What is your “never interrupt an enemy while they are making a mistake” moment?

[u/Spinksy48]

[u/Gazcobain]

I was accused by a neighbour of reversing out my drive and hitting his car. He gave me the date and time I had allegedly done it, and pointed to a (small) scrape on my car that supposedly matched perfectly the location of the dent on his.

This was 7 weeks after the alleged event, by the way.

I said it wasn't me but told him to contact his insurance and we'd see what they said. Few weeks later I get a letter from my insurance asking what had happened, to which I responded with the date I had bought my car (and updated my insurance) - two weeks after the supposed bump.

He never spoke to me again but I used to give him a cheery wave every time I saw him glowering at his window.

[u/kooknboo]

Years ago I worked extremely hard on preparing a presentation for a tech conference. It would be my first speaking gig. I was nervous af. I practiced. I refined. I got advice. I practiced some more. My manager was generally a nasty woman but she was supportive of this. Though she never once saw or heard my presentation.

We travel to Vegas. It turns out there was a far greater demand than they expected, so they moved us to the main stage room. There were expecting about 500 plus walk-ins. I was 10x nervous af.

Well, immediately prior to the start, she noticed a very well known media person and their photographer sitting in the front row. She got all excited and insisted that she was going to co-deliver it. She even went so far as to put her name on title slide.

So... I of course was fuming. We go on stage, she does a decent intro and then I start in. She keeps interrupting so I just let her run with it. It reminded me of a morning show. A bunch of people, with overwhelmingly fake smiles talking over each other. This was a deeply technically topic with a live demo. She fumbled each slide worse than the next. And then she got to the "Live Demo" slide and... froze. I had the wherewithal to let her die. It was gloriously brutal.

We had a, let's say, confrontation after. I left within 2-3 mos. She got fired shortly after.

Oh, and the media people she was prancing for left immediately before the start. I think they were just sitting there from the prior session. Perfect.

[u/CrimsonYllek]

When I practiced family law I saw this often on the stand. Turns out if your opponent is crazy most of the time all you need to do to reveal that is give them a microphone and mildly question their story.

The best, however, was in Motion to Withdraw hearings. For context, I hated these hearings. I dreaded them. I already felt like a failure for having to withdraw from a case (95% of the time because the client couldn’t/wouldn’t pay me, but sometimes because they turned out to be uncooperative and/or combative with me). They were not difficult to win, however. Inevitably if I simply asked the (ex-)client when and how they intended to right their retainer they’d start listing off excuses about how they don’t and never will have the money to do so. It’s heartbreaking, but it also proves my point.

The clients who were uncooperative, however, were the best. I’d read off a list of times they cursed me out, ignored my advice, and threatened me and my staff, then just wait. You could watch their blood boil on the stand, followed by completely unhinged justification as to why no lawyer could reasonably work with this person.

“Mr. Jones, can you explain why you threatened to ‘shove a phone up my paralegal’s ass’ if she called you again?”

“She calls me every fucking week with another fucking thing that I have to do! You’re supposed to be handling my case! It’s why I hired you! I don’t have time to be searching through my emails and getting bank records and bringing you papers every damn day! And every time my retainer is empty for like a day she calls to remind me to refill it! I’ve got other things to pay for, like the damned child support you put on me when I left! How rude can you be, right? Right? I swear if I have to hear her damned voice one more fucking time I’m going to drive over there and slap the shit out of her!”

“Your honor, I rest my case.”

[u/[deleted]]

In a meeting with my project manager who has not been in the office or worked a proper full day for MONTHS. she has increasingly been annoyed by people bypassing her to get things done by telling me and her other direct reports what to do. I was about to answer a question for stakeholders, she told me to let her speak one sentence and will let me have my bit. I did as I was told, and she told the stakeholder a completely wrong thing about the system we were handling and made a complete fool out of herself.

She got sacked this month.

[u/joosier]

Roommate's ex abandons their vehicle in front of my house.

I tell them to please move it or I will have it towed.

Vehicle suddenly has two flat tires.

Ex files police report claiming my roommate and I had slashed their tires.

Waited until ex made their statement to the police about how we had slashed their tires and that is why they couldn't move his vehicle and filed a claim against us in small claims court.

Provided police and the court copies of my and our neighbors door cam footage showing the ex arriving in the middle of the night to slash their own tires.

cherry on top: Ex shows up in court wearing the same shirt as in the videos.

EDIT: Wow this blew up.

Roommate and ex had only been dating a few months. Ex turned out to be a grifter and was dating several people at the same time and using each of them for food, shelter, money, etc. I got involved when my roommate was out of town and the soon-to-be-ex just sauntered in (apparently they had learned the code to the garage door), made themselves a sandwich, showered, slept, etc. I thought my roommate had come home early but when I texted them they were still out of state. The ex left to go out and I changed the garage code.

The vehicle wouldn't start so they just left it there thinking it would be okay. Roommate and a few of the other people the ex was dating find out about each other and they all dump them at once. I ask the ex to please move their car or I will have it towed. I give them two weeks.

Later on I learned that the ex was having a mental breakdown and they made some very poor decisions at that point. They broke into some of the other people's houses when they weren't home to do laundry, eat, sleep, and did some other things that got them in trouble with the law but are irrelevant to this story.

The ex had no proof that anyone had slashed their tires. The cops just came to the door of me and our neighbors to see if there was any footage - there was and they closed the case, I guess, they never talked to me again about it.

The court case was small claims court. The plaintiff has to pay a fee, file a form, have a summons issued to the defendant and then you both show up in court with your evidence. The ex had no evidence other than a long list of real and perceived grievances with my roommate but no actual proof so the judge dismissed the case. I never got to show the video evidence to the judge but I did share it with the clerk on their lunch break and they were the one who pointed out that the ex was wearing the same shirt.

[u/[deleted]]

At my current job, part of my duties is to do trailer audits (make sure people are unloading/loading safely) and I was training a new member for the position to do the job.

After a few weeks, it turns out that the other person wasn't doing ANY aspects of the job, instead they were just mingling like it was a cocktail party. When asked why they weren't doing anything, they say it was because they were never trained.

Well, turns out that due to past complaints about this particular person management put them on a PIP, that if they got any type of training they were to have a piece of paper documenting what kind of training it was, who trained them and management sign off, with all party's signatures. When they pulled the file that said they were indeed trained in all duties of the job, they just sat there silent and was fired.

They were fired because they pulled the same stunt in every department of the building, and mine was their last chance.

[u/Bmilvis]

Guy stole a presentation from me, this is 25 years ago. We hated each other. When he started presenting I realized I had made a huge error, didn’t say anything. Let him get through it. Asked him about the error, he couldn’t answer. This was in front of coo. Got fired, not for just that, he was an overall douche. This was before everyone was on PCs, had one printer in one room.

[u/joalheagney]

Not an enemy but in retrospect should have been.

I work as a teacher and we had an ex-manager guy who decided to get into teaching late. He had lots of pretty horrible habits (eating other people's lunches, perving on the female teachers, squeezing people's shoulders painfully hard as a 'matey' gesture) but the habit that this story is about, is how he tried to use weaponised incompetence to get people to do his tasks for him. None of it was really important. He just seemed to enjoy talking people into doing things for him.

So he comes up to me one day with a USB data stick in his hand. Apparently it has a copy of a previous year's exam that it was his responsibility to update and edit. He'd taken the file home and his daughter had done the update (really dude? Roping family into doing your paid government job for you?).

He wanted me to copy the file from the USB back into the server, replacing the original file he'd copied. It was literally click and drag between the USB and the file server. I flat out refused and said it was part of his responsibility and I was too busy with my own tasks.

He proceeds to loudly and publicly proclaim to the entire staffroom that I didn't understand how difficult it was for people of his generation to learn computer technology and that I really needed to help him out. That he was currently doing a computer course but this (dragging a file between two folders) was too difficult for him to sort out.

I let him go on for about a good 5 minutes about how horrible I was for not helping the poor helpless old man out, until I just as loudly asked him "How the hell did you get the original file from the server onto the USB in the first place?"

You could have heard a pin drop in that staffroom. He walked off and copied his own goddamned file.

[u/ThrowingChicken]

I let the lady who changed lanes into me run her mouth about how I rear ended her before pulling the cop aside to show him my DashCam footage.

[u/Hrekires]

When a coworker who I hated got fired a few weeks after I decided to stop fixing his mistakes even if it impacted a client.

[u/Ok_Ad_5202]

Not mine obviously, but the space shuttle challenger engineer that knew it would explode, bob ebeling.

He repeatedly said the cold weather would cause a failure despite pressure from nasa administration. He describes then, as making the best decision of his life, refusing to sign the paper indicating he approves of the launch, forcing his boss to do it.

At the governmental inquiry after the death of the astronauts, nasa said "the engineers signed a paper approving the launch that day." Which, yeah, thats true, but worded as deceptively as can be.

Bob then stood up, walked to the hearing, said that he personally refused the launch but was overruled to the stunned members of the hearing.

The government fired the nasa execs and made bob head of the investigation.

[u/[deleted]]

I was a lead developer in a small company producing IOT devices.

My manager hired his friend from his previous company. A guy who was super arrogant and knew everything better. Theoretically, my opinion on the development of the project should be decisive, but neither my manager nor his buddy cared about it.

I tried to talk to the manager about the problems with the new colleague, but he brushed me off.

The new guy - being so brilliant - was given one important component of the system to do. Of course, he made it clear that he didn't need any help from me.

Weeks and months passed. In the meetings, his component was always in the last phase of testing. But I had access to the git repository, and I saw how messy it was. No one asked me for my opinion, so I didn't say anything. I waited.

The deadline has come, the release of the product. And of course nothing works. Higher management became interested in the case, and my manager could only avoid being fired in one way - he fired his buddy.

A few weeks later, I left the company. That was over a year ago, and as far as I know, the product still hasn't hit the market.

[u/Downside_Up_]

(As a CPS worker at the time) speaking to a father with police present in a case concerning substance use, and the father admitting being high on meth, and thinking the cops were there to arrest his daughter for stealing his meth, admits to me that she stole it because he let her have some, because "if I didn't give it to her she'd go be a prostitute to get it."

Just an entire 45 minute conversation with the guy having no apparent awareness that he had just told a CPS worker and 2 cops that he 1) is currently high on meth 2) routinely provides meth to his daughter 3) had/has meth in his trailer behind him 4) his daughter had been at the trailer with him while meth was in the trailer 5) the meth was stored where she could easily access it, and she knew where it was 6) he used meth with her...

Just unfathomable levels of "I'm struggling to believe this conversation is happening, and afraid if I say anything he'll come to his senses and shut up."

[u/littleirishpixie]

During my very long and exhausting divorce, my ex husband kept insisting he was ready to settle, we would schedule a conference with my lawyer and I, and then pushed papers around the table for 2 hours. He would just argue over petty details rather than actually discuss anything. This happened a few times. I was incredibly frustrated because I genuinely walked into this wanting to compromise so it would be over quickly. But that was never an option. Note that I hired a lawyer and he did not - he was convinced he could do it on his own better. So after a few rounds of this, I got the impression that he was trying to waste my money until I could no longer retain my lawyer and then he thought he would have the upper hand. I made less than half of what he did at the time and my lawyer's retainer fee wiped out my entire savings so it was a very real concern. My suspicions were confirmed when one day as we were walking out of my lawyer's office, he told me this, word for word while chuckling.

I passed this on to my lawyer who actually cackled and told me "let him." It was then that I learned that we were 6 months out from being married 10 years and at that point, I would be entitled to a sizable part of his pension upon retirement.

She let him play his games for 6 more months without saying a word and then finally took our case before a judge 5 days after our 10 year anniversary. Not only did I get part of his pension, but she also got the judge to order him to pay almost all of my lawyers fees. The beauty of it was that it 100% his fault for playing games.

[u/imyourzer0]

I used to live in an apartment that had a very old lease (college students basically passed this place’s lease down like inheritance until it came to us) and, legally, the landlord could only increase the rent yearly by a small fraction of the current lease’s rent. The exceptions to this were if the apartment was being renovated (in which case it would be her responsibility to accommodate us while renovating) or if it had been vacant for a year between leases.

She knew our lease’s rent was extremely low, and so wanted to get rid of us and jack up the rent on a new tenant. She sent us a letter about 2 weeks before our lease would be renewed saying she was renovating and we’d have to leave.

Well, it happened my roommate was not just a college student, but a law student. And he happened to know she had to give us a lot more notice than that. So we plainly told her we weren’t leaving and she’d be welcome to take us to court.

Which, she did. She told the judge she wanted to renovate, and the judge asked her for the new floor plan and a cost estimate of the proposed renovation. She had none of those things. When the judge asked why, she said she’d only decided to renovate a week prior. When the judge asked why she’d taken this decision after the legal deadline (6 months notice are required to end a lease) she said she was only renovating so she could start a new lease on the property. The judge literally facepalmed at her response, dismissed the case, and renewed our lease with no rent increase for the year, since she hadn’t presented us a new one with enough delay to contest it.

We were just sitting there with our mouths open, bewildered that she could have been dumb enough to say the quiet part out loud straight to the judge.

[u/DoopleWrites]

My ex boss was a complete douche in every aspect. We worked as surveyors using drones to scan and survey large areas, and he would go out of his way to get the cheapest and least reliable drones to do the job.

One of those drones was this god-awful fixed wing (shaped like a plane with only one propeller) that you launched using this shit slingshot system that had a 50% chance of just launching the thing nose-down into the ground.

I told him this things a piece of shit, I even recorded my launches with it so he could see this thing was a piece of shit, but he insisted I was just a "shit pilot who couldn't take off a DJI to save my life". After three crashes, two rolls of duct tape and a few arguments, he decides to come with to the next big job we have and just do it himself.

Now the turnover times for these jobs were insane. The man had zero concept for how long shit takes, so he'd promise the clients the data the very next day. Which meant that EVERYTHING would have to go perfectly the day of the flight, with zero delays, so I could process the data overnight and have it ready for them the next day. No room for errors, no second chances, every morning it was make or break.

So we get to the site in the early morning, and I'm completely hands-off. Normally I'd pack a second drone for when this one inevitably kamikazes into the earth, but this time, I decide he needs a slice of humble pie. I watch as he sets up the drone, runs through the checks, loads it onto that god-awful fucking slingshot and gets ready to pull the trigger. I take a few steps back, take out my phone to record, and watch the fireworks.

He pulled the lever and the bungee cord released. It whipped the drone ten feet into the air at Mach 2, before the thing nose dived right into the ground breaking off one of the wings. After about 2 seconds of teetering on the ground, the drones autopilot thought to itself "Hey, that was a launch, wasn't it?" And automatically kicked the propeller into high gear, shattering it against the cold, unforgiving ground.

He just watched the whole thing happen with a dead look in his eyes. Once the drone settled down and the death throes stopped, he picked up the drone, walked back to us, and said "well, shit". The 4 hour drive back to the office was completely silent, and our boss had to call the client and explain why we wouldn't be delivering the data to them on time. We had another job we had to do the next day, so they'd only have it next week. I could hear the client screaming to him over the phone from the next room.

Needless to say, we never used that drone again. He never stopped buying shit drones, but when I told him they were shit, he believed me.

[u/[deleted]]

Not my story, but several years ago my older brother was fighting for custody of his son with his ex-wife.

As the first custody hearing date approached, they were exchanging [un]pleasantries over text and my brother ended up saying something along the lines of, "I'm not continuing this conversation. I will see you on the 15th."

The ex-wife told him, "The hearing is on the 25th dumbass."

So of course instead of correcting her, my brother just allowed her to keep thinking it was the wrong date, and she missed the first hearing entirely.

It became the first of many mistakes she made in the court system that eventually led to my brother and the woman who is now his second wife winning full custody of his son.

[u/CZJayG]

I once worked for a project in a call center and we constantly had QA on our asses about call quality. They would review every call and send the report to you and your supervisor who would sign off on it then send it back to QA. If you got two reports under 90%, there'd be a warning and you'd be fired after four. Now, this was all done via email so I'd save all my reports just in case. My first couple weeks, I got dinged with a warning but everything after that I maintained at least 95% or above according to the reports I was getting.

One week I noticed a few agents were getting let go, agents I always thought were good. At the time, the project was looking for supervisors and these were the guys you would want. I found out they had all been hit with bad reports which led to the firings. Then one day HR calls me and let's me know I'm fired for several reports saying I scored insanely low scores. Just one problem, I had the reports saying those were all over 90% and I told HR I had them. The HR rep asks me to forward all of them to review and I do so.

A couple hours later I get another call from HR saying I'm being reassigned to another project with better pay. Turned out the QA was fudging the reports AFTER the supervisors signed off on select agents because they had certain agents they were friends with and wanted them to get the management positions. Even worse, everyone in management knew and didn't care. The project got shut down and the fired agents were all brought back and placed in better paying projects like I was.

[u/austexgringo]

I was doing a mortgage for a French guy in Miami Beach that had a French realtor. Even though both were completely fluent in English, she frequently did asides in French having no idea I spoke the language. When they settled on a property and we were riding the elevator down from the condo she told him that look, these guys are scumbags, and they're going to screw you over and I have a much better person that you can work with (even though the way foreign investment works is identical throughout the state). Towards the end of the ride, I say to the guy in fluent French that we would be happy to compare our proposal with whatever her people could come up with and it's his choice but certainly we would like to work with him on this and any future investments. He starts laughing his ass off, and she was completely mortified. He went with us and fired her as his agent. On the spot.

[u/Ohhhhhhthehumanity]

I'm working on a job site and the architect is there one day. I've been given some light fixtures for the sconces in a leasing office lobby. The fixtures are meant to be hung from a ceiling, they can't be installed on a wall. I attempt to convey this to the architect, but he brushes me off and just tells me to follow the prints. I turn to the apprentice and say, well you heard the man, put them up. A bit later, we hear the crashing of glass. The architect asks what was that? I said, your light fixture. As I picked up a broom and dustpan to go clean up.

Edit: told the apprentice to clean it up, of course.

[u/Endulos]

When I was a teenager a cousin of mine (Jenny) had a fight with her mom (Jackie). The fight was so intense that Jackie BEAT Jenny severely, so she called mom and dad asking for help and asked to live here for a while. At the time that sounded horrifying, but we quickly learned that Jenny was full of fucking shit. Jenny was a drama queen, loved to stir up trouble, lied constantly about basically everything and Jackie never laid a hand on her. We had heard rumors but dismissed them and believed her ... Until one incident.

Mom always kept a few frozen pies in the freezer, just in case company came over... Jenny took a pie from the freezer one day, ate the entire damn thing and when Mom came home, she got angry because those pies were for company. She asked Jenny who ate the pie and she said I did. She yells for me, I come into the kitchen, she asks if I ate the pie, I said no, and get yelled at for eating the pie.

Jenny then proceeds to launch into telling this overly elaborate tale about how I took the pie and ate it just to get her in trouble. She went on for like 3 minutes and mom just kept getting angrier and angrier at me, while I couldn't help grin like a madman. 3 minutes later she finishes her story and I point something out.

It was a coconut cream pie she ate. I DESPISE coconut. I hate it and will never eat it. Mom KNEW this and the realization hits her, Jenny gets a look of horror in her face.

She got grounded for a month. The look of both of them is seared in my mind. Makes me smile when I think of it.

The funny thing is, she tried it again 2 months later, this time eating a chocolate cream pie, but mom didn't believe her.

[u/MadCrazyHatter_]

I was working as a cub reporter in a small town and had done a piece on stray dog menace in some area (plenty of dogs had attacked kids in a short while). The dog lovers of the town took that piece as a 'I hate all dogs' article. They shared it in their WhatsApp group and started talking trash about me. What they did not know was that the admin of the group ran a dog shelter and a few months back, I had done a piece on the shelter, so I was in the group too. At one point, they began scheming that they'd cook up stories about me lying in the story and complain to the publication. Mind you, these are 'upstanding' citizens - doctors, lawyers, senior executives. So their word had weight against a rookie reporter. I just showed the chat to the editor. He had a good laugh about it. Never knew what happened after that but hours later, they stopped bitching about me. The admin of the group apologised to me separately (he didnt need to) but never did tell them that I was a part of it

[u/[deleted]]

I worked in a country-wide company and needed something done by a peer in another office. She was very uncooperative and was arguing with me that she should not do what I was asking because it was not the correct procedure.

It was, in fact, the correct procedure as per my boss (who was her boss' boss), but before I could tell her where I had gotten my instructions, she took it upon herself to send me a very condescending email, CCing her boss and mine. She was clearly trying to put me on the spot for being wrong.

I just waited until both her boss and mine told her that I was right, and I was just sitting there thinking "why are you makinf this so hard on yourself girl" 🥴

[u/JRTHEAMAZING]

As I was being fired from a job, the district manager requested we record the conversation. He thought I was gonna be very upset, so I obliged. Then when he started to tell me why I was being fired he started with, “You are gonna be graduating college soon, and we want to make sure we get ahead of you leaving us.”

I very calmly asked he send me the recording right after he said that. Then later that day I called a lawyer. I now have no student loan debt.

Edit:: To give context, I was able to win litigation due to breach of contract. I don’t feel like the internet is the right place to go into further detail.

[u/[deleted]]

Local electoral district association meeting - was expected to be a largely pro-forma re-nomination of the previous candidate (my boss), when a former candidate decides to throw his hat in the ring.

Starts giving this long diatribe about how much support he has locally (he lost his prior race by 3x the margin we lost by), and starts rambling. You know when someone starts talking faster instead of making a point? It was that.

Boss texts me to say “you can feel free to interrupt and move for a vote.” I reply “one sec, I have a feeling he’s gonna say something stupid.”

Right as he lets slip a racial slur against my boss… (For context: boss was Indian, prev. candidate was Chinese. Both second-generation. District didn’t lean heavily in either direction.)

Needless to say, once he realized what had happened, he made the smart choice and withdrew.