A recent thread asked Dopers what one decision they would change if they could go back in time. Lots of people have decisions they regret, but let’s flip the coin over:
**Have you ever made a decision that let you avoid a catastrophe?
**
Actually, it doesn’t have to be a catastrophe – any undesirable consequence will suffice.
Thanks in advance for sharing.
When I was in grad school, I was living with this woman. We fought all the time and there was always some drama. Somehow, we ended up engaged, I honestly don’t remember proposing, we just started discussing the possibility of marriage and this big marriage machine geared up. I felt like I was on a conveyor belt headed into a slaughterhouse. I broke it off, took a job in Siberia so I got as far away as I could, then went to Kosovo and didn’t return to the states until 2 years later, by which time I was dating the woman who would become my wife.
We’ve been together almost 9 years now. I know that if I had married the first woman, we would already be divorced and I bet I would be mired in debt.
Four or five years ago, I was dating a woman who was physically my ideal, and really close to my overall ideal. Sure, she’d hit me on occasion when she got upset at something, but hey, I probably deserved it. After all, a guy deserves to get hit, right?
The hitting started escalating, and I finally tried to put the brakes on it; I confronted her about it. She was furious, and to “get me” one last time, she let me know she’d been cheating on me the last couple of weeks with a coworker of mine. We broke up, and it started to dawn on me that I’d fallen into the classic “abused partner” role, and I spent a few days feeling sorry for myself. Of course, I also spent those few days wondering what I’d done wrong, etc.
A couple of weeks after our breakup, the guy who she’d been cheating with was found dead of blunt-force trauma in her apartment, and she was on the run from the police. I still don’t know what happened, whether it was her or someone else who’d done it, but I realized that if I’d swallowed my pride for a couple more weeks, I’d have been likely to be the guy there when someone lost their temper and decided to beat someone to death.
I dated a woman for about 2 weeks while I was stationed in Germany. The morning after the first time we slept together she told me she wanted a baby and I didn’t have to be involved if I didn’t want to. Thankfully nothing was produced after that one night. I was young and stupid but I was able to figure out with that last piece information that she was batshit crazy. After I walked out that morning I never called her again. I did see her around after that and there was no sign of pregnancy. No I did not use protection. Like I said I was young, stupid and happened to be drunk. If I hadn’t dodged that bullet I would have an 18 year old kid with crazy Czech-German chick.
But **Student Driver **wins.
I thought this was gonna be about real bullets… ::: Never mind :::
I thought every guy dated at least a couple of dangerous bat shit crazy females before they wised up.
I did not find the right woman for 58 years… ::: Got her now.:::
Multiple incidents I dodged actual bullets. Once the sheriff was over and two kids shot while he was asking if they were still around. You could hear the whine of bullets and he was let’s get out of here, I’ll go get them right away. I originaly had all the siblings in the basement the first hint bullets were flying.
About 13 years ago, I started working for EDS in Lansing, MI doing computer helpdesk work. After three years, I quit that job when I started seeing things changing for the worst in the company. Besides, we wanted to be closer to our families in the Kalamazoo, MI area. I stopped by the old EDS building a few years back and it was completely vacant and the building was up for rent. Because of the decline in the auto industry in Lansing, there was no need for EDS to be in Lansing any more. Who knows where I would have had to move to if I chose to stay, or even if I would still have a job. I’m glad I moved and switched jobs when I did.
A few years back EDS was supposed to buy about a third of our IT work force from the non-IT company where I worked. We were all very upset about it since no one wanted to work for EDS. At the eleventh hour, maybe the day before the deal was supposed to happen, EDS was found out on some scandal and their stock tanked, making them unable to complete the deal. They then laid off a bunch of folks.
That was a group dodge. I’m sure I’ve dodged a large number of personal bullets; if I think of any I can share I’ll post them separately.
Subsitute the army for Siberia and Kosovo, and you’d be me, dude. To this day, I think about almost having married that wench. I’m quite satisfied with the woman I married.
In fact, scratch dodging a bullet. I dodged an A-bomb.
On edit: Actually, not quite. We hadn’t really discussed marriage, but we very well might have gotten married anyway.
Ha, I have an EDS related one too. There were many bullets I didn’t dodge when I was there, and I was actively looking for a job for a long time. Eventually, I applied to a job on a whim just because I liked the ad, even though I was management and the job was entry-level (and a small pay cut). I was just pretty torqued that day because I didn’t get a promotion I was gunning for, and it was given to someone who treated me (and most others) with disrespect.
I was really torn about the job prospect until the interview, where I was offered the job on the spot, and I got such a good vibe I took the job without even taking time to consider it.
In the end, I was making more by my 6 month review than I was at the old job. After I left, there was a huge management clean sweep causing utter chaos. In the end, the guy who passed me over for promotion was fired within two months for gross incompetence and the position I applied for was filled by 3 people in the next year, each of whom were fired or left on bad terms. The department I could have been in charge of was in utter chaos and the only other tenured person left a few months after I did. I’m so glad I didn’t get that ‘promotion’, because I would have turned down my awesome new job, where my boss is a close friend and they treat me with respect and flexibility.
Another relationship tale of potential woe.
I dated this she-demon of a girl off-and-on from age 18 to 21. It was a passionate, insane relationship with explosive, mind-blowing sex and drunken, drugged-out excess.
We finally split up for keeps and I went back home to Texas, while she stayed in Denver. I heard from one of my old Boulder buddies years ago that the aforementioned she-demon married some guy and eventually stabbed him in the face in the heat of a drunken domestic dispute. He ended up losing an eye and she got 3 years in the stony lonesome. If I were a nicer guy I would’ve said, “Oh man…that’s terrible. Poor guy…” but all I could muster was, “Christ, I’m not surprised. Better him than me…”
When I was a kid a buddy of mine had a BB gun. We were standing about six feet away from a tree and he was going to shoot it. I covered my left eye with my left hand. The BB hit the tree, deflected, then hit my left hand. It might have been a BB to the eye.
I lived with a g/f for 4 years. Things were not good, she historically handled all the bills. There was a sudden huge attitude shift, she was being polite to me again, we made love for 3 nights in a row instead of the maybe once every 10 days. As good as this might sound, alarms were going off all over in my head.
I came home early from work and she was in the shower. I wandered over to the computer and saw a lengthy chat conversation, with a guy. They apparently were planning on moving in together in about a week, she was planning on meeting him at the airport, she already had a new apartment lined up, and mentioned she would have plenty of money for rent etc because “Drachillix gets paid the day before you (new b/f) arrive”. I only had read about a third of the conversation before deciding to copy the whole thing to a text file and burying it in the windows folder.
When I finally had a chance to read the rest, i discovered this had been planned out for several months. The day she was due to pick him up she supposedly had a sorority function in Los Angeles.
on payday i conveniently “forgot” my check in my locker. She left the next day. I spent the next week packing all of her crap neatly into boxes. She showed up after the week was up with new b/f, her sister, and her BIL to help move her out.
It took about 30 min to haul all her neatly packed stuff out.
For the next few years we had a “Bitch X” is gone BBQ on Feb 2nd
You could say i didn’t totally dodge the bullet because she left some major unpaid bills and it took me 8 months to recover, but if I had not had the warning, I would have been left with $48 and about $2k in bills when I only made about $1200/mo. I probably would have ended up homeless if I had handed over that $600.
I’m not much of a pot smoker but somehow I ended up smoking pot in my dorm room one night. I hadn’t taken any “precautions” and the RA smelled it and the security folks showed up at my door.
I don’t know how but by the grace of Og I came up with a lie about having rolled and smoked some old tobacco since I was broke, and that musta been what they smelled. I even had the butt of said old-tobacco-cigarette in my ashtray, because I had indeed rolled it and smoked it earlier that day. They asked me to produce it and I did. Then they went away.
I can’t imagine what kind of shit would have befallen me if I got caught smoking pot in my dorm room. I’m a goody-two-shoes girl with a squeaky clean academic and criminal record. The apple of my parents’ eyes. The shame of my parents getting the news would have drastically altered the course of the rest of my life, let alone what the college might have had in store for me.
It still scares me, more than 10 years later. shudder
You were prepared.
Duuude…that is fifty different kinds o’ fucked up. And here I thought I had some horrific ex-girlfriends/ex-wives.
I broke up with my fiance after only a week engaged because I had realized in a flash of sudden (if belated) certainty at the moment he asked me to marry him, that I didn’t love him enough and never would. (FYI, guys, this is why the public proposal while hundreds of strangers stand around holding their breath waiting for the answer is not always a great idea.) I’m another one who is absolutely certain that if I had gone through with it I would now be divorced, in a very different place in every respect, and probably bitter and regretful.
I quit an academic job I hated almost a year ago now to take the job I currently have, even though it meant yet another move for me and there was no guarantee this job would work out any better than the hated job had. But today the economy has well and truly tanked and the position I held has been eliminated. If I hadn’t gotten out when I did, I would be jobless, one of hundreds now looking for work in a shitty market, and maybe on the verge of losing the house that I owned, because I would not have been able to maintain the mortgage without a job. Thank God I quit when I did; thinking about what probably would have happened if I hadn’t quit still makes me feel sick to my stomach.
A post I made in a similar thread a few years ago:
I have a similar story, only substitute:
BB Gun - AR15 assault rifle
Tree - railroad track
BB - bullet
eye - brain.
We were goofing around shooting stuff in a railroad gully. A pal with long hair was shooting and his hair got in the way of the scope, so he was missing low and hitting the railroad track. He shot twice before my pal tackled him and took the gun away. The bullets were heavily malformed by hitting the track, and they sounded like a big bumble bee as the were flying about 6 inches to the right of my ear.
Mentioned this somewhere on the boards before. On my bike stopped to make a turn, managed to catch sight of a car behind me not stopping. Jumped off it and away as the car plowed through my bike and went maybe 4-6 feet past where it hit me. Probably wouldn’t have ended up dead, but most likely would have had some broken bones otherwise.