I had just got back home from spring break and left the gate to our driveway open because my mom had told me that my sister and her wife were coming by to pick something up. I was sitting in the office, which is just to the left of the front door. My sister stormed into the house, angry that I had left the gate open, and began to rant to her wife. "He is such a sorry loser that he can't even close a gate. He's going to stay in this tiny town and do nothing with his life.
He's just going to be some dumpy middle school coach like the rest of them," she said. Growing up in a small Texas town with a high poverty rate, I just sat silently and didn't move at all. After a minute or two, I made a loud enough noise that I knew my sister heard. She gasped and left immediately, and we never spoke about the incident again. In fact, we barely spoke to each other at all after that.
My aunt and her husband unexpectedly offered to buy a house and sell it to my parents at a very low price. My family was extremely grateful for the help as we had been stuck in our old and cramped house for a long time, unable to move due to the financial strain my parents were under due to my brother and me having various medical issues. In the following months, our grandmother paid for our family and my aunt to go on vacation. I was excited to take my boyfriend of five years with us. When we arrived, my aunt asked if I could watch her 8- and 9-year-old stepsons while she and her husband went out to explore the area. Normally, this would have been fine.
However, I work with children all day, and it was a family vacation with plenty of other adults to watch them. I said no because my boyfriend would have had to entertain himself or be roped into babysitting with me. My aunt smiled and said, "Sure, no problem." I thought that was the end of it. I was wrong. Several weeks after the vacation, I overheard my mom on the phone with my grandma, speaking in a furious voice about how my aunt had decided not to help us with the house because I had declined to watch her stepchildren on vacation and that we should be more grateful to them because they were being so generous. Needless to say, we no longer speak to that aunt, and my parents never blamed me for my choice.
I work nights at a job located next to a bar.
One conversation that really stuck with me was when someone's baby mama came to find them and started yelling at them outside my window. She shouted something like, "You've got a million dollars in your bank account and still can't take care of your kids." I watched as she chased after him, screaming, as he got in his car and drove away.
I overheard a lot of interesting things while on the bus to work. One time there were only two other riders with me. They were in the back, loudly cursing at each other. Both of these guys were quite big and dressed like total punks, with leather, spikes and grungy jeans. As a wussy kid, I wasn't about to sit anywhere near these two giants.
These guys looked like they were about to start a fight. But a few moments later, I began hearing what they were discussing. "Yeah! And then I put some homemade whipped cream on that thing! Mmmmmmm!" They were yelling about desserts!
I was in my senior year of high school. I popped into the bathroom during lunch. While I was minding my business, three girls came in, discussing loudly something.
Then one of them asked, "So, how is pregnancy treating you?" A different girl answered with absolutely no change in her attitude, "Oh, we lost the baby. We're gonna try again when he gets out of prison." The first girl at least sounded a little worried when she added, "That sucks, but I totally get why you're doing this. If your mom won't let you be together..." I finished my business and walked out of the stall to see two freshmen and a sophomore who should be a junior…
I was in a thrift store a few days ago, and there were these two older men in there, talking very loudly. One of them picked something up, and kind of yelped, and the other guy said, "You must've looked in a mirror." I was laughing out loud on the inside.
It's always funny to see old people roasting each other.
I speak French, and when I was around 18, I was walking on the sidewalk near an outdoor pool. A group of teens around my age, all wearing bikinis, were walking toward me on the sidewalk. Not wanting to be rude, I passed them without checking them out or anything.
As I passed and kept walking, I heard one of them say in French, "He didn't even look at me!" The others then consoled her and assured her that she was hot enough to be checked out. They even went so far as to say that I was being a jerk and that maybe I didn't think her beauty was worthy of acknowledgment. I was just flabbergasted.
One time when I was in Las Vegas, I woke up and overheard my dad begging my mom to let him buy a working girl. Can you imagine that? I could hear the pain and hurt in my mother’s voice. Poor woman, I thought.
I don’t think I’ll ever forget that. It stuck with me since childhood.
I was eating at a restaurant in Amsterdam and was speaking English with the waiter. There were two women sitting next to my table speaking in German about basically everyone who came into the restaurant. I knew that the waiter spoke German, so after about 30 minutes of the German women's nonsense, I spoke to him in my best German.
I told him that I found it wonderful that there are so many languages spoken in Holland and that everyone here is always so kind. These two women turned to look at me with beet-red faces. That was priceless.
A woman's adult son was talking to his mom while walking around Target. His mom mentioned that she wasn't a fan of Jesus (the biblical one). Her son said, "Why don't you like him?
Did he write something mean in your yearbook?" I have never laughed so hard at a random one-liner in my entire life.
This lady sitting behind me was just tearing her dude apart while on the phone with a friend. The two lines I remember were, “He’s fine, but he’s got no ambition,” and “I don’t even let him touch me.
I’ve got Harry for that. God, if he didn’t make good money, I’d leave him.”
I accidentally overheard my parents discussing whether to tell me and my four siblings that my dad had three children from a relationship he started at 16 over 40 years ago.
My parents told us all together the next day.
They only told us because the eldest of the three was sick and needed help.
When I was a teen, I overheard two women chatting at the supermarket. One told the other that she and her husband recently installed a surveillance camera in their 14-year-old daughter’s room and that the time would soon come when she would have to confess to her daughter.
And do you want to know the worst part?
She spoke about the confession like she didn’t do anything wrong and it was an inconvenience.
I was about 15 and waiting to be seen by my eye doctor. I think I got there early and was in the waiting room.
There was no one else in there. However, I heard two doctors behind the wall talking about some patient and whether to offer a surgery.
Essentially, they said the patient didn’t need the surgery but they could make a decent sum of money, so they should encourage the patient to go through with it.
The guy above my old apartment was a single dude. We barely spoke, but that’s basically the one thing I knew about him. He’d occasionally have a new girl over, and I could hear him boinkin’ whatever girl he brought over. I’m not trying to talk smack about the guy with this, but he and whatever chick would go at it maybe three minutes tops.
One night, he had a new girl over. I could hear mainly her, but after maybe thirty seconds—sudden silence, followed by this chick bursting into laughter. I heard her leave maybe five minutes afterward.
I wasn’t exactly eavesdropping, because she knew I was there. Honestly, that makes it even more messed up: One night when I was about 11, I was doing my homework at the dinner table while my mother was on the phone with her best friend, and she just casually dropped the news that she was divorcing my dad.
We had a cordless phone too. It’s not like she couldn’t have left the room to have that conversation somewhere her fairly young, completely unsuspecting child wouldn’t hear it?
I had just secured a place for my family to live with an old college friend and their family. My partner and I helped a lot around the house trying to make it sanitary and did the dishes on the regular. It became obvious we were just picking up after them at this point and they were not helping one bit. My friend mentioned to their mother-in-law that they felt bad.
She thought it was wrong that we were constantly picking up after them, to which she replied, “Well they are guests here, they should be pulling their weight, they’re freeloaders if not.” My friend agreed. Mind you, we were paying rent and allowing them to buy food off of our stamps since things were tight for everyone. We stopped cleaning up after them, and told them we needed the money for our own food. The house was trashed in less than a week.
My ex thought I was sleeping.
She went out on the back patio which was under my master bedroom window that was open
I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop, but overheard her talking to her friend about how they were both seducing an old man for money and pills.
At a 21st birthday party, a friend and I were having a smoke break.
We heard two people leaving the party and talking in quite a distressed manner.
One guy says to the other, “Mate, no matter how you’ve had to drink, never try and kiss your mate’s mum.” I don’t think I’ve ever laughed harder.
I was on a bus once and I heard two guys sitting on the seat next to me. I was dozing off, but just woke up to hear one of the most messed up things I have ever heard. So, this guy was just telling the other guy how his mother and his brother used his father’s retirement money to build a house and kicked him out later mercilessly.
He was smiling the whole time. He even showed the other guy a video in which his father was being interviewed by a local news channel to request people donate some money. I don’t know how bad his father was to them, but that seemed pretty cruel.
My mom and I overheard her sister-in-law planning to get the mafia to take out her husband for insurance money when they were drinking in a bar. She sobered up immediately and went and told my dad about it. He got his brother to change his insurance after some convincing.
The wife left him when he told her he got his insurance changed.
Apparently, she’s had several families in her past that she’d left. They were going to run him off a cliff on his motorcycle ride home from work he took every night.
This story is told from my point of view, witnessing a stranger eavesdrop on my mom’s phone conversation. We have a family farm with animals who do what animals do and make more animals. My mom and I were at a Kinko’s when she received a call from our groundskeeper. Her end of the call definitely sounded a bit wild. My mom said, “Hey, what’s up? She finally had her baby? Great how’s it look?
…Didn’t make it huh, are you sure? …That’s too bad. Ok, I guess just put the body in a garbage bag and toss it in the dumpster.” I’m watching this poor random customer listening in on the conversation. The growing horror on her face as the conversation went on was hilarious. It culminated in her dropping her shopping items and hustling out of the store just as my mom hangs up the phone. I thought it was the funniest thing ever. Mom, not so much.
One day I’m in the office handing something in from my teacher. A school bus had never turned up to take these kids to school so they all had to get rides. I’m talking 25 kids chilling in the office getting marked late. Each kid that walks in is getting told off by these nasty rude receptionists about being irresponsible and not getting on their bus.
All the kids pretty much take the scolding. After they all leave, the receptionists laugh and say, “Oops, apparently there was no bus. Oh well it will keep them on their toes,” and thought it was the funniest thing ever.
Sitting in our favorite Mexican restaurant when my friends and I hear a college-aged woman complaining to her cohorts about how awful her boyfriend was. He gave her a ring, but it’s not a promise ring, nor an engagement ring! How dare he?! “It’s emotional waterboarding!
It’s totally emotional waterboarding!” She kept going on and on. But always came back to his actions being “emotional waterboarding! Emotional waterboarding!” It struck us as completely ridiculous and hilarious, and we’ve been overusing that particular phrasing ever since.
I heard my sister hooking up at a party. I wasn’t eavesdropping on purpose, I heard it by accident. I was at a big high school house party and I was with my buddies. I walked away for a minute and on that walk, I heard noises coming from a bathroom, I listened for a second because I didn’t know what noises they were.
But I then realized they were moaning and…other stuff. I quickly walked back to my friends and said nothing until I looked over and saw my sister leaving that bathroom. I never told anyone I know and will take it to my grave. One of my worst memories.
At an airport, I hear a husband and wife arguing. Long story short she is angry because he had been begging her for years to have relations with another woman. And she finally did. She really enjoyed it and can’t believe he is upset.
His side of the story. He then said, “Yes it has been a huge fantasy of mine, but I didn’t expect you to sleep with my sister at a family reunion after I passed out. Now my entire family knows.” The best part was that they were at the airport traveling with the sister and other family members. He continued, “Now I have to sit over here with you, and on the plane with them for the next three hours knowing that they all know you slept with my sister.”
In my last apartment, I walked into my bedroom late at night, and saw a small but very bright red light in the ceiling directly over my bed, I instinctively said out loud, “What the heck is that?” The lady upstairs gasped and a male voice asked, “What’s wrong?” She answers with, “OMG, it’s my fiber optic cable for my camera into his room.
I forgot to cover it up!!” I thought it over, and rather than going through a long legal fight and a lawsuit, and certain criminal charges for the lady who lived above me, I put into motion a full-bore push to find a new, more secure place to live.
Not really eavesdropping but reading a text. During the summer, I would babysit for my sister while her husband plays video games all day…and I mean All. Day. Nonstop. One day, I was trying to deal with the kids and they were too much for me (mind you, they’re three kids under the age of 5) so I left the kids with him and stepped out of the room to go have a frustration cry. A few hours later, when he went to work and my sister got back from work, I was doing something on my phone and my sister was next to me texting him.
The kids were all in bed by this time so it was relatively calm. I glanced at my sister’s phone and I what saw made me want to scream: It was a message from him saying that I was completely useless (in terms of babysitting). This man sits on his behind all day while a teenager basically steps up and takes care of his kids. But apparently, I’m the useless one? Makes sense, right?
It wasn’t intentional eavesdropping. I was in a conference room at work reviewing some scripts for a video coming up.
And we start hearing some crying and talking in the next conference room.
Apparently, they were letting someone go because she kept showing up to work intoxicated and they had warned her before.
I accidentally found out that a friend of mine got his aunt pregnant. I heard him ask someone over the phone, “Are you sure? I mean, Mom is going to be upset if she finds out. No, no, no, I’ll go with you. For real, we can’t see each other again?
Wait, no, we can just go away…together, you know. No this it’s not wrong. I love you. Please don’t.
When I asked about it, he told me the truth.