a home once you get your inheritance”
Me: “I won’t have an inheritance, my family isn’t well off”
Co-worker: “Of course, you have an inheritance. Everyone’s parents leave them an inheritance. I’m sure they’re just keeping it a secret from you to surprise you.”
Said to me by my co-worker whose parents are both doctors, while my mom had recently been laid off and my dad was too sick to work.
It was opening night of Batman v Superman (before anyone knew how bad it was) and my friends and I decided to celebrate my birthday and get advance IMAX tickets. We reserved our seats, and they were decent seats, and we got into the theater with our popcorn and drinks and firmly placed our a**es. There was still some time before the movie started, so we started talking. Then a woman with a little boy interrupted our conversation to talk to me.
“Excuse me, can you swap seats with my son? He’s only 6 and doesn’t like sticking his head up far.”
Now, I bought these tickets two weeks in advance, and this was for my birthday, so I looked her and her son dead in the eye and said “No.” The woman got pissed and told me I’m selfish and entitled. I told her “I reserved these seats two weeks ago. It’s my birthday. And just because he’s six does not entitle him to my reserved seats.”
I saw her b*tching to the usher and pointing at me five minutes later. The guy just shrugged.
My mechanic was talking in the shop about how we shouldn’t have given women the right to drive. It got women out of the kitchen and house and that has been the fall of this country.
This was this year, 2023.
‘Do you have to work that part-time job? It doesn’t even pay enough to cover the uber’
From my former bestie who grew up super rich, when we were studying in uni. I explained to her that I needed to go to my part-time job the second day so we needed to find another day to meet up, she said that
You can see why she’s a former bestie.
A former roommate declared, “I’m an only child, that means I don’t have to be nice if I don’t want to.”
I’m a 911 operator and had a man call 911 because the internet at the hotel he was staying at got disconnected. I told him it was not a police issue and he would have to talk to the hotel staff and/or just wait for it to reboot. He responded, “Not a police issue? This is criminal. If I unplugged someone’s life support, isn’t that a crime?”
My old boss was railing at me for placing an order late and getting charged more after missing the ‘early bird special’ when I had been reminding her consistently for at least two months (gradually increasing my urgency that she needed to make up her mind). She was yelling at me and then said, “$$$ might not seem like a lot to you but it is to me!”
This coming from the person who set my wage, signed my checks, owned 4 substantial homes, had MILLIONS of dollars worth of artwork, designed everything, etc… While I was living in a 250sq foot garden studio apartment with my partner, which flooded when it rained longer than two days, making her hundreds of thousands of dollars from sales, with no commission.
Wow, I didn’t realize I needed that rant.
My ex’s mom believed that during Easter ghosts can travel between our world and the spirit world. She legit started seeing and hearing them because she thought her apartment and her spiritual personality attracted them. She hyped herself up so much that she had to leave her apartment for a couple of days and seek refuge at her sister’s house. She didn’t bring her cat with her. I suppose she thought the ghosts would feed him.
My husband’s friend insisted on taking us to the ‘best, most authentic’ Chinese restaurant in town.
I’m Chinese. He’s a Jewish guy who has never been to any Chinese-speaking country.
The food wasn’t good, nor was it authentic.
He had the most smug look on his face when he sat back and quirked his eyebrow at me as if expecting me to heap praise onto him. Anyway, I didn’t.
The best part is that they aren’t friends anymore (I had nothing to do with that, I promise), so now I don’t have to pretend that crab rangoons are the peak of Chinese cuisine.
When I was still a kid, my now estranged mom used to be one of the most logical and understanding people I knew. When I was just a teenager, it was just the two of us, and we were trying our best to get out of her brother’s house and have our own place.
We lived on the East Coast. Then one day, out of the blue, my mom came home from work (she was a licensed therapist, mind you) and told me in dead seriousness that Jesus had come to her in her thoughts and told her we needed to move to the west coast, and we needed to leave on December 15th of that year.
I wasn’t religious, but I had never once judged or expressed doubt about her faith. That wasn’t and never will be my place. But this was worth an eyebrow raise. She expected me to throw everything I owned in a storage locker, pack a suitcase, throw my emotional support dog in the hatchback of her SUV, and drive across the country with no money or planning in advance.
We went along with this and ended up homeless and nearly dying over the course of two years, with my dog actually dying in the turbulence of everything. She always insisted that everything going wrong was my fault and that God wouldn’t lie to her. That was several years ago now, and she and I are no longer in contact. I’ve since moved North with my best friend and was forced to start my life completely over going into adulthood, and she ended up right back in her brother’s house where we started.
I wonder what Jesus tells her to do, nowadays, or whoever she thought she was hearing.
My husband and I were watching a video online when an advert came on for pregnancy tests. The woman in the advert got a negative result and was visibly relieved.
‘Why would you want a pregnancy test to come back negative?’ my husband asked, confused.
You shouldn’t celebrate Halloween because it opens you up to demons and evil, you can’t just do it to “have fun” or “yolo”.
WHO STILL SAYS YOLO???
A male friend and I were walking around his city when I noticed this guy watching me intensely and following us.
We’re about to get into this elevator and the guy quickly jumps in before us and makes prolonged eye contact with me, so I hold us back from getting in the elevator and the guy gets off and walks away.
I told my friend about it and he told me how hurt HE felt that I robbed him of his ability, as a man, to protect me.
The fact that he thought I should ignore my own sense of self-preservation, just to soothe his own ego was one of the most out-of-touch things I heard in a while.
I was 16 when I lost my dad. Our family is very, very close and I wasn’t expecting so I was hit pretty hard. A month after his death, I was picking up a book at a friend’s house, but my friend wasn’t home, so her mother was the one to give me the book.
She asked how was my family, and I said we were trying to get back on our feet. Her exact words were: “Oh don’t worry honey. Give it a year or two and you even forget your father ever existed.”
I was so shocked. She continued by saying that first, we forget their voices, and then their faces. I left her house feeling numb, sad and scared that I would forget my father.
Celebrities have the same 24 hours in a day, if they can be successful so can you.
No, they f*cking don’t. When a single mom is working two minimum wage jobs just to put food on the table, that’s not the same as a celebrity who can afford a nanny, and a personal chef, and an assistant, and they don’t have to work a 9-5. Not the same f*cking thing at all.
“It’s just a dog.” When my little, sweet papillon died completely unexpectedly due to a vet error. I cannot tell you how many times I heard that during the course of my mourning.
When I was 18 a man approached me when I was alone at the bus stop on my way to work, and accused me and my sister of plotting to k*dnap and torture him.
I had never met this man before in my entire f*cking life.
Somehow he knew where I lived, and what cars were usually parked outside. He also somehow was able to identify the woman I lived with as my sister. I don’t know how he managed to get any of this information. I lived in a cul-de-sac, so it’s very unlikely he ever just ‘strolled by’ during the day. Neither my sister nor I had EVER met this man before, or ever seen him on our street. He didn’t live in the area. And there’s no way in f*ck he could tell by sight that we were sisters – there’s an age gap of 13 years and we look nothing alike because we’re technically half-sisters.
I didn’t feel threatened by the guy or anything (I actually felt sorry for him, and tried my best to assure him we weren’t gonna hurt him) but this was disturbing sh*t. It means he either cased out our house, or he knew someone who was giving him information about us, despite knowing that he was f*cking insane. It was f*cking bonkers.
Luckily, he didn’t follow me on the bus. On the way to work, I phoned my sister to warn her about this man, then I called the cops to file a report.
After that, I saw him in town a lot. If I was in a car, I quickly learned to duck if I saw him in the distance because every time – WITHOUT FAIL – he would spot me in the passenger seat, and he would stop and stare at me. I was terrified that he would one day find out where I lived, even after moving house, because of the license plate on my boyfriend’s car.
My mom’s friend when asked if she got vaccinated yet, her response was insane, a bit funny but also scary that someone could be this far gone to disinformation. Anyways, she said no she will not get vaccinated because it will put the number 666 in her DNA and when she dies she will have to serve Satan, Hillary Clinton and Hitler for eternity.
“Wow, I wish I was as independent as you. You’re really so lucky your parents don’t coddle you.”
Said to me in college by a 20-year-old from a very wealthy family when I explained I couldn’t go to a party with her that weekend because I had to work. She asked why I couldn’t just take a day off and when I said it’s because I’m paying for college myself that was her response. Such an entitled brat. I think she ended up dropping out after getting kicked out of her major’s program for skipping too many classes.
“My mom always buys the most expensive brands at the supermarket, that way she knows she’s getting the best quality”.
A high school friend, a lovely girl with a lovely family, never showed off their wealth but was indeed a bit out of touch with how normal people do grocery shopping.
Had a friend who insisted she was in a relationship with a C-list celebrity whom she met once during a comic convention.
All the celebrity’s Instagram and Twitter posts were for her and everything had a meaning behind it.
When the celebrity got married, she said that it was just for the media so she and the celebrity could live a quiet life.
When he didn’t do anything for her birthday, she had a breakdown. She went to therapy not long after.
I had a neighbor once that was convinced I was flirting with him and wanted to be with him. He got all of this from the one-word verbal exchange we would have while getting our mail, which was basically saying “Hi”.
Keep in mind that at the time I was a minor in high school and he was probably well into his twenties. He proceeded to talk to me.
Examples:
messaging me on Facebook declaring his love for me and feeling wronged because I was playing “hard to get”
he would knock at our house door- when he knew my parents weren’t home- and tried to lure me out so that he could just “talk to me”
searched me up on all my social media accounts and tried to contact me (he used my last name from our mailbox and searched for me)
It did not help that we lived in the same building. I got so scared that I could no longer go outside for a run like I usually did. I filed a police report and his family asked mine.