“What’s The Best Way You Have Seen Someone Screw Themselves Over?” (35 Answers)

When my wife was married to her first husband, her second childbirth ended badly, with both her and her baby needing to be resuscitated. Daughter has lifelong medical issues and both ended up with financial compensation. Husband became distant and ended up breaking up 2 households. Wife sued for divorce, and he dragged it out, aiming to get some of her settlement. Enough time elapsed that she became fully vested in his retirement plan.
And he got none of the settlement.

I worked with a literal idiot for a union job where he just didnt think it was needed or morally ok. We tried to explain to him that the union helps him a lot more than he realized but nope. In one ear, out the other.

He had some incident and went in to a meeting about it. He rebelled against the union rep, and she sat there and let him sign away his job. He thought he had finally freed himself from the union to work better and they fired him hours later after he was no longer protected.

Free healthcare, education expenses, guaranteed vacay and sick time, assistance with housing/legal, guaranteed pay raises. Threw it all away because of religious political philosophy.

Cops were called to a buddy's house.

Cops told this buddy that they did not require any statement from him.

Buddy proceeded to tell "his side of the story".

Buddy went to jail.

My friend's sister was engaged to a great guy. His only flaw was he was too "tough" to wear a seatbelt. Crashed his car and died. A few weeks later she found out she was pregnant, so now she's a single mother. So that's at least 3 lives he f****d up by not wearing his seatbelt.

When I was young I realized if I threw up at school they’d call my mom to come get me. One day in 2nd grade I “got sick” because I wanted to leave, but my dumb**s forgot it was field trip day to the zoo. I tried to say I was feeling better but my mom was already on her way.

The CEO of StickerMule recently sent out a mass email to the entire customer base over his support for Trump after the attempted assassination. The email preached “love for all”. After this, the sticker company lost users, followers, and StickerMule’s Instagram was flooded with comments that pointed people to alternate sticker companies.

So…morale of the story. No one wants to hear your political stance from a random email from a sticker company. Keep it to yourself.

They were constantly badgering me to fix something (on a system I was tech support for) and I, time and time again, warned them that they shouldn't do what they were trying to do and that they should just do it the correct way to avoid their issue.

After 5 weeks of hassling me, they got fed up and emailed me complaining that they'd missed a deadline for a massive client because the system didn't work, and that I'd not supported them as my job required.

To make their 'point', they cc'd in many, many people. Their boss, my boss, their team, my team, their VP of operations, my VP (you get the idea).

I drafted my response, redrafted several times, then replied.

I attached every single one of their abusive emails, my professional responses explaining clearly that the issue is theirs and that they should correct it to make it work.

It's the only time I've made sure I *did* reply all.

I'm not overly sure of the fallout for them, but they were very quiet for at least 18 months before I heard from them again.

Gym teacher got busted banging a 15 year old student.
He was found guilty and sentenced 6 to 30 years.
He later appealed claiming that some error in the sentencing process gave him more time than it should have.
He won the appeal and a resentencing was scheduled, but before that happened
it came to light that he was still contacting the girl by secretly passing messages to her (he'd give the letters to a family member who then left it in a drop spot for the girl to pick up).

Because of that they ended up giving him an even longer sentence.

[News Article](https://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/2015/06/former_teacher_who_had_sex_wit.html).

I know somebody who cheated on her husband of 15 years this spring and thought she would do it a few months and then go back to her marriage like nothing happened. Her husband found out after less than a month, left her and moved out, she can’t afford their house anymore and both kids refuse to live with her. Oh and she lost her job last week.

My mother.

She told me one day “you’re the reason I wake up every day and want to kill myself”

I said “Good. You’re dead to me”.

She has been trying to come back into my life for almost 5 years.

I worked for one of the government agencies everyone loves. We had a donation bin in one of the visitor centers that was empty one morning. The money in the employee honor system snack room thing was gone too. It was a huge scandal. A day or two later, the cash (but not the coins) from a satellite office’s employee snack money also disappeared. This was enough to get our in-house law enforcement to question everyone with access to either building.

Well, only one person had a key to the donation box AND a key to the satellite building. One was where he worked and the other was in the compound where he was renting government housing. Also, there were cameras around and he was the only one of a certain size currently employed.

The guy was a strange mix of really excited to make his job his career and complaining that it did not pay enough. He ended up throwing away his dream career and receiving federal theft charges for around $100 in small bills.

A long while ago in a large computer corporation with looming layoffs. An employee set up a time bomb so that a lot of files would be destroyed if he didn't reset the trigger periodically thus creating a delayed revenge if he got fired.

Which eventually happened (without any severance package) because the time bomb went off when he was still an employee.

I've seen friends talk themselves into tickets when dealing with police where they initially were just going to give them a friendly warning.

Friend agreed to child support outside of court. Got a new job and the ex came back asking for an increase. Friend said no, got sued. Judge did the calculations and she ended up getting less.

My father was all tough and LOVED getting into fights with people. He was proud of himself and his muscles (all steroids) and people would genuinely be more scared of his attitude than his looks. He also had guns at home (my country doesn't allow it, so that was a BIG deal), so around the block when he would get into an argument with someone, he loved going home and getting the gun to scare whoever he was arguing with. People were generally scared of him, so he wouldn't end up getting in trouble or anything (unfortunately)

Well, one day he got into an argument with this guy who parked in front of his house but on the other side of the road (where the guy was allowed to park). My father was shouting at the guy, telling him to take the car out of that spot because it would disturb my father's illegal way to park his car. The guy didn't want to. My father went inside his house, got the gun and came outside to threaten the guy. The guy decided to leave, but he didn't go home, he went straight to the police and gave them the EXACT address of someone who threatened him with a gun. The police showed up at my father's house an hour later and found three guns. My father got arrested and spent the night at the police station, and my grandpa had to bail him out or he would go to jail the day after.

The prison system in my country is not that good, and normally if it's your first instance you get off of it pretty easily, but when you have your first instance you really really REALLY don't want to get a second, and now my father is scared of everything, because a small argument while driving could land him in jail if someone decides to call the police.

We had an employee at another location sell company merchandise on social media on his own account for 10× the original retail price. Company found out and fired employee. The very next day the company gave every employee company wide a decent bump in pay. So he lost his job and the pay bump all for less than $100 reselling company merch. Truly one of the dumbest ways I've ever seen someone screw themselves over.

D***s. Guy could have had it all. Beautiful GF, promising future. Wound up dead in a dirty basement. GF ended up looking like Keith Richards and may be dead also now.

Even before death, they lived in squalor and wound up homeless. Just destruction from beginning to end.

Dont f**k with opiates. They are truly the devil.

My ex wife was so excited to go screw other guys that she didn’t think at all about how she would feed herself, where she would live….

Within a couple weeks of her saying she wanted a divorce, and living her best life via online dating, I drafted up a contract saying I would get the house, my retirement account,  my pension, the paid off car, sole custody of our child, no alimony to her, and she would pay me child support.

To be clear, this wasn’t a case of her not knowing what she was signing.  I made sure she understood all of it.  She was just rose colored glasses about what an incredible new life she was going to live.  Who needs anything from the old life, when the new life will be so much better???

Turns out guys don’t want her for long now that she’s obsese and pushing 40 instead of the cute little 20-something she was when we married.  She thought that was the life she was going back to — it hasn’t been.  Meanwhile, she can’t hold down a job and her parents had to buy her silverware because she lived off of me for so long that she had no concept of how to survive on her own.

I don’t rub it in.  But I also don’t bail her out.  She made informed decisions.  It’s not my fault she was living in a fantasy land.

Used to work as a house matron in a UK boarding school, where there was a team of four ladies who cleaned the house I was in charge of. Three had been there for years and were great - and then there was, let's call her "T", who'd been hired as a replacement for a lady who'd moved out of the area. "T" was lazy, unmotivated, called in "sick" frequently and had to be micromanaged to get any work out of her at all; I complained to HR, who basically told me to suck it up because it was hard to get cleaners who could work the hours the school required.

T reported that her father had died, and that she had to go halfway across the country to clear out his house. The following day was my day off, and I went into a nearby town to have lunch and run some errands; as I was sitting outside Starbucks with a coffee, who should emerge from the shop opposite me - laden down with shopping bags and laughing with a group of friends - but "T". The look on her face when she spotted me was classic "deer in the headlights" material.

She was called into work the following morning and fired on the spot.

Old friend from high school “Eddie” was really good at pitching and got a full ride scholarship to play baseball at a D1 University. A week before we graduated high school, we were playing basketball in gym class. Eddie goes for a shot, misses, gets angry, punches a wall and breaks his hand. Long story short, the D1 school took his scholarship away because his hand was f****d and he would’ve missed summer training. Poor guy was devastated. 10+ years later and He still talks about how he could’ve been a pro player. He now operates a crane in Philly and makes really good money.