Although there are many situations in school when you get to be held responsible for things you haven’t done, it is nothing compared with what one can get through during compulsory military service.
Arrested for possessing a stolen motorcycle. Spent a night in jail over it. It wasn’t stolen - title mishap. Had to go to court to prove I legally owned it.
One time, when my brother and I were very young, my mother found a dried-up little Flintstones vitamin in the living room. She asked if either of us had been taking the vitamins without permission, and we denied it. Mom then decided she was going to get the truth out of the guilty party, no matter what, and browbeat us for what felt like hours, getting nowhere. (I’m sure we would have chowed down on those little candy vitamins, given the chance, but they were kept in a high cupboard). Anyway, Mom finally told us we were going to be taken to the hospital to have our stomachs pumped. She got our shoes on and brought us out to the car. At this point, we’re both crying with fear. And then I had the bright idea that I could save us both by confessing to the crime! I did so, Mom was triumphant. Brother never did thank me.
Another time, I was about sixteen years old, working at McDonalds. During one shift I began to get queasy and asked to be allowed to go home. The manager said he needed me to stay, and asked me to go work on fries. Fries??? I took one look at that grease pit and headed for the door. A friend of mine happened to be in the lobby at the time, so I asked her to please take me home. She agreed, but wanted to swing by the bowling alley first to see if her boyfriend was there. So off to the bowling alley we went. She went inside for a while, I stayed out in the parking lot throwing up. After some time, I think she realized I wasn’t going to be any fun, so she returned and drove me home.
By this time, my manager had called my house to find out where I was, and my grandma was freaking out because she didn’t know. After hearing my story, Grandma decided that I must have allowed my friend to talk me into quitting my job so we could go hang out at the bowling alley. And that was that.
These terrible injustices have haunted me always, to the point where I have left instructions with my kids to please bury me under a tombstone inscribed with my name, birth and death dates, plus “I did not take that Flintstone vitamin and I did not quit my job because Deana told me to.” I think it would be great if they actually did that. 
Accused of verbal assault with threat of physical harm. Received a day off without pay and a corrective action memo in my folder. Union did nothing to help me, they said it was a he said, she said issue.
A few months later the same employee makes the same accusation against another, only this time there was a witness. Corporate Investigations is called in and it was determined that the “victim” was making false accusations against others. She is fired but HR chose not to clear the records or give back pay. They claim was there was never any clear and concise proof that something did not happen between me and this person.
In grade 7, a teacher caned me because I could not remember his name. I resolved to never get caned again.
Later that year, the jr. school headmaster (a wee little man about my size) tried to cane me for taking another kid’s hat (which I had not done), so I chased him about the room whacking him with his cane until he apologized. I found it amusing that he never reported the beating to my parents.
Kindergarten 1963 - I went home for lunch since I lived near the school. My Mom gave me some grape flavored hard candy that I brought back to school and shared with a friend of mine. A little while later some girl tells the teacher someone stole her chocolate candy bar, so the teacher makes everyone stick out their tongues, and there we are, me and my friend and our tongues are - yes, purple. So my friend points her finger at me saying I gave her the candy. So I got accused of being a thief. This was at the time when I was going to Sunday school too and learning that stealing is a sin, I was extremely upset. I went to sulk in the coat closet for awhile, then tried to make a break for the hallway and freedom, I remember the teacher and I having a tug of war over my arm with the janitors standing around watching. I ended up in the Principal’s office and my Mom had to come and get me. To this day I’m still not sure how it was resolved but I never did get an apology from the teacher.
The time my mom accused me of a similar thing gets re-enacted in my head at the oddest times. (Well, it was weirder, though. My first-grade class all signed a get well card for her, and she accused me of forging all their signatures.)
My advice: tell your mom about this. Give her a chance to apologize (which any sensitive human being would do), or in my mom’s case at least say “I have no recollection of that.” (not surprising, there was a drug problem involved)
But it felt good to bring it up, like the time I punched the neighborhood bully…
…well, okay, it was 50 years later at a high school reunion: “That was for beating me up on the way home from kindergarten.” “Well, I don’t remember that, but given my personality at the time, sounds like something I would’ve done.”
I had a boss that wrote me up because the telephone records at work showed I’d only made something like 3 customer calls in a week, and I was in credit/collections. I refused to sign the write up, stating I could get customers who would say I’d called more than 3 time in one day, let alone only 3 total calls in a day. The write up (my only one) went into my personnel file. About a month later the boss told me they were removing it, because he’d made calls from my desk phone, and they didn’t show up on the call logs.
And once, as a little kid, my family was at our vacation cottage. We went into a gift shop at some point early in the summer. A glass cat fell off the shelf and broke when I was an aisle away. I was accused of breaking it, and my mother bought the item. To pay her back I had to go without ice cream the whole summer while my siblings could go to the local ice cream shop regularly. I felt the injustice keenly.
StG
I was working at a sporting goods store, sales. A manager job was coming up. Only me and another (female) employee were being considered. Thursday was my day off. I came in on Friday and was ushered into the managers office along with an attorney. Someone had accused me of sexual harassment and I was terminated on the spot and escorted out of the building. No explanation of the circumstances or even who was harassed or accused me despite me asking.
I was furious and humiliated. Of course there wasn’t a whiff of truth to it. Guess who got the job?
Was it the another (female) employee?
I was fired the first week of a job for threatening the person working beside me. They claimed they had testimony from everyone around us regarding what I said. The problem was, they had testimony regarding what words were used, not how they were strung together. I strung them into a rather ungainly sentence that people that overheard it, or like the person it was directed to, not be all that there, might interpret it as a threat.* This was a problem because I was getting annoyed at her and that’s what prompted the comment in the first place, but it certainly didn’t help my view of her that she now was suddenly accusing me of threatening her. I eventually loudly swore at her, and that was really what caused people to care about what we had been talking about.
They called me that night and told me not to show up the next day. They then called me at the end of the day to tell me not to come back. I was not given any chance to defend what I had to say, and my attempts to defend myself then and there were just met with “we had witnesses”, failing to understand they effectively had the three blind men with the elephant as their witnesses. The whole room of workers was full of idiots other than the people leading. And the people in charge of me came to my defense in terms of how superb of a worker I was, but they apparently couldn’t come to any arrangement to keep me. So they fired the best worker they had because he said something the wrong way that a bunch of people misunderstood.
*It has come to my attention that this sentence itself is ungainly and hard to parse. Basically, I used words that could be used when threatening someone, even though the semantic content of them once parsed in full was the exact opposite. The problem was, they were too hard for below=average intelligence people to parse, and all they heard were the threatening sounding words.
These are all great, but this one is my favourite:
I mean, there have been more plausible scenarios as the basis for sitcom episodes. To be clear: I believe you, I can just totally see why you would never be able to convince your ex that this was how it went down :).
As a young kid in school I remember frequently getting into trouble for laughing at inappropriate moments, i.e. when someone else has done something wrong and the teacher is wondering who to punish - often it would be me even though I had nothing to do with it. But nothing that sticks out in my mind as much as the incidents recounted in this thread. On other occasions I have been able to convince people I was in the right because “I have an honest face” - apparently.
I don’t know exactly what I did wrong in the following situation, since I still don’t understand how to do it correctly.
I lived in NC at the time. I switched insurance companies for my vehicle liability insurance, making sure they overlapped the coverage. A week later, I was pulled over while driving. The officer told me that my license plate had been revoked. I had to leave the car in the parking lot and get a friend to give me a drive home. When I got home, I found a notice from the DMV in the mail. It stated that they had been notified of the cancellation by my previous insurance company and that my plate was being revoked. I definitely HAD overlapping insurance and even showed the officer my new and current insurance card. It didn’t do a bit of good. I had to go to court, show them my FS-1 form, talk to the prosecutor, get the charges dismissed, and then pay court costs. Pissed me off royally.
My brother pushed me into a window once. It broke, and if I hadn’t grabbed the curtains I’d have fallen through the window. It was only the ground floor, but I would have landed on top of a lot of broken glass.
My mom made me pay half the cost of the new window.
Two examples, in particular, stand out.
When I was six years old, I got the understanding, as I recall, that my father was interested in learning the lyrics from “My Own Home”, a song from the end of the Disney movie “The Jungle Book”, when Mowgli meets the girl from the man village and decides to follow her there. After a while, I conflated this song in my mind with the nursery rhyme “Bye, Baby Bunting”. The reason for this is almost certainly that in a book I had, “Disney’s Mother Goose”, which featured nursery rhymes illustrated with Disney characters, the illustration of this rhyme featured Little Hiawatha and a baby girl, and I mixed up these Native American Indian characters with the Indian Indian characters in “The Jungle Book”. So that was my first (honest) mistake. I then went to tell my father what I thought were the lyrics to “My Own Home”, but then I made another - again honest - mistake. I had not memorized the rhyme well. When reciting it to my father, Instead of saying that Daddy’s gone a-hunting “To catch a little rabbit skin/To wrap Baby Bunting in”, I said “to catch a rabbit to make a diaper”. I had assumed that this was what the baby was going to be wrapped in (at that age, I obviously didn’t know what swaddling cloth was), but my father thought I had invented the lyrics and was deliberately being crude or morbid; he shouted out: “What?! To make a diaper out of a bunny?!” - and slapped me across the mouth. At the time, my permanent front incisors had come in and had ridges on them - and they went into my lip and drew blood. At least my father was sorry afterward.
The second example involved my mother and happened when I was seven. I once had a day off school and was spending it at a neighbor’s at-home daycare. We were outside at one point and as it was a very wintry day, it happened that a small child slipped on the icy pavement. I moved toward her wanting to help her up, but the babysitter thought I had pushed her down. I don’t remember well how, if at all, I had attempted to defend myself, but I ended up forgetting about the incident. Later, when my mother came to pick me up, the babysitter took her aside and told her I had pushed or beaten a smaller child, outside of my earshot. My mother approached me absolutely furious and started dragging me home across the street, demanding to know “what I had done”. I had no idea what I had done. At home, she put me against a table and started beating the bejezus out of me, trying to extract a confession out of me. I had no idea what I was supposed to confess, and tried to find possible faults in my behavior that day; my mother kept demanding “and what else?” She did not stop until I was covered in bruises. It took some time for me to be told what I was being punished for, but I had forgotten the incident from earlier that day and could not recall having beaten up any small child - as indeed I had not. Only later - and much too late, did I remember, and managed to explain, that I had not beaten or pushed, but had actually tried to help the child that had fallen down herself, but it was obviously too late. My mother is a person who, as time went on, morphed from a generally loving and caring (if always the more disciplinarian) parent to an authoritarian, paranoid narcissist. In adulthood, following various disagreements and my calling her out on her treatment of me, I received a half-assed non-apology for this event: she stated that the only thing she regretted as regards my upbringing was that she beat me for something I had not done, while asserting that it “wasn’t her fault” as the babysitter had told her otherwise. I will just briefly add that my mother’s paranoia has caused her to accuse me, my father, and who knows who else, of various forms of malice, misinterpreting (I would almost say deliberately), right into adulthood, various innocent and honestly meant actions, comments and opinions as if they were somehow aimed against her, whereas they weren’t. She’s a textbook paranoid narcissist.
I don’t remember too many cases when I was wrongfully accused in school, but one or two incidents do come to mind. The one that strikes me as the most serious is when Mr. P.-J., a teacher I had for (mercifully) only one class in high school. I distinctly remember turning in a term paper to him, which he misplaced and then told me I had not turned it in, stating that he thought it was “even a little dishonest” of me to claim otherwise.
While working at Wal-Mart in my 20s I got called into the security office out of the blue, no idea why.
The loss prevention officer accused me of stealing and returning a couple gaming consoles for the cash and went full on into the “good cop” routine. After 45 minutes of trying to convince me it would be better if I confessed, he was on my side, and the cops don’t really care about such a small theft I demanded he search through the store’s records to find my purchases.
With a smug look on his face he pulled up the electronic records on his computer and turned the screen toward me. He looked less smug when the console purchases were there exactly when I claimed to have purchased them. He offered no apology and simply said “you can leave.” I guess I avoided the punishment but man that guy was a piece of work.
My 5th grade teacher gave us a 20-30 minute time window, in class, to read a chapter of our social studies textbook. Why this wasn’t homework I don’t know, maybe she needed some personal time.
You need to understand I loved my 5th grade social studies book. Each chapter was about a primary school aged brother and sister that lived in a different part of the world. There were kids from Northern Alaska and France. There were Saudi kids and Chinese kids. It talked about what they wore, what they ate, what their parents did, how they worshipped, how they lived. It fascinated me, I spent many evenings at home with my nose in my social studies textbook.
So, not only was I a fast reader, I’d read the entire book cover to cover several times before that day. So, when we got the in class reading assignment, I skimmed the chapter, then I started doing something else. I don’t remember if I started drawing or something or if I just read ahead in the book.
But the teacher saw I wasn’t reading the assigned chapter, and accused me of not having read it. So she took me into the library to quiz me privately (the school building was modern, and the 5th and 6th grade classrooms all had a secondary entry door that connected directly to the library.)
I gave her a highly comprehensive rundown of the life of children from the South Pacific Islands, demonstrating such a detailed knowledge of the material that it kind of left her speechless.