Every so often the planets align and fate conspires against you in such a ridiculous way no one will believe you. It's like Bill Murray stealing your french fry, it happened, you saw it happen, but there's no way anyone will ever buy that story.
But sometimes you have proof, and you get to tell people "Ahah! I wasn't lying! Here's Proof!" and they have to be like "Yep, that is indeed proof. What a weird turn of events." and you both have a laugh about it an move on with your lives. But we here at Rough Maps are not content with moving on, we want to hear those crazy stories, and share them with you.
So here are some of the craziest ones.
At least they beat "The dog ate my homework"
40. Sounds like maybe not management material
Hired an employee via phone interview and she didn't show up the first day at work. Called her up, she said she did come to work and received an orientation. HR said they didn't give anyone orientation.
Turns out she went to the wrong address and they had an orientation for a dozen new hires and she somehow got in and tagged along..
39. That was unexpected
We had a tech take leave 4 times in a year because her grandmother died. Same excuse every time.
When called on her lie, she pulled up obituaries, and turns out she had 4 lesbian Grandmas. Really sucks to lose that many people in a year too.
38. How to get out of doing homework
I'm a high school teacher. About 10 years ago I had a student say he didn't do the homework because his car caught fire on his ride home, and his textbook was in the back seat. I was suspicious, but he quickly produced the badly charred textbook, which was also completely waterlogged from when the fire department put out the fire and asked me if I could issue him a new one.
It's possible that he burned and soaked his textbook in an effort to getting out of doing the homework. If that was the case, bravo.
37. That peacock had your back
I was late to work once because a peacock was in the middle of the road. Boss didn't believe me until the next day when the peacock blocked the road when he was coming in.
36. Parents just don't understand
My excuse. The night before I went to sleep away camp in middle school I hear a glass shatter in the kitchen at 2 am. I go to investigate and find a broken bottle on the counter and beer everywhere. Start to clean it up and parents come to find me. Tell them it exploded and they don’t believe me. Say I’m in trouble after I get back from camp. By the time I get home nearly all of my dad’s home brew bottles exploded.
35. I too am a Nigerian prince. I have a deal for you, if you are interested?
I had someone who had to take two weeks off of work because he said he had to go back to Nigeria to be crowned ruler of his province. So I was like "Ah, so you're a Nigerian Prince, eh?"
Well turns out Nigeria has a lot of "royal families" of different areas and the dude working for me was a legit Nigerian Prince. He worked as a security guard.
The guy became the king of his principality and returned to work as a security guard. How did the relationship change? Well, I started addressing him as Your Majesty (not being patronizing at all, I was honest to god trying to show the man respect). He brought me back this cool dagger as thanks for letting him take so much time off. People around the office figured out he was legit but every once in a while somebody caught me addressing him properly and they'd be like "Why are you calling Frankie Your Majesty?" So I'd have to explain he's a king in Nigeria. And you can imagine how that conversation went.
34. This is life in the city
Someone was running late for something due to a traffic accident, and a road being closed. So they tried an alternate route, and that was closed for a different incident. So they called, said that they'd try another way. The third route was blocked for something else. They called again, said they gave up and went back home. Checked the news, and they weren't making any of it up - there was no escape from their neighborhood for a while that day, several main roads were shut down for various reasons.
Photo by Joline Torres on Unsplash
33. Unexpected kangaroo
I had an instructor at Lincoln Tech who said he was late because he was caught in a traffic jam caused by someone hitting a kangaroo with their car. This was in the US, and kangaroos aren't part of our local wildlife so everyone called him a liar. Then we heard the news report of how someone had imported several wallabies to keep as pets and one of them had escaped and gotten hit by a car, causing a major traffic jam.
32. Keep calm and carry on, I guess
When my friend and I moved into our first apartment together, we thought it was cursed for a while. We both worked at the same shop, usually on different shifts.
About a month after moving in, she left for work, got about 10 steps down the road and saw a police cordon. The officer at the cordon was confused as to where she had come from since everybody within the area had been told not to leave their building, but this message obviously hadn't got to us for whatever reason. She couldn't get past and had to turn around and go home because apparently a WW2 bomb had been uncovered on a nearby construction site. So our boss was told 'yeah I might be late for work, there's a bomb'
About 2 weeks later, I went to leave for work and when I opened the door to our flat, I was confronted with a long black bag propped up in the hallway against my neighbor's door. There was nobody around for a second or two and I was very confused. Then a paramedic appeared, looked at me looking at the bag and told me to go back inside my flat, which I did because what else can you do? I closed my door and just stood in the same spot for about 5 minutes in total silence processing what was going on.
Then a policewoman knocked on my door and apologized, told me to make myself a cup of tea (I am British) and stay inside for a while. The black bag was, in fact, a body bag and my neighbor's body was inside it because he had passed out and choked on his own vomit, which is a real thing that does happen apparently. So then our boss got a call from me saying 'sorry I'm gonna be late there's a corpse in my hallway.'
At our work Christmas party that year we got an award for the best true reasons for being late he had heard in his 25 years as a manager.
31. That's an interesting development
I got a call once to go cover a shift for a co-worker as she has a horse at her house and she has to wait for it to be picked up. I laughed when I heard it but she sent me photos and apologized about me having to do her shift explaining the horse belongs to her mother and she often rides it to her house because the neighbor kids like it and stuff.
Turns out the horse got out the stables and decides to go for a long walk overnight and she was startled by some rattling at the open window in the living room. She thought somebody had broken in so ran in with a knife and found a horse head sticking through her open window into the living room like "Sup, got food? I've been walking all night and I'm hungry"
Her parents came with their horse trailer thing to get it but it took a while before they could arrive.
30. This does one-up "The dog ate my homework"
In 8th-grade earth science, I had a group project. My team was supposed to measure temperature changes based on altitude. We used a few helium balloons and I think like 50 yards of twine. We did this at my house, a farmhouse where we shared the back 20 acres with our neighbor, who had quite the herd of cattle, in exchange for goods.
Anyways, we kept our notes on a folding table out there with some paperweights. And on the last check up on the experiment, my mom noticed the cows gathered around our project. We rushed out there to shoo them away but alas we were too late. The cows ran off and we checked our paper, and the cows ate a massive chunk out of my notepad. All of the data was gone. The due date was tomorrow.
Luckily the teacher let us do it again because we had proof of what happened.
29. I bet it was Flo Rida
I had a student who told me he was going to miss one of the exams because he was visiting a famous rapper in Florida with his family.
He told me that the rapper, who at the time was a relatively big deal, all over the radio, was his cousin and his family was flying out for a show and he couldn't skip it.
I mean, I would have let him make up the exam anyway, I don't really care as long as he takes it. But all his peers and I were kind of like, "Yeah, right...okay, whatever you say man."
He was telling the truth. When he got back from Florida, said famous rapper skyped into our poetry class and chatted with my students about poetry and lyrics and such. It was actually really cool.
28. See, it says right here the notices were sent out on "date pending”
I was a student. It was the first day of school. There were six of us who were late. The reason: the school bus stop was moved to a new location. We all piled into my mother's car. We went to the principal's office. The office manager said notice letters were sent to us, so she checked her log. The notices were never sent out.
27. It takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose
I was in college. I went back to my house between classes only to find my roommates barricaded inside by police.
Why, you might ask?
There was a bull moose in our side yard and the fish and game people were VERY concerned.
So my lab isn’t until 3 or something, and meanwhile, there’s like 8 officers having a standoff with a moose in my yard.
This continues until someone decides that the moose is an imminent threat and they’re going to try to tranquilize it. So they try that and it fails. So now they’re going to kill the moose.
It gets to be about 2:45 and I need to leave for my class and I’m summarily informed by the armed officer that my lawn is not safe and I’m to stay inside.
So I emailed my prof and was like, “look I know you’re not going to believe this but I’m barricaded in my house and they won’t let me leave. I assume this will be on the news tonight.”
Turns out it WAS on the news - they interviewed me - and I got an exemption on that lab. He told me later that he was going to 100% fail me because it was the worst excuse ever until he saw the news story.
26. So how are you emailing me then?
As a graduate TA for undergrad students, I was teaching an online course and all assignments had to be submitted by midnight. A student emailed me (this is important) and said her internet was down and she couldn't submit the paper. As in logged into her email on the internet to email me that her internet was down.
The way the class was run, if she didn't submit the paper by midnight she got a 0 for the assignment.
I replied to her email (remember - her internet is down) that if she brought me a hard copy of the paper she could still get her grade. She shows up at my apartment 10 minutes later (I hosted study groups in the community room) with her hard copy paper and a half-melted internet router. She had emailed me from her smartphone that she had for her internship (this was early in the smartphone surge and few people had them).
The girl got her grade and we're still in touch! She proved herself to be an incredibly dedicated student and is now in graduate school herself!
Photo by Kaboompics .com from Pexels
25. What
I failed to show up to class one time and this is the true story I told my teacher.
I was in my electronics lab and the power supply kept making this horrible buzzing/grinding sound. I'd smack it and it'd shut up for awhile before doing it again. Now, you're thinking this was my alarm clock and I was dreaming about being in the lab. And you're quite right. The thing is, in this dream I was a gigantic grape with arms and legs and a face. So once I realized that it WAS my alarm clock and I needed to get to class I was still enough in the dream to think I was still a grape. And fruit doesn't have to go to class. So I didn't.
The teacher stared at me for about 15 seconds and said "I wish I was a grape." and not another word was said about it.
24. He was protecting you, give thanks
When I was a teenager I used to walk to work and it would take me like half an hour. One day I was walking to work at the end of my street. There was this large dog and he "followed" me literally the entire way to work. Right up to the front door.
"Followed" is in quotes because he didn't walk behind me, he walked in front of me the entire way there. I couldn't get around him because he was too big and too quick, but he walked extremely slow. At one point I did trick him by walking behind a fence and then jumping over the fence, and I took off running to cover as much distance as I could but he caught up with me and got right back in front.
I ended up being over an hour late. I didn't even give an excuse because I knew they wouldn't believe me.
23. Was your boss MacGyver?
I had a boss who got stuck on a construction site he was managing. Everyone had gone home for the weekend and he was doing a walkaround when a door shut on him, trapping him in the bathroom. This was before cell phones, and no one knew he was there. He looked around, the sink worked and the toilet worked, so he wasn't gonna die of thirst. He had two quarters in his pocket. He tried popping the door with one quarter, and it fell out the other side. He managed to get the other quarter just right and was free. When he got home he told his wife to check on him if he wasn't home by 7 on a Friday. He never checked a job site by his lonesome ever again.
I liked him. Very down to earth man.
22. So what do you guys do all day
One time I saw what appeared to be a massive fireball falling out of the sky somewhere in the vicinity of a nuclear power plant, which was affiliated with my organization at the time, and as such, I was obligated to make a statement to security about the topic, making me 10-15 minutes late for my shift.
Security informed me that they had not seen it, despite the fact that I had witnessed it where I believed to be in the sky directly in front of their viewing glass, which they stare out 24/7, and it was the size of something that, well, is pretty hard to miss.
My co-workers said they believed me, but even I honestly didn't believe it myself until I saw on the news a few days later that a large number of meteors had fallen throughout the country that same night.
21. A likely excuse
I dated a guy for a few months in college. Towards the beginning of the relationship, we planned to go out and he didn't show up. No phone call, no answered texts, nothing. Annoyed, I began to accept I had been stood up and would never hear from him again. A couple of days later I get a text, "I'm so sorry I just came out of a coma. Can I come over tomorrow?"
I thought it was a lie but I wanted to humor it. He shows up to my house with crutches and his discharge papers...he was definitely in a coma. He was in an awful accident on the way to my house, that left his car totaled and, broken bones and in a coma for a couple of days.
To this day when friends tell me their dates ghosted them, I think, "Hmmm maybe he's in a coma?"
pixabay
20. It's the circle of life
As I was waiting for the traffic light to turn green so I could cross the street, some kind of rodent appeared out of the blue and started climbing on my leg. I panicked, shook it off and witnessed it being eaten by a stray cat within seconds after. I felt sorry for the little guy, I was his last hope for surviving and I betrayed him.
I ended up missing my first class that day because I had to go back home and change my jeans, I was paranoid that the mouse could be carrying some disease.
19. So do you just have a bunch of pictures on your phone of yourself all bloodied up
A while back I worked at a restaurant in New Orleans. One night there was a customer that I hit it off with, and he wanted to hang out that night after my shift. I told him sure, but I had to run an errand first (the errand being going to the hospital for a tetanus shot because I had stepped on glass a couple of nights prior). So around midnight I finish work and start riding my bike to a nearby hospital. I was rounding Lee Circle pretty fast... the road was wet, so when I hit the streetcar rails my bike slides out from under me. I crack my head pretty hard and get taken to a hospital. Meanwhile, the dude texts me, wondering where I am. I send him a selfie of my bloody face, but this was before all phones had the capability to receive picture texts. I don't think he believed me, never ended up hanging out with him.
Fast forward a year or so. On my bike again, someone parked along the road opens their door without looking. I'm riding way too close to the cars, so the door hits my arm before I can react, and I end up in emergency care. My friends who had taken me to EC bring me to their place to hang out. Out of the blue, I get a call from the customer from the first story, saying he was in town and wanted to hang out. I don't think he believed me that time either.
18. Always cover your webcams
Moved into a new place. The landlord is very nice, lives in the house. Her son also lives there.
A few weeks after moving in, he knocks on my door - accuses me of spying on him, quickly takes it back once he sees my genuine confusion, says he is panicked because recordings of private moments, seemingly made in his own apartment, have surfaced at his place of work - no blackmail attached, seemingly just to make fun of him.
The way he behaved - the super harsh and quick accusation, the immediate backpedaling - screamed: "I haven't taken my meds." And I don't mean in the derogatory "weird people must be mentally ill": I go to therapy myself and I know people who have had mental breaking points where they did that exact kind of thing if they didn't take their meds.
So I was very friendly and understanding, and a few days later he tells me he found out who it is (neighbors from the other side of the street), feeding me some obviously shaky story about them "hacking his internet" that didn't make much sense. To me, this smelled like, "I have now resumed taking my meds and have realized I behaved irrationally, but I can't tell you that, so here's an attempt to defuse the situation."
Turns out, no, he was totally right. He is currently suing them, got into the newspaper with it, and it's looking pretty likely he'll win. They have done this to more people, just for fun. He just isn't particularly tech-savvy, so the explanation was him being generally right but not understanding anything about it.
17. There's a time and place, man
I did bill collections for a while out of high school. Had been calling on this one guys account for a few months. The Saturday after Thanksgiving I called, he answered, I told him I was calling about the car loan he owed on. The guy says "I can't talk about this. My wife just got killed by a pack of dogs!" (In a super Texas redneck accent). I'm like "killed by a pack of dogs?" in a very "I don't buy it" voice...he hangs up.
Curious, I go to the search engine at the time, enter his last name, his city name, and "dogs".
Like 3 days prior, his 75-80 year old wife was out on a lawn tractor or something similar, the neighbor had like 6 pit bull rottweiler mixes that got out of their pen and mauled this woman to death. I turned to my boss and was like "Uh, that guy isn't lying...she got mauled to death on like Wednesday".
My boss was like "call him Monday and ask when he gets the life insurance check".
16. Silver linings, right?
My first day on a new job, I accidentally slept in and was heading into work about an hour late (in my lazy college days). I was already trying to form some type of excuse in my mind on the drive over, but knew I screwed up pretty bad. I had an old Jeep that was having problems at the time, and although it usually shook a little while driving, this morning it was shaking pretty violently. I paid no mind as I was trying to make it into work as soon as possible, but after a few minutes, smoke started coming out of the hood.
I pull over into a 7/11 parking lot to check what's going on and pop open the hood casually thinking my engine's overheated. Turns out my car's engine is on fire. In the heat of the moment, all I could think to do was throw water on it, but I didn't realize it was an oil fire, so the water just caused the fire to explode over the entire front of the car. I slowly backed away expecting my car to explode like an action movie, but an employee ran out an sprayed it down with a fire extinguisher. I was shocked and obviously bummed about my car, but it did give me a good excuse for being late my first day.
15. What are the odds of that
Guy didn’t show up for work because police were questioning him about a dead body found in the back of his pickup.
He didn’t put it there or even know it was there. That did not stop a neighbor at his apartment complex from noticing it, calling the cops and having SWAT raid his apartment in the early hours of the morning, before being questioned by homicide detectives all day.
Eventually, the cops determined the body fell into the back of the truck when he drove under a railroad overpass. The body was that of a hobo (they still exist) that was struck by a train and dragged until his body fell off at the overpass and into the bed of the guy’s pickup.
He said he had noticed a huge clunk sound coming from the truck the night before when passing under the viaduct, and had attributed it to a rough road and needing new bushings or shocks on the pickup.
Nobody believed the story was true until it was in the newspaper the next day.
14. "Only a few very select people close to me know this full story" - And the entire internet
One night in college as my roommates and I were getting ready to go out to a bar, our carbon monoxide detector briefly went off. Being dumb 21-year-olds, we ignored it because it didn't persist and went out to the bar until closing. When we returned we didn't hear the alarm again but my roommate decided to call his older brother (who was a cop) for advice just in case. The advice my roommate got from his brother was, "What are you, stupid? Call the fire department."
We called 911 and explained the situation to the firefighters when they arrived. They immediately started mocking us for waiting so long to call...until they got to our kitchen in the back of the apartment with their CO detector. The thing went nuts and we were immediately ordered out of the building. The firefighters rushed to the apartment upstairs and evacuated them and came extremely close to breaking down the door of another apartment with an axe before the women finally woke up and answered the door and then evacuated themselves.
As all of this is happening, firefighters make their way down to the basement boiler room where they figure the CO leak is happening. They discover a strange man living in the boiler room in squalor and also force him out. There was a back staircase in the building that connected all of the units and the back yard. We never kept our back door to that staircase locked, so this strange boiler room man had access to our apartment whenever he wanted for the better part of a year before this night. The whole situation was so bizarre and tough to wrap our brains around (especially after a night at the bar at about 3 am) so we all found places to stay for the night and vowed not to talk about the strange man living in the basement.
I was supposed to work early the next morning and left some hard-to-believe messages for my boss about not coming in. I excluded the basement man but told her the rest. To her credit, she seemed to believe what I said and gave me some info about tenants rights in our city. She never pushed me further on details but I have to imagine she had to have some doubts about my story.
As a postscript, I finally brought this subject up with these former roommates over a decade later at a friend's wedding and we can now laugh about how strange that night really was. We are fairly sure the basement man was known to our landlord but we have no info aside from that. Our landlord was slammed with fines in the aftermath because there was a law requiring CO detectors in every apartment and we only had one because my roommate brought one himself. The other two units did not have detectors. It turned out a seagull died in a chimney and clogged the exhaust, causing CO to build up. Only a few very select people close to me know this full story.
Pixabay
13. Never Forget
Someone I went to school with who was late a lot came in one day talking about how he was late because he was watching the news.
Yeah right, David. And why exactly were you watching the news?
Some plane had just flown into a building in New York.
My 'where were you' moment is sitting in Social Studies class listening to a kid tell the most obvious lie he had ever told... only for it to be the truth.
12. That was not what I was expecting at all
"Danny" was late, again. Danny was often late, though he always showed up with a dumb smile on his face at some point (usually right in the middle of an important diagram or figure). I finally asked if anyone had seen Danny ... should I mention they had all been very quiet this morning?
I didn't say anything rude, I just asked where he was, and if anyone had seen him or knew when he would decide to show up. Can anyone guess the answer? Yes, you got it. Danny was dead. He had been involved in a drink-driving incident the night before and was dead.
I was stunned and the kids all looked at me the way a Swiss Watchmaker looks at a Jam smear on a Cafe table. The tone of my voice had been enough, they were all giving me "What is wrong with you" stares. A thought entered my mind and I couldn't stop it. I managed to change the tone slightly so the phrase "I don't believe that" came out almost as a statement of shock, not distrust. There was a pause, and then they all sort of settled back into their seats and I just kept teaching and finished the class.
At the break, once the kids had left, I called the office, angry and confused, and wanted to know what had happened and why I hadn't been told. We were told there would be a meeting after school, and not to make any comments for the rest of the day. HELLA AWKWARD DAY followed.
That afternoon at the meeting, we (seven teachers) and a few admins were discussing what had happened, the limited details, and how we should begin thinking about an assembly acknowledgment once the parents had disclosed the facts. As we are sitting there talking about how we had all made some gaff or other and come off as insensitive, guess who comes into the office?
Danny comes in on crutches with his dad and is promptly shown into the meeting. From the looks around the table, I wasn't the only one confused. The principal simply said "We thought you were dead".
His usual arrogance nowhere to be found, Danny says "well, I was, kinda"
He had died during the crash, technically, and been resuscitated. His doctors told him to rest, but he insisted on coming in so no-one would worry about him. He wanted to ask if, when he was better, he could be part of an anti-drinking and driving assembly.
For the rest of the year, he was a model student: on time every day and always there to help staff or fellow students. He healed fully and by the end of the year was the Valedictorian. I am 100% convinced that his speech at the assembly contributed to a safer-grad that year.
Sometimes I muse that I was right, and he wasn't dead, but more times than not, I just marvel at the wonder that is humanity.
Pixabay
11. Sounds about right
I was a new driver, headed to school at the crack of dawn to take an AP exam. For those not familiar, attendance is critical for these exams and you absolutely must show up on time or call the exam proctors to let them know you're going to be late. This was also central Texas in the middle of May, which is prone to torrential downpours
So, being a new driver I didn't want to take the highway so I'd just take a little farm-to-market road every day and figured it'd be fine. It was not. It was backed up because a portion of the road had flooded but Texans being Texans, people were still crossing anyway. So a 15-minute commute became 35. I'd failed to write down the proctors' numbers so I had no way to let them know I was going to be late.
I got to the parking lot about ten minutes after it was supposed to start. It had been raining so hard and the parking lot had such poor drainage that there were at least 6 inches of water covering the ground. And horizontal rain. Even with my umbrella I walked into that exam soaked from mid-thigh all the way down, my shoes making a "squish, squish, squish" noise with every step.
Exam Proctor: Why are you late?
Me: Sorry, the road was flooded. I had to swim through the parking lot
I was at least able to take the exam, though I was freezing. (And before anyone jumps on me, yes I now know how dumb it is to walk or drive through a flooded area, but high school me didn't)
10. I'd watch this movie
There was a teacher who taught college English as a second language class. She had a student who asked if he could have an extension on his paper. She declined.
Turns out, his family living in another country was imprisoned because his dad was a journalist who wrote a scathing article about the current regime. He missed class for a few days, during which he flew to his home country, rescued his mom and sister from prison and flew them back.
And he still turned in the paper on time.
Photo by Emiliano Bar on Unsplash
9. Wow what a bad mom
I had a student tell me that her mom got mad and ripped up her homework. Naturally, I didn't believe her. Weeks later at a parent conference, the mom actually admitted doing so out of spite because the two had gotten into an argument and that she hoped it went against her grade. From then on I believed the student.
For the remainder of the year, she tried her best to turn it in, on occasion I would receive the shreds of what was left of her completed homework.
She got a pass for the rest of the school year, whether it was turned in or not.
8. Anything is possible in the great USA
Funny story about the last excuse. One day, this great guy in my P.E class completely disappears for like half the year. Nobody could reach him, he wasn't responding to any phones, messages, DMs, etc, and part of his family was gone too. Even the teachers were puzzled and worried. So he comes back sometime later and we all joke around about how he was deported.
Well, turns out he actually did get deported. For some reason, they mistook his family for illegal immigrants and detained them for a month, then sent them to the Dominican. His family was half Puerto Rican, half Mexican so it made no sense why they were sent to the DR, and at the very least, he himself was also a U.S citizen. His family filed to go back to the USA immediately.
7. I went to a school of over 2,000 students, if the dean knew who you were it wasn't a good thing
It is really confusing when you never get in trouble and then the first time you do nobody knows what to do.
The first and only time I got called down to the dean's office in high school, which is like 6 years or so ago so I may not remember everything, I got lost. They just tell you to go to the dean's. Cool, what room??
Finally, show up and the dean is like do you even go here? Since he never saw me before. Then he had to look up the complaint against me because he wasn't expecting me, I guess. Maybe I went to the wrong dean. Then he just lets me go because a teacher wrote me up for being late even though I had a signed note from a parent.
My excuse? My mom drove me to school (she wouldn't let me walk) and I was late because she got called out to declare someone dead(hospice nurse) at like 6:30. Dean apparently thought it was such a stupid thing to be written up for that he actually remembered who I was after that.
6. Sinkhole kid
We had a kid in our class who was pure chaos. Came late all the time, forgot stuff, didn't do his homework, disruptive in class... you get the picture. One day he came to school over two hours late and said the bus he was on fell into a sinkhole. Everybody was like "yeah, right", until the news came in that there had indeed been a sinkhole from a tunnel construction and that indeed a bus had slipped into it. We never found out whether our classmate had actually been in it, but he swore he was.
5. Yeah that sounds legit
A friend from grad school had previously been a skydiving instructor in Colorado, and had jumped more than 600 times. One of these times, he (for some reason) had his wallet in his suit, and it fell out. Fell to earth somewhere, he figured “This sucks but OH WELL!” Absolutely no chance of finding it.
Separately, a man in rural Colorado was found murdered. Turns out in their remote cabin where he lived with his daughter, he had been abusing her and she finally had enough and killed him. Unaware of this, the police searched the house and all of the man’s property and found my friends wallet in the trunk of his car. Police thought to themselves, “Clearly the murderer left his WALLET in this dude's trunk. Easiest arrest ever.”
Friend had the super believable alibi of “Couldn’t have been me, Officer, actually that wallet fell out of my pants while I was skydiving.”
4. Never talk to the FBI without a lawyer present
My freshman year of college I was living in the dorms and I got a knock on the door. It was the FBI, they wanted to talk, which I did, right there in my dorm hallway for about 30 minutes. Afterwards they told me that they didn't have a warrant but they were going to get one and that I could hand over my electronics now or they could come back again. I legit didn't have anything to hide especially with the line of questioning they went down, I told them they could take it but I had some mid-term essays and projects on there that I would need to backup before they took it but no dice which didn't make sense to me. They gave me the option of letting me keep it and they would come back for my stuff later or they could take it now but I couldn't even back up my files. But at the time, even more important than redoing these projects and essays was that I wanted to be able to smoke in my dorm and only worry about my school busting me rather than the FBI. I gave them my PC and my external backup USB hard drive without being able to backup my school-work also knowing that this would probably be a good excuse to get the time I needed to redo my assignments.
The FBI basically gave me a receipt for what they took for me that day. All but 1 teacher didn't take my word for it and made me provide a copy of the receipt the FBI gave me for my stuff. Afterwards the teacher was very apologetic and sincere offering some good advice about reaching out to the school's student legal center if I didn't have anybody helping me out with it.
I was not indicted or charged with anything and I eventually got my computer back but it took about 8 months from start to finish.
3. This is way more common than you would think
Last day of exams senior year my dad goes out to his Dodge Diplomat, starts it, puts it in drive, and tries to disengage the handbrake, which comes off in his hand. He gets out of the car and kneels down to look at the brake mechanism, trying to reinsert the little handle, and unintentionally disengaged the brake. The car, being in drive, begins to roll away, and dad leaps up and tries to catch the runaway car by grabbing the steering wheel. He can't keep up with the car and the wheel turns as has pulling and falling behind; eventually, he fell and the back wheels rolled over him, crushing his ribs and collar bone.
The diplomat went into the woods and got stuck on a tree. I had to flag down an ambulance in my underwear and call a classmate to let them know to tell the teacher that I couldn't make it to my final because my dad ran over himself with his own car. I realize how laughable this is when you're not in the middle of it but it's certainly the oddest excuse I ever gave for anything.
2. Honestly, I don't know how I would react to hearing this story
I was late for work once because my roommate kidnapped me. She had happily offered me a ride to work since I normally walked so I accepted the offer. Everything was fine until we actually started driving and she started going in the opposite direction. I was a bit confused and asked if she was quickly running an errand or something because she was going the wrong way.
She then pinned the gas and started yelling at me about "what are you doing with your life!? You don't have a job, you have no savings, you have nothing to show for yourself!" This totally caught me off guard and made no sense because she was supposed to be driving me TO MY JOB and I did have savings and was in school and had just come back from a year of traveling. I had no idea what she was going on about. I asked her to let me out of the car and she wouldn't pull over.
She started slowing down for a red light and saw I was ready to open the door and jump out as soon as her car stopped so she hit the gas and ran the red light. She ran stop signs and was weaving in and out of traffic trying to not let her car stop so I couldn't get out. I seriously thought we were going to die or she was going to hit someone. She was screaming at me the entire time this was happening.
Finally, someone cut her off and she slammed on the breaks and almost came to a stop but was about to pin it again. I tucked and rolled out of the car then broke out in a sprint. I had my cell phone in my hand and was about to call the police when my ringer was going off and it was my work "CAN'T TALK. ROOMMATE KIDNAPPED ME. TUCKED AND ROLLED OUT OF THE CAR. CURRENTLY RUNNING AWAY. HAVE TO CALL THE POLICE. I'M GOING TO BE LATE"
I'm pretty sure my boss thought my story was far fetched but I had never called in a sick day and I always picked up shifts when they were short or what not so I don't think he cared anyways. I called my boyfriend at the time and got him to drive past and see if she was at the house or not. She wasn't so he went in and got my pets out and anything else that would have been an obligation to go back immediately.
Then I got a couple of my friends to go with me and pack up everything else of mine in one go. She was out of the house the entire day apparently which was super convenient and it took her like 2 days to realize I was actually gone. She sent me a bunch of concerned messages to see if I was ok and where I went. She was a very confusing person...
1. Sounds more like the parents did it and blamed you
I was napping after several days of poor sleep in a hotel room then went down to the lobby and sat on a couch. My friend goes back up to our room and I go too after a few minutes. My keycard doesn't work so I knock on the door since I can hear people inside. I groggily start saying how the key got scrambled or something when I'm pulled into the room and thrown on the bed. My friend starts wailing on me and I cover up and look around the room confused. His parents are just watching. After getting wailed on a bit I elbow him in the face. Not even hard enough to leave a mark or even really hurt, just a get off me kinda thing. Only then do they pull him off me.
Now I'm confused, no idea why they're doing this. He kept screaming "Why did you do it?" And I'm baffled. I ask "Did what?" And they point to his guitar, snapped cleanly at the neck.
Apparently, they thought I was so angry at my friend for trying to wake me up earlier by jumping on my bed and stuff like that I snapped his guitar. When I was in the lobby and ignored him that was because I "Knew what I did" or whatever. I ignored him because I was groggy and yeah, a little annoyed that he tried to wake me up so abruptly when I said I needed the sleep and some other dumb teenager stuff about feeling left out.
I looked over the guitar and best I could tell was it snapped from being propped against the wall/old or something like that. It was a clean break and I expected that if I had broken it in anger it would be more shattered than one clean break on the neck. Nothing I said mattered to them. I knew them for years and they legitimately thought I'd done it, even after I walked them through how I'd just come clean if I broke it and going down to the lobby to sit confused on a couch was a way worse move than "I tripped over your guitar and broke it, I'm sorry". I found cases of similar things happening online, didn't matter to them. I'm pretty sure I even stress cried.
Later that day I heard the dad telling a random guy how "This crazy kid broke my son's guitar" while I stood right behind him.
My dad couldn't come pick me up since it was out of town. Boy that weekend sucked and ruined one of my only friendships at the time. Pretty sure they still think I did it. I wish I had, then at least I would have gotten something out of being treated like crap for days and would have deserved the things they did.
So yeah, I guess the excuse was "it spontaneously broke" and it was true.
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