People Are Revealing Those Moments When They Definitely "Dodged a Bullet"

This one kinda feels like it should begin with "Hello Justin, Liam, November and guest (probably Gareth) Please enjoy my entry to 'Safety Third' " At an old job I used to burn scrap wood, pallets, packaging etc. at the weekends in our yard.

One time I was filling the burn barrel and a lot of the stuff was damp, so I used some accelerant. My big ole' gallon of brake cleaner had mysteriously disappeared since I'd last used it, but I had a spray can so used that instead.

Now I'm not *entirely* stupid and have a little bit of firefighting and explosive gas mixture experience, so I knew what could go wrong here and took appropriate precautions. I didn't spray directly into the barrel, instead soaking rags on the ground beside it allowing the fumes to blow away in the wind. I then held the flammable rags at arms length over the barrel and lit it with a rolled up piece of paper.

BOOM!!! All at once as I moved the burning paper towards the rags I looked away at something moving nearby, a piece of burning paper fell into the barrel. Thus igniting the aerosol gas which had indeed blown away from my rags and directly in through the air holes in the bottom of the barrel, mixing just right with the air inside this confined space. The gas/air mix exploded launching the fuel soaked rags in my hand, chunks of wood, paper and rusty nails up into the air engulfed in a fireball (at least 10ft high from the CCTV footage).

In the immediate aftermath of this slight fright I patted down my alight sleeve, felt my now shorter hair, and checked the rest of my body for new holes. I looked around to see a spread of smouldering debris all around me, up to the burning rags and paper floating down on me and across to the main building. Where 2 of my colleagues were on their asses, crying, faces in hands...Not of fear or shock, but in laughter for a solid 2-3 minutes before looking up to see the look on my face.

All in the total damage done was the loss of all the hair on my hands, left side of my face, nostrils and about an inch of fringe. As well as my hoodie losing all its loose threads and fluff and the smell of burning hair for weeks after.

In hindsight, it probably could've been much worse having accidentally created and detonated a crude nail bomb directly underneath my own face. Not only in terms of injuries, but also that there were so few witnesses it was never reported.

Username: Puzzleheaded-Cap-103

When I was 2 days old I turned blue in front of my doctors, they told my parents "We believe your son has a heart condition." They did an ultrasound and found not one, but seven grade IV heart conditions. They told my parents, "Your son will probably never live on his own, he'll probably be short, and severely mentally and physically disabled, and he'll most likely need medications or a transplant eventually."

For reference, a single grade IV heart condition SHOULD put you on a transplant list. Fast foward to now: I'm 26, 6'3" 175lbs living on my own, and have done 13 years of martial arts, baseball, and lift weights. My internal heart structure is such that it is almost physically impossible for me to have a heart attack.

I lack 1 of my 2 valves, and 2 of my 4 chambers, my aorta is not in the right area, I have additional jugular veins, and my major heart arteries are in such a way that my circulatory system does not go in the same order. Also, I take 0 heart medications, only 350mg aspirin and 10mg blood pressure medication. This isn't for anything specific but only to take a small workload off my heart.

For me it goes: Heart, body then lungs. In other words, my blood gets to my body unoxygenated, and then receives oxygen after. As a result my O2 level in my blood floats at about 93-95%, and I've had it measured as low as 75% without suffering any ill effects (except my hands turned literally blue)

For you it goes: heart, lungs, then body. You get 100% oxygenated blood! Your O2 levels run between 96-98%. I'm part of a medical study that examines how heart disease patients function during exercise. I'm the only patient who hasn't had to drop out due to health reasons yet.

My cardiologist routinely asks me if graduate or med students can observe me (I almost always say yes) and she has given speeches on my conditions, and personally told me I was the "healthiest patient I've ever heard of." I have submitted myself to the Guiness Book of World Records for "Most Heart Conditions Survived."

A Few Cons: I have ADHD and a social processing disorder. I'm prone to succumbing to dehydration faster, I need to bundle up during the cold and am a bit more suspectible to respiratory illnesses such as the common cold, also a slightly increased chance of a stroke. That's all I can think of now.

Username: [deleted]

My wife and I were planning a trip to Vegas, and there was a big country concert going on during the week we were planning on being there. My wife likes country music, and I hate country music, I absolutely can not stand it. She mentioned it under the assumption that I wouldn't want to go (she likes to bust my chops with stuff like this sometimes).

She makes so many concessions to keep the family running that I honestly thought it would be an awesome thing to do for her. The while time we're planning the trip, we both just kinda kept "dragging our feet." Time to book the flight? Let's wait till next week just in case something pops up. Time to book the room? Ehh... we'll get to it later. Etc.

We're not superstitious or overly religious, but we've always made it a point to "trust our gut." This goes back to when we were younger and just starting out. There was a gas station close to our house, and we would go in the middle of the night sometimes to get snacks and a cold drink. We were heading out, and something in my gut just kept nagging at me. I felt dumb, but I told her, and she was having the same feeling, but didn't want to speak up. So we decided not to go.

About 10 minutes later, we figured that we were just being dumb and ran out to get drinks. It turns out that the gas station had just gotten robbed, and the clerk was shot. Had we gone when we originally wanted to, we would have been there during the robbery. From that day forward, we both agreed that whenever we were having "that feeling," we would just go with it.

It gets to the point where we HAVE TO start actually booking our flight and room, and I tell her that I know she's excited about the trip, but I keep getting this nagging feeling that we shouldn't go. It turns out that she'd been having the same feeling, and neither of us wanted to say anything because we didn't want to feel guilty about ruining a vacation for the other. We decided to put the trip off of a bit and forgot about it.

Fast forward a few months, I turn on CNN at work and see "Breaking News" about a gunman shooting up a country concert in Vegas. I get home from work, and as we're talking about our respective days, I bring up the thing I had seen on the news... my wife stopped dead.

It hadn't clicked for me, but this was the week we were supposed to be in Vegas, and THAT was the concert we were going to attend. I still get chills when I think about it.

Username: th0r4z1n3

Okay, story-time! I was headed home from a gig, dragging one of my roommates in-tow (I was his ride, so....well, duh). I see in the rear-view mirror, on the highway, a pair of headlights behind me. I ALSO see....some brake-lights appear near'ish to them? But they disappeared, and VERY quickly afterwards the headlights disappeared too.

We're on a divided highway, I figure "Oh goddamned, it's late on a Saturday night, but I'll feel dumb if I don't get out and make sure THAT person is okay." So I pull off under a bridge, and we hoof it 1/2 a mile back to the smoldering wreckage of a truck, barely off of the highway, its' front-end caved in and the driver in a panic.

Having SEEN (in reverse) what happened, we did what we could to calm the poor guy down. 18'ish, was coming home from a party, had some beer left in the bed of his truck so he's SUPER freakin' out about what will happen when the cops show up, so I agree to be a bro and skedaddle the beer off to my trunk, while he tries to find all the necessary paperwork in the glovebox to explain to police how he was VERY MUCH just driving home (he was 100% NOT intoxicated, judging by how he was acting -- or, if he had anything to drink, the adrenaline fully overwrote that pretty quickly, so I sided with him and his "Look, *I* didn't cause this wreck" mentality).

So I return to the truck, my buddy is standing next to the tailgate watchin' traffic, and the owner is sprawled alongside the passenger-side, rifling through the glove box. I'm standing 'bout 2 feet from him (and, by proxy the truck). I didn't THINK to mention he should turn on his emergency flashers, but....in retrospect, mighta been a good call.

What happened next was simultaneously "in slow-motion" (as they'll tell ya car-wrecks are), and also instantaneous. I was AWARE of a loud crunch sound, and my roommate flying past me on my left, as the tailgate, truck-owner, truck-proper, AND A VAN flew past me on my right. I was left completely unstruck, swearing every possible curse word I could think of, checking myself for injuries, and then rushing up the hillside to see if either of my two living compatriots were still, y'know....living.

(Seems the truck wasn't *quite* so fully off of the highway, and since it was right around a bit of a curve, that mean it was KINDA hard to see.....around the bend....so yeah, extra car wrecks.)

This poor lady in her van struck my buddy, into the tailgate, into the TRUCK, broke the Tailgate off (and sent it flying all akimbo -- along with the friend), into the truck for 'bout another 10 yards, then wound up rolling onto its' roof, on the opposite side of the highway.

Van, demolished. Truck, demo'ed on both ends. Friend? Freaking the HELL out, but (somehow....?) completely uninjured, just in severe shock. Owner of the truck? Woozy, but VERY pissed off at the fact that the truck is a complete wreck. Me? Apparently I'm goddamned Nightcrawler, 'cause I was standing immediately next to a multi-car Tour de Force of crumpling, and didn't incur any injuries whatsoever.

Given the fact that my roommate TOOK A 2-CAR SANDWICH FULL-ON, though, we called him Colossus for a while. 'cause, I mean, NO INJURIES? Are you kidding me? What are you made out of, Pure Spite (and Reinforced Steel)?

They took him to the hospital as a precaution (much to his chagrin, 'cause they wound up cutting up a prized Led Zeppelin shirt of his), the lady in the van was just glad everyone survived, and the Truck owner -- I BELIEVE? -- brought the original drunken driver to court and won a lawsuit over him.

(Dude managed to get onto the RIGHT side of the highway, crumpled heap that was his car, and got all of 1/2 a mile down the road to a grocery store, where the police found him sitting inside his smoldering wreckage, still VERY drunk at the time.)

So everyone lived, no one was harmed, and I don't know how this happened. Honestly, more MAJOR props for the people that were HIT BY ACTUAL VEHICLES ON THE HIGHWAY and didn't get injured; I just somehow vanished from existence briefly, so I could tell the tale, I guess.

Username: Drumboardist

My "dodged a bullet"moment involves me literally not dodging an actual bullet. I was working as a bounty hunter. Had heard about a neighborhood guy that skipped bond that day. I had no intention on looking for him because I hadn't gotten paperwork yet.

Anyhow, I'm sound a sleep in bed and wake up, like wide awake at around 3am. I think to myself I have some warrants to run down so I guess I'll go out and see what I can do. When I get to my car, I grab my mag lite.... batteries are dead. The only place near me that was open at that hour was an inner city convenience store not too far from my house.

I walk into the store and there's the guy that I knew skipped court that day. So I tell him I have to bring him in (his bondsman is one I regularly worked for). I get him against the code station counter, legs spread, patted down and I get one cuff fastened onto his left wrist when all the sudden he jumps away from the counter and wants to fight to get away. Not a big problem.... I pop him a few good times in the mouth, get him turned around and am holding him from behind. Fairly under control.

Well, they have an armed security guard.... and this guard decides he now wants to help by getting in front of my guy and pulling out his 38 revolver, pointing it at him. The guy reaches out and grabs the gun from the security guard. Guard runs away.

There's a bunch of yelling (place had a bunch of regulars drinking coffee and hanging out) and then I hear the first gunshot. This guy is trying to shoot me by shooting behind himself. I do have a gun on me but it's an automatic and nothing chambered (I did not expect to run into anyone at the store) .... so I would have had to let go of the armed guy to use both my hands to chamber a round.

It felt like an eternity between the first shot and second shot... but it was probably only a few seconds. It's amazing how much can run through your head so quickly. Anyhow that second shot hits me right where you're leg and groin connect. Man it felt like someone mounted a pool cue to the front of a locomotive and ran it into me. Very small concentration of great power (if you've ever seen a 38 round, it is big and has a lot of powder behind it).

It knocked me to the ground and I begin scrambling for cover as I hear him emptying the rest of the rounds. I'm imagining these bullets are tearing through me but my adrenaline is so high I can't tell. Turns out he was just shooting around the store to get everyone away from him so he could take off.

But the bullet that did hit me actually completely severed my femoral artery. Typically you bleed to death within a minute when this happens. But, by a 1 in a million chance, the hot bullet seared enough of my tissue and the artery that it slowed my bleeding. It probably helped that I stayed calm too.

The clerk called 911 and said there was an officer down. Holy shit, when they finally wheeled me out to the ambulance there were cop cars and fire trucks as far as you could see in every direction. There were four ambulances backed up to the door.

They got me to a hospital and the damage was so bad that the vascular surgeon they called in couldn't do it. They had to call in a heart surgeon who cut a piece of vein from my right leg to graft into the artery in my left. I tell you what though.... whatever they gave me for pain was freaking fantastic. You could have shot me 5 more times and I wouldn't have cared.

After surgery, they kept me unconscious in ICU for 3 days to allow the repair to heal some and then moved me to the regular floor. A detective came in to visit and told me that the shooter had been killed by police in another state. He pulled the empty gun on police, during a chase fire another crime there, and they killed him.

It took me a good month or longer to walk right again. My left leg would not straighten out for the longest time. So, by all accounts I should be dead. It really gives you a much different perspective on life.

Username: PD216ohio

Dodged a bomb blast (1000kg of explosive) by being 5 minutes away from the ground zero which killed 18 people and more than 100 people lost arms and legs. This happened to me. This is from the days when I used to live back home (I used to live in Karachi, Pakistan but now moved to UK).

We used live very close to a CID (Police Investigation Department aka Pakistani FBI) building which we all were unaware of and always thought it was just an ordinary government building till on 11th, Nov 2010.

On that day I around evening time coming home from work I thought I better hit the gym (because they had a sauna and after being tired from all day work that sounded like a good idea) which was hardly 0.3 miles away so I decided to walk to the gym. I change quickly and leave for the gym and start walking towards the gym.

This is almost I've hardly walked like 10 minutes and I'm 0.1 miles away roughly and all of a sudden for a nano second I feel that ground is shaking and the next thing I hear is a loudest bang I've ever heard followed by a pressure kick into my chest. Now to let you guys know, my both the ear started bleeding because the bang was so loud and for the reference the kick in the chest was as bad as Big Show wearing military boots and kicking you in the chest straight
with full force.

Next thing? I'm on the ground covering my ears because they are in agony and covered in dirt trying to figure out what's happening. As I am trying to figure out I can see all the cars alarms have gone off. Anything made up of glass has been shattered in roughly 1-2 miles area.

I'm still trying to figure out what has happened and I start smelling gun powder and as if someone is making a BBQ and is being burnt. I will always remember that smell which was something unsettling. Next things rock and dust particle starts landing on me and the surrounding areas which had 1-1.5 inches long of pieces of human skin and flesh. I am not believing that I have another human skin piece stuck to my arm. I brush up my clothes and arms getting up and covering my ear recovering from that pressure kick.

As I move closer to a spot in a street where I am hearing loads of people screaming and crying I see a few 3-5ft cracks between some walls of the building which have been destroyed by the shockwave of the bang. I see the gap between a wall and move into the area where I see these scenes straight from a Hollywood movie where people are crying, cars on fire and dead bodies on the ground.

By this time I'm thinking its a bomb blast and that's what has happened. As I move closer I see a 10ft and 30ft wide crater which has been filled with the water and the building which was a CID building is no longer there. There are hundreds of people lying on the ground crying for help as some of them don't even have legs or limbs or some don't have their complete bottom.

I am still in a state of shock looking around and I see a woman crying and hitting herself because she had her husband dead who's legs and torso was missing. I seen that later. I see several people without legs, brains out and no limbs.

One thing, which haunted me for sure was a 18-20yr old guy who was dead and lying on the floor towards his chest on the floor with his neck turned towards me. I can still remember him looking straight into my eyes. His feet were flipped the other way around.

After the police arrived and media arrived I came back home after it got crowded. After I came home after the dusk everyday, I would see that 18-20yr old boy standing and starring into my eyes. I would wake up screaming through out the night and see that guy standing at the door way just staring at me.

For two to three weeks I would see this guy regularly during midnight standing in my hallway staring through my soul. I still remember that guy's face and the shockwave and the sound of the blast.
[Photo of the Explosion aftermath ](https://imgur.com/nyOe6df)

Username: [deleted]

This is one when I was 5. I understand if it’s hard to believe. I was 5. My grandad bought a lawn mower to help my uncle (he lived with us at the time) get more stuff done around the house (like have a trailer attached and such) and this lawnmower was a old piece of shit.

The guy tried to make it a racing mower and had rattle can paint on it, it didn’t scream luxury by no means. To set the scene, our house is on a decent size hill with a wrap around gravel driveway. One side is easily a 45 degree slope, and it washes away the gravel pretty easy.

Back then, I was all about trying to make money to buy give to my grandad to buy me a video game or whatever. So I’d help my uncle by riding the lawn mower (the easier chore) while he loaded the trailer with gravel and I’d drive up to the top so he can spread it out and make it look decent again and maybe prevent it from washing again.

I stopped to get a drink at the top of the hill so when I came back he was already at the bottom of the hill getting ready for me to come pick the next load up. I start down the driveway on the mower when I start trying to ease on the brake to not go so fast. The pedal hits the theoretical floor.

I start trying to frantically push harder and harder and try over and over and it doesn’t work. I start yelling and screaming I can’t stop it. I could’ve jumped off but you’re 5, you know that gravel hurts. You don’t have the common sense to say “yeah that hurts but being hit will hurt worse” I’m about 3/4 the way down the driveway at his point. My uncle, who I love much like my very own grandad, throws the shovel and stands in front of me bracing for impact. This story actually doesn’t end here.

My uncle is 5’9 and even in his prime weighed 170 pounds, by this age (roughly 57-60) probably closer to 140-150. I just plow over him, and I see his eyes roll back and I thought I just killed this man. Little did I know he grabbed on to something underneath and went with me, and I’m grateful he did because this next part would be ongoing to this day.

We go out onto our busy road, and of course one way there’s a semi truck that just topped the hill and about 3 cars on the other side. You know how in the movies things seem to always happen in the middle of the road so conveniently? The lawnmower decided enough was enough and it stopped in the middle of the road.

The truck stopped for us, I’m so grateful he had the wherewithal to go ahead and brake before coming over the hill, and the others stopped too. But I was frozen. I couldn’t do nothing. Scared to push the gas and scared to get off just frozen. Gratefully my uncle held on and he got up super fast and pushed me across the street into our neighbors driveway.

We left the mower there because, fuck that thing now, and we walked back up the driveway in silence, processing I guess, because as soon as we got inside we sat at the dining table and just put her heads down and started wailing.

Not as close of a call as the others here, but damn, that day still haunts me. Looking back and seeing everything else that I’ve done, this is the one time I can remember where the universe worked for me. I have a really bad problem with listening to my intuition which is why I broke my leg last year and why when I was 14 me and that same uncle spent 6 hours of the hottest day in my states recorded history stuck in a ditch with no way to really get out.

How stupid are we? Me and my uncle? Chance after chance and yet, here we are still saying “eh if we die we die.”

Username: SykeOut2

I was working for an engineering company in 2013. We built a couple laser cutters, one for a local branch (I'm in Canada) and then a second one for a Texas location.

The company then decides to close the Canadian location and ship the first machine... to Russia. Middle of nowhere, just a bit over two hours' drive to the Kazakhstan border. Literally the opposite side of the world from me if you're just going by time zones.

Normally we install stuff on-site ourselves since it's all custom, but since this machine had already been installed once we just created documentation to allow the company to install it themselves. They pack everything up and get it shipped, a few months later they're done and try to turn it on - it doesn't work.

Well, crap. After some "fun" phone diagnostics with a German guy who spoke English and Russian, in the early hours of the morning or laaaate at night, we figure out it's broken. Not possible to do video conferencing, since they only have land line hookups - internet isn't installed on the site yet, and there's no cell towers in range, since he site is 100 km out into the bush.

We try to ship over some spare parts. The spare parts get intercepted in Heathrow and held by customs - apparently, someone had to get bribed later to get them shipped the rest of the way, but they won't arrive for another month and the machine is still broken so - hooray! Free trip to Russia! In the middle of December!

My coworker and I make a crazy long flight to Moscow, where we're meant to transfer to a domestic flight. I have to pass my bags through customs, and inside I've packed a second set of spare parts. This is 100% legal, *as long as I declare they're for repair and not for resale* but when I get to customs there's this crazy half-translated, half-Russian form without enough room to write on it... if I don't declare my stuff properly, I can get my baggage seized or worse.

Partway through filling out the form I just kind of gave up and went to find someone to help me. Head down this weird narrow hallway, ask the woman who's practically asleep at her desk if she speaks English. She does! Great!

Me: "How do I fill out this form?"
Her answer? "I don't care. Just keep it."
Me: "Really? It says it's mandatory..."
Her: "I don't care." Then she leans back to go back to sleep.
Me: "Uhh... ok? Thanks?"

I was sweating (thanks to wearing a winter coat appropriate for -35, and from the stress of maybe being sent to Russian Airport Jail), and couldn't believe what had just happened. I couldn't relax until I was out of the airport, bags in hand, at the final destination, three hours later.

Then - we finish fixing the thing (the whole trip was crazy, but this post is already too long) and come home as scheduled. Two days later massive oil sanctions are put in place by the Canadian government against Russia.

The laser cutter falls under the oil sanctions because it was for manufacturing horizontal drilling parts. I have no idea what would have happened if we had needed to stay longer, extend our work visas, and come back after the sanctions.

Username: evilspoons

The biggest bullet I've dodged was a literal bullet. I was in the Dominican Republic visiting with family when I was a teenager. We took a drive into a remote area to visit an uncle. One of the cars ended up with a flat tire. My stateside cousin, two cousins from the DR, and I went to fix the tire and see a little of the nearby town. So we loaded the tire in the trunk and headed off.

While we were driving, we ended up getting pulled over by the police. There are cops in uniform and cops without uniforms; we were pulled over by the latter. These local cops tend to be more power-trippy, especially in remote areas where they are the only law. One of the cops was really young. They asked us to get out of the car, which we did.

In a flash, the young guy started to get really agitated and pulled out his gun. He had us lined up on the side of the road, on our knees, with our hands behind our heads. He didn't like our answers and threatened to kill us. Honestly, he could have, and nothing would have happened to him, and we all knew that.

He put the gun to my head and started screaming questions at me and accusing us of being thieves, drug dealers, and murderers. I grew up in the States, but I speak Spanish. I learned that 15-year-old me is not bilingual when a gun is pressed to my head. The only thing going through my head was today is the day I die.

My cousins were all shouting that I didn't understand. When I processed that, the Spanish came back, and I was answering, but things were still super tense. Thankfully, the cop's partner, who was searching the car while this was going on, started yelling at the young guy to chill out.

He pulled out a box of baseballs and a Bible. He asked my Dominican cousin, who was driving, about them. He told the cop that he worked for one of the baseball teams, which he did, and he was a member of a conservative religious denomination, which he was.

He then asked us about the tire in the trunk, and we told him to check it for the nail. He did. He said okay, handed us the balls and the Bible, and told us to get out of there. No apology, nothing, just an alright, get out of here.

We hopped in the car and drove off. We didn't say a word until we fixed the tire. On the ride back, our nerves had settled down, and all we could do was laugh at the fact that I almost died because I forgot how to speak Spanish for like ten seconds. Aside from the almost execution, it was a great trip.

Username: umptilla

When I was seventeen I finally got my driver's license. My mom, ever the cautious one, wouldn't let me get it prior to that because I was "irresponsible". I probably was.

Unbeknownst to her, I had made a copy of her car key one late night at a local Wal-Mart. She was out of town, probably down at the lakes. Me and my then-girlfriend decided to take her car to that same Wal-Mart this night to shop for school supplies. So, I guess I wasn't as irresponsible as she'd pegged me for.

I was driving back along the interstate after purchasing droves of notebooks, pens, and folders. I was in the middle lane, going 75 in a 50 (through town). Stupid, but everyone does it. My old "behind the wheel" instructor told me once that it's safer to go with the flow of traffic than it is to go against it. That's exactly what I was doing when I noticed a behemoth of a one ton truck coming into my lane.

I didn't have time to think, so I laid on the horn of my mom's little Pontiac Sunfire and felt helpless as his much larger truck pressed against my car, forcing me to fishtail into the lane to my left... where another truck was waiting to sandwich me. The rest is a blur, but I'll relate as much as I recall to you.

I was slammed into the other truck and crushed against it going 70, 75 mph. The truck that caused the accident got clear of the tangle and I ripped the wheel to the right, lest I force the second truck into the concrete dividers along the interstate. The other truck had the same idea and ripped his wheel to the right as well. During all of this, my girlfriend is screaming and my head is absolutely on fire from a good wack I took to the noggin against my window during the initial impact.

The driver of the truck hit my rear quarter panel in an attempt to steer himself away from the dividers, and my car spun out. It was the late afternoon, rush hour even in my modest metro. I went into a series of three terrifying 360 degree spins and somehow came to a rest along the side of the interstate. Both of the trucks continued driving, and at this point I couldn't even see them ahead of me.

Moments after coming to a stop a huge knot of cars went racing by us, cars that would have hit me during my spins if they had taken even a few seconds longer to get out of. By all rights, I probably should have died there on that desolate patch of interstate.

Instead, I walked away from it virtually unscathed. I had to call the police, who apprehended the man at fault a few miles down the interstate. The second truck driver also called the police, and we all met at a gas station a few exits up from the accident scene to give statements and exchange information. The kicker?

The at-fault driver, trailer trash from somewhere in Missouri, claimed I had hit him. Thankfully the second driver stated that he'd seen the whole thing and told the man he was an idiot. The best part was when I looked over at the at-fault driver's truck to see a toddler wide-eyed in the back seat. Truly classy.

Username: supermegafuerte

It was 2004 and we were in Baghdad Iraq. After a long day of driving around the city, running missions, and cultivating “sources”, we returned to base for the night. On the way back, we received a call on the radio that my First Sergeant’s HMMWV (Humm-Vee for those civi’s) had just completed maintenance at a near-by Log Base (less than a half mile from home). The truck had new windows put in after being blown up the week before.

This Log Base was known to get mortared or rocketed daily, as the enemy knew it was a log base, and that one impact would shut down operations for at least an hour until cleanup could be done, to at least slow down operations somehow by just a bit. We knew the impact history, and the likelihood that we could get caught in the crossfire even by stopping for a few minutes, but when 1SG says to do something you do it...

We get on the Log Base and start searching for the building where the truck is currently parked (they moved it from the maint area to a storage/parking area, thanks assholes). Upon getting onto the Log Base, and essentially being done with our mission we dropped all our gear (e.g. Helmets, Body Armor, and stored our weapons); we were on a Log base for god’s sake less than a mile from home.

We began driving in circles looking for a warehouse/building we had never been in before. Finally my Driver Shawn gets frustrated and pulls over to ask for directions. I get out of the turret and hop into the drivers seat, stating that I would drive around the block again to look for the warehouse and meet him back at that spot.

I drive about a city block away when I see the truck and pull into the parking lot. Imagine pulling off a road into a parking lot for say, a 7-11. Now imagine that there are CONNEX’s (big metal shipping containers that go on the back of 18-wheelers) alongside the road, with space in between each to either a) open and pull shit out of or to b) be able to drive up to a warehouse or into a parking lot.

So between the warehouse and the road there is a corridor created by these big metal boxes, if you are driving down this corridor you are pretty much screwed as there is no way to get on the road other than to wait for a big enough opening

But I digress. I park the truck and open the door, looking around for my Driver to see if I could flag him down and tell him the truck was literally a few hundred yards away from where I left him. When I finally spot him, it seems odd that he is running towards me, occasionally jumping in the air, all the while his hands are waving, with a look on his face that he is/was screaming at me.

I am perplexed at this and don’t really understand what’s going on at first, I look around and notice that the entire Log Base is eerily silent and my best friend is hauling ass towards me like a maniac.

I didn’t have enough time to react; the “explosion” rocked the truck as it landed in between us (about 15 yards away). He was thrown into the CONEX, something hit his glasses and knocked them off his face. I stood with my truck door open and winced as the bullet proof windows on the door in front of me shattered, the front two tires (and the driver’s side rear tire) were flattened, and my windshield was broken with barely enough to see out of it to make it drive-able.

Me and my driver scream like little girls, freak out, and start grabbing our gear, ammo, and weapons and get to the nearest blast shelter. The guys in the truck behind us lock their hatches and shelter in their trucks (idiots) and we all get to have a laugh while waiting for the all clear. The team comes over the radio saying no one was injured but one truck got torn the hell up. That was our, we chuckle and everyone thinks we are nuts.

Turns out the mortar hit the ground but didn’t explode. It created a small crater from the impact (approx.. 6-10 inches deep) and the shrapnel we thought was going to kill us all was the concrete and rocks flying away from the impact area. We drove home on three flat tires, broken windshield and blast windows.

Only made it onto the next base and then said fuck it. Parked the truck and called the local mechanics for a tow. Its dark and the sun has barely set over the horizon. We take a seat alongside the road, overlooking a holding pool of water (romantic eh?). I ravage some MRE’s find one with Skittles and open the pack. My driver and I sit on the road, drinking water, eating Skittles and smoking cigarettes until the tow comes.

Username: TheNickMartinez

Chilling with a friend one night I ask him for an adderal to help with work the next day. He gives it to me before dropping me off. I half forget about it and leave it in my pants before taking them off for bed.

I wake up 5:30am and have a weird feeling but shake it off. Wake up an hour later to a huge crash. Next all I see is light beams cutting through the dark of my room. The sheets get yanked off the bed and as I lay there in my underwear it becomes clear what’s happening.

Posted around my bed are 8 federal officers in full tactical gear, their rifle mounted flashlights pointed at my face. I’m yanked out of bed and handed the sweat pants I’d been wearing the night before. After the formalities of arrest the lead officer takes me shotgun in his truck to county.

It’s about halfway through this 40min drive that I feel the pill in my pocket. Instant sweats. Bringing it into a police vehicle is a charge but bringing it into county is a felony charge. I know most officers clean their car after arrests wrap so I don’t want to dump it there.

Frozen in fear I take no action. I’m fucked no matter what. During booking the arresting officer stays the whole time. It’s during this I realize he’s a bit of a big shot round here. All the co’s want his attention.

So I’m headed to holding but first, I’m searched. Standard face the wall hands up. The officer behind me is absolutely fawning over arresting officer But he’s doing a thorough job. Hits the pillless Pocket, deep, shakes it out and all. I’m dying inside. Right pocket he starts right as arresting officer says something that catches his attention.

My head down I watch, almost in slow motion, the pill wiggle from the corner of my pocket as he shakes at my inverses pocket. And then, it drops. As one end of the capsule hit the ground it slightly bounced, the sound echoed in my brain. 3-4 more bounces till it settled all as loud to me as the last. My head rose to face arresting. Nothing. Look at the window to see a reflection of the other officer. Nothing.

They were too busy eye fucking each other to notice I’d brought a controlled substance into a detention facility. I didn’t even attempt to step on it or hide it. We soon left the area and I was taken to holding. Got out same day and always wonder what they thought when they found it.

Username: Amen_ds

When Afghanistan was hot and heavy, Engineers were the main source of expertise since more of the warfare was IED related. The Marines particularly were churning out Engineers at hyper speed because of how many where getting killed or wounded. To try and bring the engineer numbers up, they decided to enlist tankers into the MOS since this war wasn't really for them.

I was assigned to this platoon getting ready to go to Afghanistan. It was just a clusterfuck of Engineers (my guys) and tankers that have never even used a mine detector. The platoon commander (1st Lt tanker) was this ribbon chasing, Chesty Puller wannabe. He wanted his face in a medal of honor placard in every Marine installation regardless of anything else.

Unfortunately for him, my previous duty station was his previous schoolhouse. I was one of his combat instructors. He didn't like the fact that I knew more than him and I was his teacher. It made it easy for me to tell him he was incorrect about something.

Seeing how he acted made me uneasy. I knew this guy was going to get fellow Marines at the least, hurt, and at the most, killed. I've been deployed multiple times before this but this time, I was scared more than I was during my first deployment. Well, since he didn't like me so much, and there was for whatever reason, too many people in my platoon, I was selected to be kicked out and reassigned to an actual engineer platoon.

Well, we all deployed to separate locations around Afghanistan, and wouldn't you know it, right around 1 month into our deployment, I get some news about the platoon I uses to be in. Long story short, the platoon commander was looking for medals and got some of his men to leave the safety of their vehicles and search areas that didn't need to be searched.

Well, one guy steps on an IED and they get ambushed. The platoon commander orders another guy to go get him. He steps on another IED. Platoon commander looses his shit and some poor Lance Corporal has to take over. The other guy that stepped on the IED was supposed to be my role.

It took me a long time to accept that what happened to that Marine wasn't my fault. At the same time, I felt grateful to have been moved to another platoon. Thankfully, they both survived, and they both live happy, fulfilling and very successful lives now. But fuck that Lieutenant.

Username: Crossbones18

I am now 36, but when I was 18 I worked in a metal fabricating shop. I did the opposite of dodging something when I dropped two 5'x10' 1/2" thick steel sheets weighing over 2000 lbs. onto myself. I used a crane to lower them onto my forklift and the teeth on the clamp were dull (I wasn't trained to look for the warning signs of something like that).

As soon as the plates touched the forks the clamp released and they fell 6 feet right on top of me and pushed the forklift back 20 feet. All I remember of the plates falling was me putting my arm up in the air to protect myself.

I had an out of body experience that was really peaceful until I woke up with my entire body underneath the steel plates. My head was the only thing sticking out. I saw a large pool of blood coming from it so I thought "I'm dead." I felt a literal ton of pressure pushing something out of me.

Now here is where the dodged bullet comes in. I was in a secluded area of a pretty loud shop and the closest person ran an extremely noisy laser cutter all day. He almost never turned it off, but he did at the perfect time and I was able to just squeak the quietest "help" out. I can still hear him muttering help to himself a few times and then clueing in and screaming "HELP!!!"

It still took a bit for him to find me and apparently they couldn't even fit a 2x4 the 1.5" way to keep the pressure off of me. He jumped in the forklift and lifted the plates off of my body while some others pulled me out. (He was told he didn't follow proper protocol and the metal should have been left alone so family could come say goodbye if I died when they lifted it off)

An ambulance showed up and the first thing they did was pull down my pants in front of all my coworkers. All I could think was "why are they looking at my penis?" It makes sense now that they were checking for a prolapse, but at the time I was so confused. My family would always have a devotional time in the morning and in the middle of praying for my safety, they got a call that I was in an accident.

My parents rushed to the hospital and we found out together, that I had no broken or fractured bones. Everything was fine other than a small cut on my head, a really nasty friction burn/cut across my chest, and some poopy pants. The cold I had was also gone.

Username: EPman77

Met this beautiful girl on vacation to Hawaii. Met her mom, did excursions with her, had what you can describe as a honey moon... as a first week long date. We had amazing times and sex together and after we both lived in different nations, so we decided to exclusively see each other remote until we can be together.

She told me amazing things about wanting to grow old together and take care of me and how she felt this was a one of a kind connection. I was hesitant but excited. Little by little, more and more stories about her ex husband (no kids) and prenup discussions/arguments with her ex, among other red flags (wanting to have children within 6 months or less/move in together so quickly).

Needless to say my spidey sense was tingling. I was still enamored and was willing to explore it but my instinct told me to slow it a bit down, as I did - through me just being me and wanting to do things I would normally do (like be intelligent with personal finance expenditures, save money where plausible, return shoes or item that wasn’t satisfactory) I’d notice little comments come out.

Eventually she had made some nasty comments coincidentally right near her birthday and at that point I was simultaneously already arranging flowers to be sent to her. We decided to basically end things shortly after, but had I not trusted my instinct and Slowed things down previously she would have relocated to me we would have had some wild sex and probably she would have woken up “miraculously pregnant” and I would be with someone who has no concept of how to save or spend properly and can also be unruly and manipulative.

Just after she and I ended it, I was still in shock as I grew affectionate towards her, our mutual friend essentially told me that “she’d see how things go at a later point when she was visiting my area, but met an amazing guy that she wanted to see things through with”. This was only about.... a week after we were on pause/ ended things.

A couple months she called me and I told her to piss off.... eventually I saw she was with someone else and that ended at a certain point thereafter. She’s still single. Succubus avoided... thankful I didn’t end up with someone who’s manipulative and calculated to their own benefit. Cheers all.

Username: originalOdawg

Wasn’t me, however I was there to help facilitate the bullet dodging I was working midnight shift as a police officer. This shift started Christmas night and ended the morning of the 26th. It is the slowest day of the year for that department.

It was about 4am when a call comes in, single vehicle accident. Car vs. a utility pole. These kinds of calls at this time of night typically are DUI related, more so that this car was the only one on the roads. It was a tiny, older model Chevy Malibu. Completely sheered a massive utility pole in two, the next 12ish blocks of businesses/residences lost power.

The driver was a dude in his late 20s, and for the most part he was entirely injured. He called 911 himself and was out walking around when I arrived. He had spent Christmas evening at a family party and had consumed a hefty amount of alcohol. He woke up early to catch his flight back home to Florida, unfortunately for him not enough time had passed for his body to process out all of that alcohol. His performance on field sobriety tests indicated impairment. After his arrest his BAC was (if I remember correctly) 0.091.

Here’s the bullet dodge. Typically after a DUI arrest the person is arraigned, given a court date, and released to a person willing to take possession of them. (Extenuating circumstances change that but that’s generally how it worked for a 1st offense, non-agg DUI). In the city I worked, a magistrate was always on duty, no matter the time of night.

The only exceptions were holidays. No magistrate was on duty so he had to be held until one came on duty at 8am. Because of that I had to take him to the hospital to be cleared medically before he could be admitted to his holding cell at the jail. Even though he was uninjured, and made no complaints of injury, I still had to get him cleared at the hospital.

We check in the hospital, he makes a small off handed comment to staff that his chest was feeling a bit sore. They order up a CT scan and he’s gets in and out in like 15 minutes. We proceed to wait for the next few hours, staff having no updates for us.

Then a surgeon walks in. Tells this guy he has a massive aortic aneurysm, is amazed it did not burst during the car accident, and insists to be prepped for surgery immediately. The guy I arrested refuses because he has to get back to Florida. The surgeon and staff spend the next hour arguing with this guy that he’ll likely die on the airplane and won’t make it to Florida. Guy still refuses.

At least at this point it’s 8am and I take the guy to get arraigned and released but maybe he dodged that bullet? He at least knew about it now, and I still wonder if he ever made it back to Florida alive. He was also otherwise seemingly healthy. He never suspected a thing was wrong with him. Getting the DUI the morning after Christmas likely saved his life.

Username: Kezetchup

My father has a manufacturing company it always was pretty well stocked with all kinds of tools. From early youth on I've spent a lot of time in the shop with him and got to use pretty much all "the toys". Either while helping him out, or doing some DIY projects of my own.

One day when I was 19 years old I strolled through the shop and spotted a power tool from Bosch that I hadn't seen before. It looked like an electric Jigsaw, but instead of a vertically oscillating saw blade it had a rotating pin.

Or rather: A milling head (about the length of a thumb) had two blades in deep recesses that ran diagonally along its full length. It looked like these recessed blades were replaceable and they were just held in place by a screwed rail in the recesses. Just the cutting edges of these blades were exposed out of these recesses.

I asked one of the workers what it was for. He called it a profile surface milling machine and for the renovation of the factory building they were creating new window frames out of square timbers. This machine was used to mill the recesses into which the glass panes of the windows would be set.

"Cool!", I thought. I picked up the tool, turned it a bit to see the "business end" in action and held down the power button. The tool spun up and I could see the rotating pin spinning. Yet, there was an odd vibration that was pretty hard on the wrist.

Much more so than compared with the jigsaws that I had previously used and which compared most to a tool of this kind in terms of handling. It felt strange enough that I quickly let go of the power button again.

Next thing that happened? One of the blades set into the recesses of the spinning pin detached and whistled past my face. It passed so close by to my cheek that I could feel the air it displaced on my skin. The blade impacted into the wood panels of the shop wall and completely disappeared, punching a thumb sized hole into one of the panels as it went.

The worker looked at me in shock and uttered: "Whoa! It's not supposed to do THAT!" Yeah, no effin' kidding. Soo ... I lucked out that day and got to keep my face the way it was. At least for a bit longer. :p

FWIW: If you ever intend to buy one of these, get one where milling pin or milling head is a one piece item that can be replaced entirely. Trust me on that one.

Username: DocToska

This was over 20 years ago. My friends and I went to Lake Placid to do some skiing. Lake Placid had hosted the winter Olympics several years before. We were excited to see the slope where the men's downhill skiing event was held. The slope was called Upper Skyward. One of the reasons Lake Placid was chosen for the Olympics is because Upper Skyward was the steepest slope on the eastern seaboard at that time.

We were average skiers at best, but through bravado and each one of us egging the others on, we decided to do the run. We were skiing the green and blue trails to warm up. This would be the first time any of us would be on a black diamond trail, let alone a double black diamond.

It was very windy that day and there was a lot of ice on the trails. On one of the blue trails, I hit a bad patch of ice, skid out if control, and freaked myself out. I then backed out of going on the Olympic trail. All my other friends also backed out as well (I think they were secretly relieved).

We skiied only blue and green trails that day. At the end of the day, we took a long green trail and had a leisurely ski back to the lodge. Then we heard shouting from behind us: "MOVE!" ; "GET OUT OF THE WAY!" We pulled over to the side and saw a member of the ski patrol in tuck position, dive bombing down the mountain, clearing the path.

I turned to my friend and said "I wonder what that was about". Five seconds later, we saw another member of the ski patrol dive bombing down also, but he had a stretcher behind him with someone on it. At his speed, the stretcher was bouncing up and down a lot on the snow. We wondered if the guy in the stretcher was complaining, but then the blanket covering his face fell off and we saw he was in no position to complain.

We gingerly made our way back to the lodge to turn in our rented equipment and wondered what happened. The next day, we found the local newspaper. Apparently, a visitor from the midwest, rented out equipment. In the rental forms he indicated that he was an intermediate (average) skiier. He went on the Upper Skyward trail, slipped on a patch of ice and skid several hundred feet into snow making machinery. If my friends and I had gone to that trail, that could have been us as there was a lot of ice that day.

Username: Comfortable-Ad6929

So this is a little NSFW but.....it's perfect for this prompt. My SO and I were driving to a music festival that was about three hours away. We were staying for four days, gonna listen to some amazing music, drink good beer, and have an all around ball.

This was a yearly sojurn and we had been looking forward to it for a long time. The weeks leading up to it were hectic as all hell, and when the day came we hadn't packed and hadn't gotten a lot of sleep. We decide, screw it we will sleep in and get some rest, pack our stuff and leave later in the day.

We wake up at about 6. PM. Dammit. Okay so quickly pack our camping stuff, well if we are missing something we will just have to buy it when we get there. Oh well. So about an hour and a half into the drive, we both realize that of all the things to slip our minds, we forgot the damn tickets.

Tickets sold out months ago. No digitals, no recourse, we turn around to go back and get them. Get back home at about 10, frantically locate the tickets and head out. Again.

So we are both pretty laid back people so we are not angry or upset, just laughing at our own stupidity. We drive and drive and when we are about an hour out we realize that we are both extremely horny. Like gotta fix it now horny.

After realizing that driving through the mountains in the middle of the night on a very unpopulated highway while trying to get each other off might be a bad idea, we pull over to the side of the road and jump in back and go town. I noticed one car pass us right after we pulled over.

We put the clothes back on and hop back up front. We start to drive and about five minutes later we see the car the passed us in the middle of the road, totally destroyed. They hit an elk at 60. The elk died, the woman had a gash on her head, the guy was okay but very shaken. The car was a close to brand new SUV with a bunch of airbags and safety crumple zones etc.

We were driving a much smaller SUV, very much not new, with none of the saftey features of this other car. I am confident that if we hit the same elk we would not have fared as well, especially if my husband's penis was inside my mouth at the time. So lesson kids, always pull over and have sex on long road trips. It may have your life some day....

Username: Magicthighs42

Me and a buddy of mine were walking home from work one day and we would always take the train tracks because it's almost a straight line to both our houses. This day it happened to be really foggy out. We did this every single day mind you.

We were about halfway home and we enter what i would call a bridge part of the tracks? Its just an elevated part of the tracks over the road so that the cars below can pass under the tracks. We get to the bridge, which has one way in and one way out with raised barriers or walls on the sides.

We are only a quarter of the way across the bridge when i just happened to glance behind me for no reason at all really. And i see it maybe 100 feet, MAYBE 100 feet away. You guessed it, train. I didn't hear it coming, my friend didn't hear it coming, and now looking back on it we both decided the train conductor couldn't see us through the fog until he was a little closer than that maybe 100 feet.

This thing is hauling ass BTW, not the bullet train or anything but a normal train moving very quickly. My friend still didn't know what was up until i sprinted past him and smacked his shoulder on my way by pointing at the train screaming TRAIN! If we had hopped over the side we would have fell a pretty good distance and directly in the path of cars on the road, no go.

Couldn't turn around because the train was too close and coming from that way. So we run the rest of the way to the other end of the bridge and finally with maybe 3 seconds to spare, we make it and dive off the tracks once we are clear of the bridge.

Train blows by us and the wind force of it being so close threw my hat into the woods. I forgot about my hat at that point and me and my friend looked at each other for a moment and just started laughing uncontrollably, cause you know, almost died and shit lol.

We carried on our way after and both went to Justin's (my friend in this story) house, where we both hugged his mom out of happiness of not dying and told her the story. To this day neither of us understand why we didn't hear the train at all!

Username: PM_ME_PICCOLO

So at my previous job I worked as a machinist for a company that made parts/accessories for firearms. It was a relatively smaller company with only a handful of guys working there. The owner wasn’t too much older than me.

So we had firearms around the office, mainly for measuring and testing fits. Overall it was a relatively safe place since none of the guns were ever loaded and or in a position to be fired anyways. With the exception of two guys who had concealed carried (one being the owner). Too add to this, everyone there was pretty well versed in firearms, safety, the rules we were operating with given the environment. I never actually felt like I was at risk until...

One day we’re all on the shop floor when the owners mom and aunt show up. I’ve never meet the aunt but I’ve met the mom plenty since she shows up here and there. Well apparently the mom needed something from the office so I took her and the aunt upstairs. The mom starts looking around for what she needs and I start filling out some paperwork since I was upstairs anyways.

Well shit went south really quick when the aunt started getting nosy and poking around things. Well she found the owners desk (same room as the others, again small company) and apparently he had put his CC gun in one of his drawers because the next thing I know she has his gun out of it’s holster.

Finger on the trigger pointing it around the room, aiming down the sights whilly nilly while making bang noises. I see this and quickly and calmly tell her to put it down, she doesn’t listen so I begin walking over to her to grab it from her.

While I do that she is super confused and accidentally points the gun at me not knowing any better. I grab the gun and point it away from me as I take it away from her. She is all confused and flustered about why she can handle his gun. I then proceed to drop the mag out and take the round of the the chamber.

And let me tell you I was pissed that she was acting like it was a toy. I put the bullets in my pocket and walk them downstairs. They eventually leave and I hand the gun and bullets over to the owner before explaining what happened and how I was pretty pissed about it.

He sighs and apologizes and then proceeds to tell me that she probably wanted to see it because she’s is currently shopping for a Carry gun because she got her permit... then he informs me that she actually has really bad memory lost because she has slight brain damage from an accident that happened a long time ago. I was baffled to know that this woman is somehow allowed to carry and own a firearm when she immediately violated so many safety rules.

Username: [deleted]

An actual bullet. 3 for that matter. I know is not what you meant, but here is the story anyways: i was around 11 when my bestfriend and i went to a classmate's birthday party. My parents picked us up and we took my buddy to his house. Now, he lives in a dead end street, meaning there is only one way im and out.

We drop him off, turn around and as we aproach the street corner a black car stops right in front of us. I remember i was sitting between the two front seats, looking ahead with my dad on my right and my mom on my left. My little brother was sleeping on my right, on the back seat. At the sides of our car, there was another car to our right and a container to our left, sligthly forwards.

The back door of the black card opened, and down from it came my country's stereotype of a criminal. I distinctively remember him pointing what i could swear was a revolver. I even remember seeing the drum on the sides.

Inmidiatly i grabbed my brother's head and dropped down on the floor, as low as i could, while my father did what is easily the best executed manouver i will ever see personally. He made the car drift in between the container and the parked vehicle, without even touching them. I cannot emphasize enough how fucking amazing that manouver was.

Anyways, the criminal shot us 3 times, no questions asked, with all three shots impacting the car, two on the passenger side tire, and one on the windshield frame, also passenger side. That Last bullet ddnt get my mother square in the face because my dad was already drifting, had he delayed just a second, he would be a widow.

Meanwhile, i remember i was surprisingly calm, i had no fear or anything, maybe because i was young and at that age we feel safe with our parents. But then, my brother woke up, confused as to what was going on, and tried to straighten up, as the bullets flew our way. Then i fucking panicked, pulling him by the hair to keep him low.

And then, after just a few shots, the assailants drove away, leaving us unharmed. We recovered the bullets, and kept them in the car, sort of like a reminder of how close we were. I wish i had them still, but we lost em when just a few weeks later my mom got kidnapped and the car stolen.

I know this all seems connected, as if someone was after us, but truth is, we just got unlucky on a relatively unsafe zone of a third world country. Shortly after we moved to another province, 700km away, and havent had any incidents again. So yeah, biggest bullet i avoided were 3 .32 shot at me and my family.

Username: JakorPastrack

I went out clubbing with a tour guide (Guatemalan) I met during my bike tour of Guatemala City and another guest (Argentinian). We were leaving a club when a guy who spoke really good English started chatting me up. He also started chatting up the Guatemalan guy I was with, giving him props and talking to him like they were friends, asking how he's been, etc.

He asked what our plans were for the evening, and I said we were gonna head out to this other club (I forget the name). The random guy was like, "Oh yeah, we're going there too, we'll meet you there!" I said OK, cool, we're driving there. He was like, "Oh yeah, you guys can ride with me and meet up, etc."

The guy was so suave, and the way he spoke to my friends made me think they knew each other. I'm a female solo traveler of many years, backpacking in some pretty sketchy places, so I am pretty street smart. But this guy was good, professional even. As I started walking with him, I looked back at my friends and was like, "You're gonna meet us there, right?" My friend nodded, so I thought it was fine.

As I'm walking away with the random guy, I look back and see a glimpse of my friend's eyes, and they looked... concerned. They weren't moving or going to their car to meet us. They were just standing there, watching me walk off with this strange guy. It didn't feel normal.

I put on an airhead persona and said, "Oh lolz, I don't wanna leave my friends, blah blah blah," and ran back to them, telling the guy we'd meet him at the club. The guy didn't come after me; he just stood there and eventually walked off. I got to my friends and asked, "UHHH do you know him?!"

My friend replied, "NO, and I don't know who he is either. We should just get out of here." He then told me human trafficking, drugging, and raping girls are common in Guatemala. But to be honest, I don't blame the guy. Guatemala is the kind of place where people get gunned down in broad daylight, and nobody bats an eye.

He wasn't about to get murdered for a girl he just met that same day. He wasn't going to interfere or get involved if I willingly walked off with some guy. So that was that. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Username: Greentea_88

I had a coworker who made a mistake during her first project after training that ended up costing the company over $1.5 Million USD. Oh, but dear reader, it gets worse. She was eventually fired not just because of that but because she wasn't improving in the role.

She invited me to a bar as her going away party (didn't know it was due to being fired) and she threw herself at me because of the help I gave her on the job. Timing wasn't right but I met up with her about a month later.... and ooo boy... Does it get worse.

We got dinner but she decided she didn't want anything... except a drink with gin, I ordered the same drink but with my personal favorite gin instead of the restaurant's gin. She liked it so much she ordered another round for us.

Then she ordered a third. Then she ordered a fourth but that didn't happen because while she ordered the fourth round she spilling about half of her third drink onto the floor. I gave the waiter a look to say "Yeah, get us the check" and he did that instead of the drink. Remember when I said it gets worse?

Well at that point she decided that "She knew what I wanted" and said I should meet her outside in 5 minutes after she uses the restroom... then disappeared. I found her 30 minutes later at the wine bar next door and she had ordered over $100 in wine and sides to go with it. When I sat down with her she passed out on the patio and I was left with the bill. Worst isn't over yet.

I tried to carry her and the drink/food to go, but this lovely family, whose wife has a wheelchair, offered to put her into the wheelchair and wheel her to my car. So I'm like "Fantastic, you are too kind, today has been a disaster" and when the husband, the passed out woman in a wheelchair, and I get to my car the husband asks for my ID because he's with the County Sheriff's department.

He gives me the whole fifth degree, and after that he recommended I keep an eye on her and to keep her airways clear. It was at that moment where she woke up, opened my car door, and puked out all of the gin and wine into the parking lot. Oh, and she tried to kiss me the moment we got home... you know... with her vomit covered face.

And the end of her story is that she died this year due to an overdose. There's a lot of heated debate between her friends and family on if it was intentional or not.

Username: MrAlexSan

A couple years ago, back when I still lived in my old apartment, I had a weird incident that I later found out could’ve been lethal. For anyone who doesn’t know, the laundry rooms in apartments are usually located in the basement with a separate room filled with dryers and washing machines. You have a card you fill with money to use those machines.

Anyways, I lived on the 11th floor so you can imagine how annoying doing the laundry was, going up and down repeatedly. It was especially hard on my mom since she had other things to do and 3 other kids to take care of so I usually was in charge of the laundry.

One day, I was home alone with the instructions to do the laundry before my mom got home. I went down to go fill my laundry card with a 20 dollar bill just to find out one of the elevators were out of service and the only one that was available was incredibly slow. I waited a good 15 minutes before deciding to fuck it and get some cardio in, going down the 11 stairwells.

The ATM machine thing that fills your card up with the money is located on the 1st floor next to the garage doors in an isolated area. I was always creeped out and continuously looked over my shoulder to give myself some sense of safety. After filling the card I rushed to the lobby where the elevators are located and tried my luck again with them to no avail.

I was tired from the 11 stairwells I had previously went down and knew I was going to die going back up which is significantly harder so I decided to only climb to the 4th floor and wait out the elevator there. I don’t know what I was thinking, or how that would help but keep in my mind I was a stupid 13 year old at the time.

This is the part that always has me think of the “what if’s” at 3 am. While I was waiting for the elevator to arrive, I heard a large rattle from the apartment to my left. It startled me but didn’t alarm me since it wasn’t anything unusual. That was until I heard things being thrown around and the sound of shattered glass. Almost like someone was trashing the place. I paid no mind to it but I couldn’t help but feel curious and inch closer to the door.

I stood there, listening to the noises for a good minute before I heard footsteps walking towards the door and the chain starting to rattle. A voice with an accent I couldn’t decipher was harshly whispering to someone else. I don’t know why but my instincts told me to run. Normally, I may have acted like I was waiting for the elevator but something just didn’t feel right. So I booked it out of there into the stairwell and just as the door closed behind me, I heard someone run down the hall to where the stairwell was located on the left.

I rushed up the stairs without looking back. No one followed me since I didn’t hear any footsteps but I still didn’t stop till I reached my floor. I slammed the door shut and knew that I would definitely not be doing the laundry.

I didn’t want to text my mom and worry her so tried to distract myself by playing GTA. A couple of hours later, my mom and siblings came home and my youngest brother excitedly told me about the fire truck and police at the front of the building. I hadn’t heard the sirens or firefighters since I had music blasting in my headphones whilst gaming.

My mom explained to me that apparently someone had robbed an apartment near the ground level by climbing up onto the balcony and breaking in. I asked which floor and she told me the 4th. When I tell you my heart dropped the moment she confirmed which floor.

This wasn’t the first time a robbery happened in this apartment building since we lived in a more run down area I suppose. I never told my family what happened in fear of them overreacting and not letting me go out anymore.

I still sometimes think about what would’ve happened if I stuck around and acted like I was waiting for the elevator. I was a 5 foot nothing 13 year old girl. Who knows what could’ve happened.

Username: ImSoFuckingTiredOfU

Not sure if this is exactly what people are looking for, but anyway. I have a autoimmune disease which essentially causes my bodies digestive track to attack itself, I had a serious hospital stay when I first was diagnosed and a few lesser times after that for flare ups before going 2 years without any huge red flags in my treatment.

Anyway flashes forward and one day I had absolutely searing pain in my guts out of the blue, this woke my sometime in the evening and kept me awake all night, finally early that morning I decided this was not a small pain I could talk to my specialist about and went to a hospital.

I arrived at the ER about 8am, and then spent the next 9 hours waiting in the lobby as case after case went in and then returned from the ER... eventually the pain got so bad I just lay down on the carpet in the lobby, until they finally let me into the exam rooms.

Well they took all the possible blood work, listened to me describe the pain and only one of the nurses seemed to honestly believe me when I told them the pain was worse then the time I had broken my thigh, 3 ribs, and a arm in a car accident. That guy (unrelated but he'd just returned 2 weeks prior from a tour in Iraq) told me he'd try and get me prioritized because "something doesn't feel right about this"

Half hour later the on-site doctor pops in and basically tells me it's probably just a flare up of my disease and that she'd prescribe me some painkillers and send me on my way. At this point my vision was going foggy and I continued to insist it wasn't that, she finally relented and offered to do a CT scan of the area and they prepped me for that.

I watched as the nurse and tech who were doing the CT scan both the nurse and tech started getting agitated as I went through the machine, before the tech actually bolted out of the room, returning with a different doctor I didn't know while the nurse started helping me drag myself over to a wheelchair.

I get back to the exam room to see the onsite doctor come jogging down the hall and she proceeds to inform me "well the lab just called me directly, and that's never a good sign"

Turns out my intestinal track had ruptured and I was bleeding into myself. I also was starting to go into septic shock and was probably just short of a complete collapse. I spent only 3 months in the hospital after that visit, but the surgeon was absolutely certain I'd be dead by the end of the night.

Username: Ichera

So this happened in the Philippines. My mom and her side of the family decided to take a trip to Baler, the surfing capital of the Philippines. It was a three days, three nights stay in a hotel near the beach.

Me and my other 3 siblings were all so excited to surf and all that jazz. The trip is gonna take half a day so mom decided that we should all wake up early so we can have some fun and not waste money on day one of our stay.

Mom's first mistake. Dad literally sleeps late nearly everyday for no reason and takes an eternity to finish taking a bath. We all decided to adjust, we woke our dad so he can have a head start in the bath while take to our second bathroom. Me, my three siblings, mom, grandma, and aunt (yes it was a pretty loaded house) finished before our dad did, and mom is pissed about it.

We left home before sunrise and drove to Baler. We were all so excited, we were singing songs, playing all sorts of jokes and games that kept everyone lively. When we burned ourselves out, we started to doze off. Before closing my eyes, I heard my dad asking my mom if auntie can take over driving cause he was getting sleepy, but mom insisted that the hotel was 20 mins away.

I was resting on my older sister's shoulder, eyes shut but have yet to enter the realm of sleep when, BANG, I felt the entire car jerk and come to grinding halt, tire screech and all. The impact was so nasty, my temple landed square on my sister's shoulder bone.

When I woke up, mom was screeching at my dad who was circling the car to see the damage (we were very poor and this car is what's helping the family with work, and was sending me and my siblings to school; we cannot afford to instantly repair because of other bills).

My dad was apologizing because he fell asleep while driving. We all stepped out to see the damage, the car swerved into a concrete barrier right on the front passenger side. The gap between the front passenger door and body was practically folded together because of the impact, tire had this gaping hole where you can see the rim inside, and the hubcap was missing.

I looked around and saw that we were at a bridge, and that concrete barrier was the only one that looked sturdy enough to handle the impact. If it wasn't for that barrier, me and my family might have been sleeping with the fishes. We are all sleeping at the backseat this one time, next thing we might have seen would be the pearly gates.

Username: Dio-The-Hero

In terms of a literal bullet we had one of the members of the Hell's Angels come into the emergency ward all shot up. The local police were going helter skelter all over the town looking for the shooter, but we had absolutely no police presence in the hospital.

Zero. One guy was there for a few minutes to try to take a statement before the shooting victim went to surgery. But the guy was unconscious so the police left. We BEGGED them for police presence in the hospital and they just buggered off.

So, have you ever been in an emergency room with an entire gang of Hell's angels who were just shot at in a gangland shooting? I don't recommend it. They were going utterly apeshit. They were hollering they were going to go out and murder whoever was responsible. Several implied there were armed at that moment. This was Abbotsford BC, BTW, so no one has a license to carry gun. If you're carrying a gun, you're breaking the law.

Anyway the person who shot the Hell's Angel was an East Indian gang member. And there are A LOT of east Indian people in Abbotsford. Literally tens of thousands. So anyway this random east Indian teenage kid wearing a West Coast Choppers t-shirt walks in the front door and one of the Hell's Angels spots the kid and makes like he's pulling a gun out of his jacket.

One of the other Hell's Angels sees this happening, he grabs the other Hell's Angel and throws him against the wall telling him to cool it. And the whole time the guy with the gun is screaming his head off he doesn't care if it's the right guy or not, he's going to blow the fuckin kid's head off.

So the guy telling him to cool it slaps him a few times, then turns to towards me like, "Everything's fine, nothing to see here. It's all good." That east Indian kid was just a random visitor, and to this day he has no idea how close he came to having his brains blown out right in front of me.

18 hours after that Hell's Angel shooting victim was dropped off, after an entire night of our supervisor repeatedly calling both the chief of police and the mayor of the town, begging for police protection for the hospital, all of a sudden the police decided the shooting victim needed round the clock police presence. And I know it was 18 hours, because I was there, and when shit like this goes down, you count every minute. Also I made a shitload of overtime.

Username: Patches67

Over 10 years ago my ex and I ran into one of his old friends while out of town. We were going to go camping cause my ex wanted to prove he could be a good boyfriend and have a nice, normal weekend. The minute we accepted his friend’s invitation to hang out that went out the window.

There is no way to accurately describe him, I’ll call him Mike. You could tell he had a pure soul, but was absolutely tortured. When I asked if he liked living there his response was "you know when you are in the wood punching trees? Well the people here, they just leave you alone.” Mental illness ran in his family but you can tell he was just haunted.

The first time I did acid was that night. The next morning Mike was driving us around town. He took the road along the coast and was driving wildly. He went back and forth between saying how happy he was to see my ex, and then upset that he had a girlfriend and a normal life.

He’d swerve wildly saying "I should just drive us off this cliff!" Then would correct himself saying "no, no, feed them. Give them blankets." I felt like there was a real possibility he could take us over the edge, but in my post acid trip mind, I was at peace with it. If it was my time to go it was my time to go. I had absolutely no control over the situation.

A year or two later I found out he had killed his mother, who had schizophrenia (Mike likely had it too). And just a week or two ago I looked him up again and saw details from the sentencing hearing — it was a brutal killing, but even worse than that was that his mother appeared to have started an incestuous relationship with him, who knows how long ago. In that moment it kind of all made sense — he seemed like such a tortured lost soul, and that would just mess you up in so many ways.

I don’t think it was likely we would have gone over the cliff that day, but it was within the realm of possibility. I don’t know if anyone else here has met someone like that — just so absolutely open and raw. Like he had no protective barrier and felt absolutely everything.

When I read "full on ballistic missile strike" I immediately thought of the details of that killing, but I know it was caused by the situation, and he wouldn’t at least purposely do anything to anyone else. Having just read about it a couple of weeks ago I think I just needed to get it out.

Username: Brighteyes_82

I used to do line work for various power companies as a lead lineman of a crew of six. It was my last two days on the job before quitting line work altogether and going to the phone company. My wife had heard too many horror stories about guys dying and getting arms blown off—some were friends I worked alongside for years. She kept wanting me to do something else, afraid I'd become a statistic.

We ran into another crew on storm trouble, turning people’s lines on and putting lines back on the poles. I put two linemen on the tap pole feeding the little community and told them to ground the line and not to heat it up until I gave the word. I took the other two bucket trucks around the corner to start putting the wire back on the poles.

After we had everything cleaned up, I left the third-class lineman (a trainee I was training) to go back out to the two buckets I left on the street where the tap was. While I was filling out some paperwork, the groundsman with me said, “Is that the stinger hanging down? Looks like you forgot to put the stinger on.” Sure enough, there it was hanging down.

I grabbed my hooks, went down to the pole, and climbed up to hook the transformer back up. Linemen will know what a K mate is; it’s a surge suppressor used on the stinger between the primary and the transformer. It has fiberglass wrap on it, and the wires connect to the end. I had my leather gloves on, not rubber because the line was supposed to be dead and grounded.

I grabbed the K mate, and when I connected it to the primary, the house lights came on. I thought, “Holy shit, the line’s hot,” and jerked that stinger off as fast as I could where I already had a grip on the K mate. Luckily, I didn’t have the end in my hand like I was going to hold it, or I would have been dead.

I put the stinger on with a hot stick and gloves, then rode out to the end of the road to see who the hell lit that line up without permission. I found all of them standing there, bullshitting and waiting on me. After grilling all of them, I found out that the third-class lineman (the trainee) went out and told them we were all done and they could throw the cutout back in.

Let’s just say I had a 30-year-old man crying like a baby and genuinely sorry for doing that. He knew he was in the wrong and was happy I wasn’t dead. He told me a few minutes later, “I won’t do anything unless you tell me first, etc., etc., I’m sorry.” I told him to drop it and not worry about it. We’re all going home with all our limbs and lives, and that’s what counts.

To sum it up, I almost got electrocuted and killed during my last two days as a lineman. Now, I’m an engineer and just sit at a desk engineering network equipment.

Username: Triplesfan