Used to ride a motor scooter. Riding home, I turned left through an intersection and I hear a huge CRASH behind me. I pull into a parking lot and turn around, there’s a white Jeep in the intersection flipped up on the drivers side door.
If I had been a hair slower, I’d have been squashed.
The bullets I’ve been dodging are small things. Mormon missionaries coming over trying to get young blood to join them. I’ve gotten better at saying no and politely lying about not having time for them. Saves me a lot of headache.
I love them lol, I give them a copy of The First SubGenius Pamphlet and tell them the good word of our guru J. R. “Bob” Dobbs, Saint of Sales and Slack. “Bob” got a divine vision much like their Joseph Smith, except it was in 1953 while working on a television set of his own design when he received a shock and a vision from “god,” the same one known to them as Jehovah, who told “Bob” of his true nature, that he is no god but a space monster named JHVH-1 from some corporate sin galaxy sent here to TAKE OUR SLACK!! But “Bob” has a plan, he’s collaborating with other aliens, the good ones called X-ists, to sell the planet out from under JHVH-1, and anyone who buys an Ordainment Membership through The Church of The SubGenius gets a ticket off planet onto the PleasureSaucers with the alien sex goddesses (gender agnostic, they can take any form you desire).
I have a blast and they get a taste of their own medicine, win win.
That whole SubGenius thing sounds crazy and I love it.
It is crazy! It’s the only religion that’s so crazy it just might WORK! PRA’BOB!
Don’t lie, tell them you already belong to the Satanic Temple in either heart/mind, or both 😌
This drives some of them with even more fervor to save your soul.
Boil some chicken bones and tie them together with hair and hand it to them next time they come over.
Completely harmless, but deeply disturbing for anyone who thinks witchcraft is real.
The key is implicit permission. They believe that objects imbued with demonic power grant permission for the demon to enter your life if you accept the object.
Whether this will work depends on how intensely they’re into “spiritual warfare”, so maybe actually don’t do this.
I’m a brass musician and an atheist so the only time I go to church is when I’m getting paid. The last time some Mormons approached me about going to church I asked them, “What’s the pay?”
They were genuinely confused.
They don’t come around anymore, but I used to say that I was disfellowshipped/excommunicated, whichever was fitting for whatever religion they were selling. If they ask why, which they basically never do, just say “I’d really rather not talk about it, if you don’t mind…”
They don’t actually want to waste time talking to people who were kicked out of the church for “bad behavior”, and in many cases aren’t even allowed to, so they blacklist your address.
No soliciting signs typically do the job, too, though.
Neighbor started firing guns in the air for a reason I do not comprehend. After one bullet zipped past my head, I crawled inside and called the cops. Four leisurely hours later, the cops arrived and said there was nothing they could do.
So now when I’m outside on that side of my property, I keep an eye out for the neighbor, when I see them I go inside. If it ever happens again, I will try to capture video.
/ \ / \ | \ | \ neighbour youis this what happened?
my wife and I were driving to some appointment and we thought we heard gunshots but we’re driving.
So I wait in the car and listening to tunes and the guy parked next to me asked if someone was shooting at me and pointing to my door. My window was down all day so I was like what?
He pointed again and I got out to look and on the top of the window frame of the door is a odd angled hole. It was something powerful but not at the right angle to go more than the first layer of steel.
Totally bizarre. IDK if it was a bullet for certain but IDK what else would make a hole like that in a car
Friend and I were sitting on a top of a small mtn, hear gunshot in the distance, rural area don’t think about it… All of a sudden we both hear a wizz and a ricochet between our heads… Look at each and run… That was scary…
It’s weird, this way it would be subsonic ammunition. Maybe another shot? Still crazy as fuck though! Where in the world things like this happen?
The one that passes could be the next shot and OP is too panicked to hear the second bang.
They said it was far away so it may have gone subsonic on the way. Especially small common bullets like .22 will lose speed relatively quickly as they fly.
Maybe some idiot shot straight up into the air?
It was quite a ways away… This was in NH. I doubt it was intentional, but who knows.
I work at a bank call center. One time I had someone call to check the balance on an account they recently opened with us. The bank I work for is regional, and this caller was on the other side of the country. The account number they gave pointed to an expensive private school in our area. When I asked for more information, the caller said they gave someone 500$ to open the account for them, and that person gave them some checks from us with that account number. I got my lead on the line, did some more Q&A, and we determined this person had been scammed, and given fake checks. The lead said they would close the account. The next week I get a direct message from the fraud investigation team director asking me why this account wasn’t closed. I was able to provide a screenshot of the message from my lead saying they were going to close the account. They thanked me and that was it. I went to check on it, and over 60,000$ in fraudulent checks had cleared the account in that week. I’ve only been working there a few months, and I’m 60,000% sure they would have dropped me like a hot potato on the spot.
Is it normal for a call center rep or lead to close customer accounts? I’d assume that the fraud department would be the ones making that decision and handling issues raised. Anyway, I’m glad you had the receipts to prove it wasn’t your fault.
Honestly, it’s not typical, but neither was the rest of this situation. In cases where it’s that clear there’s fraud on the account, leads absolutely have the authority to either close or approve the closure of the account. I can’t speak for all banks, but as far as I know, all leads at our centers have worked on the fraud teams, so they’re very well versed in these matters.
Seemingly innocuous activity. I was changing a the band on my watch.
Watches have a little spring-loaded pin that goes through the band and in to the bezel. I had the spring compressed with some needle tweezers and I was removing the band when the tweezers slipped. One side of the pin was still seated in the bezel, but the other side was free, and pointed right at my face as I was leaning over this watch to work on it. The pin shot straight into my eyeball.
Or at least it would have if my vision was better. It hit my glasses instead, with enough force to leave a dimple in the polycarb lense. Lesson learned, wear safety glasses when working on anything that could possibly get launched, sprayed or blown into your eyes.
You had me in the first half ngl 😆 Well told 👍
OP did you think this was the matrix? Who do you think is literally dodging bullets?
One guy comes to mind…
Trump?
Brother if the shooter missing counts as dodging…
The term frequently means narrowly avoiding a bad outcome, regardless of how it happens. Often it’s nothing more than Mr Magoo-ing out of the way.
There are remarkably few people in the world who can actually dodge a literal bullet. Everything else is just luck or escaping.
Yes that’s what the term means figuratively. However having read the title I was referring to the other part.
I would assume through context clues that “figuratively” in this context means narrowly avoiding a bad situation, and “literally” means avoiding your death regardless of whether it has to do with a literal bullet or not.
It’s an odd assumption to make when it’s not the meaning of the word literally. That’s literally the meaning of the word figuratively.
I think we’ve had enough years on this planet to realize people use the word literally incorrectly almost as often as they use it correctly.
One year, Alaska. Hiking with friend on boulder field. We stop for a break, I stand below friend on the slope. 3-foot rock rolls down at me, luckily I was balanced enough to pivot out of the way.
Next year, nearby. High speed car accident with moose. I hit the brakes just before the moose. Came through the windshield a foot to the right of my head.
Alaska’s an amazing place, but it has its share of dangers too.
Maybe the time I was headed to lunch with a friend. There was a Mexican restaurant we frequented in a strip mall with a gas station at the end closest to an intersection. We have the green light to cross the intersection as we approach when a shootout occurs at the gas pumps. We were going to turn in right next to the pumps, but my friend geared up and floored it. Yes, geared up. In a diesel. He spent another 15 minutes escaping the danger before asking where we should eat. I told him the safest place was probably at the Mexican place as every cop in town was likely in route.
When I was ~19yo, we went to a rave and I let a kid I didn’t know borrow my glow sticks. He lost them and gave me caffeine pills to try to compensate me. Cops saw the exchange and made me pull them out of my pocket. I had ecstasy in the same pocket and got lucky that I didn’t pull out the wrong pills (while rolling face).
When I was 18yo, someone tried to rob us at gunpoint for acid we were selling. Cops got involved and bluffed to both me and my roommate that the other had admitted to selling pot and that was the robbery (we weren’t selling pot, so both didn’t admit to anything). The cops dropped the sheet of acid that was hidden in a porno box when they searched our apartment and we found it on the floor.
In either case, I could have gone to prison for enough time to destroy my future.
Many MANY years ago when I was a child I woke up to use the restroom and my parents were sitting on the floor not realizing I had gone to the bathroom until after and as I came out they had me go over to them on the floor and I fell asleep on their laps. It wasn’t for DECADES later that I learned what had happened. There was a drive by and they were waiting on the cops to show up. 4 houses were hit. I fell asleep and got moved back into my room just before the cops got there
My most recent ex and her family. She was pushing for marriage toward the end of the relationship but I was getting sick of her crises of the week and her horrible family. I eventually saw a therapist that helped me realize that my ex was abusive, so I ended it with her and went no contact. I then went on a 6-month dive into learning about narcissists and abusive relationships. Once I learned that, I started noticing all of the fucked up shit she and her family did. They were seriously legit psychopaths. They were so bad that if they came out in a documentary about psychopaths, I would feel validated. I would think, “Yep, the world makes sense.”
Looking back, the way her two brothers-in-law behaved made so much sense. One was was a complete anxious wreck. I never saw him last more than 15 mins in any social gathering with the family, even leaving his own wife’s birthday party at his house once her family arrived. He also didn’t allow anyone to be physically behind him, was typically alone even in social events, and always carried a gun. The few times my ex and I offered to help him with something, he was quite suspicious and declined. I was never able to meet up with him one-on-one no matter how many times I tried to reach out to him over a period of about 6 months. I’m almost certain that the sisters did not want that to happen, so they sabotaged any chances.
The other brother-in-law was clearly disassociated from reality. You could tell by looking at him that he seemed to not be mentally there. It was like he was somewhere else in his mind. His eyes wouldn’t focus on objects, he would not have emotional reactions to things, and had a fake smile on no matter the situational discomfort. Think of people yelling at each other, a horror movie playing at full volume, and something burning in the kitchen, yet this dude is calm and smiling like everything was great. It was odd. Towards the end, he was dropping hints at me like, “I have never seen [your ex] care about how her behaviors affect men,” and told me that, “To survive in this family, you need to understand the Stockdale Paradox.” Btw, the Stockdale Paradox was a mental approach that an American POW in Vietnam used to survive imprisonment while others died. He would also send me songs that were quite depressing, almost as if they were a call for help. I remember thinking that he was trying to tell me he was in pain through songs but couldn’t directly tell me for fear of his wife (my ex’s sister) finding out.
In retrospect, both brothers-in-law were prisoners. The anxious one was in permanent fight-or-flight mode, while the other one was implicitly telling me the hell he was in. I think about the latter from time to time. He was a good guy surrounded by psychopaths. Imagine the hell someone is living if they need to engage in POW tactics to survive their spouse and her family. It would not surprise me in anyway if I found out that guy killed himself one day.
I learned the real meaning of “don’t stick your dick in crazy”. It’s not that they will get obsessed, stalk you on social media, demand attention, or break your heart. It’s that your judgment will be clouded and that will prevent you from protecting yourself, ultimately seriously ruining your life. Those two men are stuck without a way out. However, let’s say that if by some miracle either of them escape, they will never fully recover. The emotional injuries they have suffered have caused permanent damage.
tl;dr: the bullet I dodged was imprisonment with a family of legit psychopaths.
Imprisoned guy here. This reads like my life story of the last 10 years. Funnily enough I realized all the abusive shit, but the dick still thought love was possible although I knew how a real relationship feels. Sadly the dick also decided to have another two kids to the accidental in the mix so I’m in prison for at least the next 20 years.
Edit: loving the hell out of the kids though, gotta protect them from becoming like mom.
The Stockdale Paradox
James C. Collins related a conversation he had with James Stockdale regarding his coping strategy during his period in the Vietnamese POW camp.[21][non-primary source needed] When Collins asked which prisoners didn’t make it out of Vietnam, Stockdale replied:
Oh, that’s easy, the optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart. This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.
Collins called this the Stockdale Paradox.
Damn, man
I was playing around with electronics from the trash with my brother. We found a lamp with what we figured was a broken fuse. To test this theory, we wanted to take the fuse out of the system. So what do we do? I hold the cables together using two pliers. Our theory was right. But I ended up slightly shifting the wires so they weren’t in contact anymore. Suddenly 240v were traveling through my arms and my muscles tensed, causing me to grab the pliers really tightly, unable to let them go. My brother saved my life by being smart and cool headed enough to just unplug the lamp after 2-3 seconds. I dont think I ever came closer to dying than that time.
What did you feel like after?
Luckily enough I was totally fine. Just a bit shaken up from the shock. No pun intended lol
My ex wanted to get back together with me. We went for food, I insisted on splitting the bill. She blocked me afterwards.
