Former Unfortunate Circumstances Which Can Now Be Considered Hilarious

Sorry for the title, guys. Facebook friends may or may not have seen me listing potential personal essay titles narrating frightening and/or funny situations with friends yesterday.

What are some horrible, sad, unfortunate, or otherwise tragic circumstances that have happened to you in your life that were terrible at the time but are now the source of a funny story?

When I was six years old or so, I put a tiny little child-sized chair on top of a five-drawer dresser in our bedroom. I've probably told this story here before. The dresser sat immediately next to the bunkbed I shared with one of my sisters (I got the top bunk, obviously, because I am the eldest), and it being a five-drawer dresser and me being six (or so), it was a very tall piece of furniture. So I've set up this child-sized chair on the surface of the dresser and have declared myself Queen of the Dresser and the tiny chair is my throne.

The next oldest sister, Erica, did not like me calling myself Queen of the Dresser. (It may have had something to do with me requiring my sisters to all be my subject minions and to fetch me Capri-Suns at my demand or something. I was a tyrannical eldest sibling.) She disliked this fact so much that she decided to yank on the leg of the chair. I don't think she quite intended for what was to happened that happened, but I went flying off of my little aluminum throne and my head connected squarely with the corner of the other bunkbed in the room. I had to get stitches and still have a scar today on my eyebrow, which smurfs up my hope of ever having perfect, naturally-shaped eyebrows.

Not long after, Erica was running around in our living room and tripped right into our blocky stone fireplace, which resulted in her own skull cracking open. Justice had never tasted sweeter, and as a child, I couldn't have been more thrilled for the harm of my own sister.

The Spanish Inquisition.

Pancho Villa


nah.. I went with my parents to PA for a driver appreciation party their boss held every year for the drivers. It started off at the main terminal/offices, but then moved on to his boss's house.

Just to kinda set this up.. My dad worked for this guy once before way back in the late 80s- he was the one who talked my dad into keeping his plans for Disney World even though his big truck had a blown engine and was stuck up there in PA. He also told my dad to put his cash away, don't worry about the cost of anything, and put the entire trip on credit cards (because worrying about money will just put a damper on things).

And then, my dad talked his boss into buying his oldest daughter a mini 4-wheeler. His boss still had it when we went to the party, and we were all taking turns riding it in the front yard and swimming and stuff.

It's my turn again, and I take off in a lap around the front yard, then up around the pool. I wound up starting through the trees/woods off to the side and for whatever reason, I panicked and hit the throttle instead of the brake. I flipped that sumbitch over a steep hill and landed in a big patch of thorns.

Scratches. Everywhere. It was so embarrassing.. I was like 13 and going through that awkward 'tween phase (I was never blessed with being hot like my friends, unfortunately) and there were some hot older guys that were friends with the boss's daughters that saw the entire thing.. Ugh.

When I was about 14 I was on holiday with my family in Greece. We went to one of the poolside restaurants for a bite to eat. It was a huge place overlooking all the pool. Probably about 300-400 people including those round the pool. So there I was, in my bikini, about to dive in to my food. I asked the waiter for ketchup. I then shook up the glass bottle of ketchp and removed the lid.

On removing the lid, the entire bottle exploded. The majority of the ketchup went in my face and eye, but it also went all down my body and even hit the bald man's head sitting behind me.

My Dad kindly started the hysterics and soon the entire resturant were laughing. People around the pool soon caught on to the comotion and begin laughing too. I was MORTIFIED! Especially being at that tricky teenage age, I wanted the ground to swallow me up. The waiter brought me a towel to try and wipe the ketchup from my stinging eyes, he tried hard to stifle his laughter, but ran away quickly as he could not surpress the urge.

Horrified, I stood up and ran from the restaurant.

That my friends, was a bad day.

When I was 13 I threw a crying fit in Video Games Etc. (a local game shop) because my mom balked at the expensive price tag of Final Fantasy VII. I was a needy child. She finally relented and bought the game for me, and I proceeded to shirk my homework and school to play it incessantly. I can't count the number of times they yelled down the stairs, "Get to a point where you can save, and go to bed!"

Now I'm old, and can look back and laugh (though I kind of wish I had done my schoolwork, I'd probably be making more money than I am).

Last year my dad was working on a motorcycle for his brother in law and it caught fire while he was filling it up with a tank of gas. The motorcycle fell over and my dad reached down to grab it without thinking and burnt part of his beard off. When the firemen came one of them went, "Smash the window!" And my dad was like, "NOOOOOOO!" And they smashed it anyway while practically flooding our basement and cutting one of our power lines leaving us without power upstairs for a couple of days.

We spent all day cleaning up the water from the basement and fixing the burnt wiring and replacing the broken window only to find out that we needed a permit to do that. Had to wait a couple of days for an inspector to come down here and look over the work and a couple days more for the power to finally come back on. We got more hassel from the firemen and the city than we did the actual fire. Then the motorcycle tried squishing my dad's foot when he was moving it to the backyard. I still think the bike was trying to kill him.