You’ve heard the saying “this is why we can’t have nice things,” alluding to the fact that a few people ruin things for the rest of us.

Does one person ever truly ruin it for the rest of us, though?

These people say definitely yes.

I have SO many questions.

My primary school used to do relatively frequent trips to a local zoo, until one boy decided to vault the fence and punch a penguin.

I wish I was joking.

This tracks.

There’s also the Alabama fan that poisoned I believe a several hundred year old tree at auburn because he like Alabama

He also admitted to it by name on the radio.

There’s literally always one.

I’m a contractor and I work in different kinds of plants and mills. In one mill I worked at, we had a gravy job, two hours of easy work, and get paid for twelve hours.

Well, one guy decided he was going to charge them for sixteen, and now we get two hours for the job.

Imagine being that hated.

Had a job where as a dialysis nurse where we added a position to pick up add ons and emergency cases that came in later in the day. In this role we worked noon to midnight which helped us cut down from needing a nurse on call every night to maybe once or twice a week. Whoever took this role didn’t have to take call and had weekends off. We loved rotating through this role and enjoyed taking a break from having to be on call and enjoyed having weekends off.

Then there came the nurse who went out at 7 am instead of noon, and finished at 5 pm. When there was an add-on or an emergency case she wouldn’t answer her phone, which meant which meant everyone had to go back to picking up extra patients and being on call again.

She did this every time it was her turn to go through the rotation so they eliminated the position and we went back to having to be on call all the time.

Classic dad move.

The elementary school I went to let 6th graders go on an overnight trip to a lodge where we could go skiing and snow tubing.

My dad volunteered as a parent and was “supervising” by letting me and 5 other girls pile on top of one tube down a steep hill and we all went flying.

Two of the girls busted their arms when we all landed in a pile. It looked like a cartoon.

Anyway, after that no more sleepovers at the lodge and tale has it 30 years later everyone at the school still blames my dad lol.

Poor trees.

The guy who ki**ed the most isolated tree on Earth. Same with that woman who burned down the oldest tree.

Imagine the history the trees lived through.

The guy who ki**ed the most isolated tree on Earth…by running into it with his jeep.

The one tree, in hundreds of square kilometers of desert, and he somehow hits it with his vehicle.

Everyone suffers in silence.

I drive school bus, and we used to be allowed to play music on the buses. Most drivers enjoyed finding out what channels the kids liked and getting sing-alongs going. Yknow, making everyone happier.

Then some crazy Karen mom called the dispatch office screeching about her daughter coming home talking about a song this Karen apparently thought was evil or something and now we aren’t allowed to play anything on the radio while kids are on the bus.

I mean honestly.

Not having to take your shoes off before boarding a plane.

F**k you, Richard Reid.

Read the room, lady.

I worked at an office that had casual Fridays. One day a lady came to work on casual Friday in her gym clothes, and management was uptight and appalled by it.

Instead of telling her that she couldn’t wear gym clothes to work, they abolished casual Friday for everyone. It pisses me off to this day.

No more boots.

At a previous job, we got full uniforms. Shirts, pants, hats, hoodies, winter coveralls, winter coats, gloves. But we dont get shoes or boots.

Turns out a couple of years before I was hired on, they used to give boots. But one guy would take his boots and sell them, then request a replacement, then sell those.

He did this about 20 times before anybody caught on because of municipal bureaucracy being slow to notice. When they caught on, they stopped giving out boots to their employees.

Edit: I worked as a park maintenance groundskeeper for Parks & Recreation

Fool me once…

At a certain point in US Army basic training, your platoon is given the “opportunity” to sit and eat without having to wait for the entire company, AND with that comes the fact that if one person is finished eating, we’re all finished eating.

This one trainee who happened to sit early finished his dinner before the other side of the table even got to start. He stood up, the the DS promptly made everyone else get up too, eaten or not.

This same trainee did the exact same thing the next day, except now it was breakfast, so a few people didn’t get dinner OR breakfast.

I’ll never forget the nasty s**t they did to his bunk and locker dude. Couldn’t really feel bad for him, and you best believe NOBODY stood up early for the rest of BCT.

Who chokes on a lollipop?

The person who apparently choked on a lollipop at my bank and now we don’t get lollipops anymore.

There’s a time and a place, folks.

Not one person but two people ruined my work’s break room.

I work at a YMCA as a swim instructor, so two people decided to have s*x in their break room at a different Y in another city. Apparently the higher ups decided that every other YMCA in the area or state should lose their break rooms because “it could happen again.”

Like yeah, it could happen again but don’t take our break rooms away, at least get rid of theirs and not ours! It’s so frustrating, now when we’re all cold and damp in between lessons, and after lessons are done, we can sit in the lobby, or sit somewhere on the pool deck which takes away spots for kids or parents.

Thanks Milcreek YMCA, you guys suck, go somewhere else and have s*x but don’t do it at the Y!

Totally out of touch.

Other firefighters constantly ruin any sort of appreciation restaurants give out. We had a BBQ restaurant that would give a flat 10$ off your meal. If you didn’t spend 10$ it was basically free. One guy ruined it on an 8$ order by demanded the 2$ be given to him as well.

Had people going in uniform on days they didn’t work. Had one guy have a family reunion at a local restaurant then made a big issue they wouldn’t give his entire party the discount.

I don’t understand how out of touch people can be.

An acceptable solution.

I worked for a YMCA overnight camp several years ago. There was a policy against staff having s*x in any building where kids might find you (the bare minimum and not something that should need to be encoded in an official workplace policy, but fine).

However, this rule was nowhere near comprehensive enough to prevent the full spread of possible reprehensible behavior. Staff were having s*x on the sailboats, in the camp kitchen, in storage sheds, in the staff barracks – all technically places children did not have access to, but definitely not ideal.

The camp’s response, instead of declaring a firm “stop having s*x in your place of work” decision, was to provide a designated section of the forest where tents were set up for the purpose of having s*x. It was the weirdest staff meeting I have ever attended and I cannot believe that the YMCA thought this was an acceptable solution.

I got fired from this camp for drinking alcohol on a day off, despite being offsite, of age, and completely sober by the time I was back on the clock. Apparently that’s a fireable offense, but having s*x in the kitchen is not.

And dodgeball is so fun.

Back around the mid 2000s I was around 10 years old and I used to go to this place after school called “the Boys and Girls club”. They had an area with multiple basketball hoops on a court which we used to play all kinds of games in; one of those games being dodgeball.

These were not those big rubber balls but instead the styrofoam filled balls with kind of a thin layer of plastic so otherwise… harmless.

One of the kids thought it would be a good idea to shove a rock into one of the balls and throw it at someone he didn’t like; well he ended up throwing it right into that kids face and broke two of his front teeth.

We never played dodgeball again.

What a bummer.

I used to work for state government in Alaska. I was reviewing some department policies to update and I noticed a particular statement in the employee behavioral policy about adhering to basic hygiene (expected) and wearing clothes at work (not expected). I went to my boss to ask him about that and the look on his face told me I was in for a good story.

Our department had satellite offices all over the state and in some very rural, very isolated areas, these were nothing but glorified shacks. Local fire brigade shows up to one of our shacks in middle-of-nowhere to find a department employee standing outside the burnt building, in the nude.

In February. Turned out that the guy, who was the only on-site employee, happened to be a nudist. Now, no one can work naked for the state of Alaska. What a bummer.

Too many of these stories.

Previous job I had used to be hybrid twice a week. One person, on their hybrid day, decided to slack off work and go out.

They got a call from their manager because they were late for a virtual meeting and the manager heard a lot of background noise like they were at the mall or something.

Said person eventually admitted they were not home working, got fired, and now everyone had to be in the office 5 days a week.

No more trusting the neighbors.

The guy who ruined Halloween for everyone by poisoning and killing his own kid with a pixie stick, now everyone thinks people just hand out poison candy because this AH started a mass panic.

I couldn’t even eat my candy corn growing up because they were “loose unwrapped candy”, as if anyone is tampering with candy corn!

Seriously, my parents had such a hard rule against anything not hermetically sealed and it was such a waste of good candy because of all the hype over sickos when it wasn’t even a neighbor, but a parent who lied that ruined the whole thing for everybody.

People are the worst, man.

We could be having so much more fun around here if everyone would be cool.