Electric shocks: I’m slightly hesitant about opening doors with metal handles, and generally nudge or use my feet to close car doors. I’ll rarely touch the rubber handrail on escalators (though I think it’s actually the metal part below that zaps). I always imagine shocks or ‘a tingle’ when I’m plugging cables in and out. The only time that this has genuinely been a problem was when I crashed a quad bike into an electric fence and couldn’t bring myself to pull it off.
Bleach. I’m afraid of laundry (100%) bleach.
I’ve even worked in the restaurant industry & used bleach mixures for cleaning/disinfecting. But I won’t handle bleach at home, I’m not particularly fond of buying it in the store, and I won’t make the bleach mixtures myself for dish cleaning.
I suspect that at some point when I was a little tyke my mom saw me reaching for the bleach & scared me off touching it with things about burning skin or damaging eyes, although I don’t remember anything specific.
Somehow, it’s stuck. And I’m 36. :rolleyes: Drives me nuts, but I haven’t been able to confront it…and since I don’t have to use it, I don’t. Himself keeps some for laundry & cleaning…but I don’t use it. At all. Ever.
My only fear with automatic toliets is that the nasty toliet aerosols are projected more rapidly and intensely than they are by a regular toliet. Also, I’m always scared the toliet is going to flush when I’m not really finished, but this isn’t irrational since it’s happened before on numerous occassions.
And I have another one: people dressed up in plushy animal suits. When I worked at Six Flags, a guy dressed up like Sylvester crept up behind me, lifted me off of my feet, and took me out back (“off stage”, as we called it). Then he dropped me down on the ground and took off. I screamed so hard that my bottom lip cracked open (it was chapped) and started to bleed real bad. I never found out who that guy was, but ever since then I’ve been weary of the Plushies.
Yep. I’ve had them flush on me that way, too. It’s a bit disconcerting.
The aerosol deal freaks me out, as well, I’d forgotten about that. Though the feeling I get is like I can’t get away from that crazy spray in time, because the stalls always seem too small… like being in a tiny room, trapped, while a geyser goes off. Blech.
I’m starting to get that way after reading a book on microbiology. That and noticing how more and more people don’t even wash their hands when leaving the bathroom.
I’m not sure if this helps any, but as a person who has had this happen to him several times… It’s not -that- terrible. Painful, sure, but not irreparable. I’ve grown back three tonails so far.
Granted, the first time it got infected and I felt like I was gonna die… But that’s not helping, is it?
Anyway, my irrational fear? Something is wrong with my car. WHenever I’m driving, if I get just a little bit of wiggle in a turn, or I feel like the acceleration isn’t right, or I even hear the slightest odd noise, I start panicking and assuming my car is on the verge of breaking down and stranding me somewhere. I shudder to even think about it now. ::shudder::
My fear exactly! I get my kids to plug things in. I don’t fear that they will get shocked, only that I will. And I do get static electricity shocks almost every time I touch something metal, or even touch other people. I have nightmares that I’m crawling under an electric fence and I have to get out before I get shocked. I think it stems from that time when I was 11 and I stuck a pair of tweezers into an outlet to see what would happen.
Another fear I have is when I’m paying for something with my debit card, I’m always petrified that it’ll be denied. Even if my paycheck was just deposited, and I know I have hundreds of dollars in there, I stare at the monitor with my heart in my throat until it says “approved”.
Another one is being homeless. No matter how hard I work or how much money I have in the bank, I can’t help but envisioning myself living at the Salvation Army, sleeping on a plastic mattress.
First, when I’m walking up fire-escape type stairs, the kind with no back to the stairs and a nice open gap where my feet can go through, I’m terrified that my feet will somehow shoot forward at a strange and unnatural angle and I’ll get stuck/fall through.
Also, when I’m up very high and there’s nothing but a shortish barrier between me and a terrible fall, I’m sure that I’ll get an urge to throw myself off it, so I have to stay away from the edge. Which is absolutely retarded because I’m not in the least suicidal. I’m just scared that my body will think “Hey, falling is fun” and fling me over before my conscious self can speak up.
I also sometimes fear that I’m not actually all that smart and the whole world will find out after some horribly embarrassing episode where I expose my mediocrity and nobody will love me anymore. But that’s just normal paranoia. 
This is making me laugh my ass off!
I have that. Also, balconies with low barriers seem much more likely to break off than ones with high barriers I can lean on.
That’s not an overwhelming fear with me, but the possibility does cross my mind in such situations. Probably we’ve all seen too many movies and TV shows where people have fallen, jumped, or been pushed over low barriers, or where the barriers have broken in order to send someone plunging to their death.
It’s not just me! There are more people in the wholly irrational fear of heights brigade.
Though I’m sure the structure has been tested for exactly these sorts of problems, there are stores that I can’t go into for fear of tripping and flying over their ill-conceived and terrifying balcony, or going suddenly mad and just running straight at the edge and flinging myself over it.
I did a tour of the new Seattle Public Library which was great, until the top floor where the tourguide had her back to a multi-story view. I’m sure that other people were thinking “nice view,” or “interesting,” while I was thinking “we’re all going to die! Every one of us! Get away from the railing!” and backing up as far as I could while still being able to pretend to listen while I was searching for a place to get down. And those glass floors that support people’s weight? Ha. We’ve just been very lucky so far. Someday, someone’s going to fall through one, and it isn’t going to be me - because I can’t walk on them. It’s too scary.
Most of the rest of my fears are quite sane.
I also hate walking over grates, etc. for fearing of dropping things.
Losing my car keys - I’ve never lost my keys, or locked them in my car. But I’m so paranoid about doing it. If I’m getting out of my car, I’ll have to check three or four times to make sure I’ve tossed my keys in my purse, and they’re not on the seat or something.
Garbage disposal things. Completely irrational fear. But I can’t stand near them, or put anything in them, or even empty a glass into a sink with one.
Not having enough money for something. I’m a waitress - I always have cash on hand. But like someone mentioned above, I can be buying just a can of pop or pack of gum and I’ll be worried that somehow I won’t have enough, even though my wallet is full of tens and twenties.
I rarely have a problem with heights, but I’ll also sometimes get that feeling - “What if I decide to hurl myself over the edge?”. Where does that come from, anyway?
Whenever I look over a bridge parapet, balcony railing or what have you, I always worry my glasses are going to fall off. I sometimes reach up and take hold of them in case they suddenly should leap off my face. And yes, I have had them well fitted; they never fall off in the normal course of things.
I don’t look off high places at all unless there’s a good sturdy railing high enough for me to take hold of. No railing or parapet? Then I’m taking hold of Mother Earth by crouching or lying down. Even then I’m not looking over the edge for long.
Oddly, I didn’t have much fear of heights when I was young. It got much worse after I tried skydiving.
-
Sharp things. Razors, vegetable peelers, cheese graters. I have this weird “feeling” that I’m going to slice myself with one
-
Add me to the fear of heights/uncontrolled falling band wagon.
-
That my hair will fall out or will go some weird shade of green or orange when I put a colour through it.
Being homeless. I went for a short period in the early 80’s without a roof over my head when a couple of siblings took it upon themselves to throw me out of my mother’s house while I was unemployed. Due to some health issues with my wife in the past couple of years, we got behind on our house payments and the fear rose up again. Sometimes I wake up at night and can’t get back to sleep worrying about losing my house even though we are current on our mortgage.
Similar to the fear of jumping off things, sometimes I feel, just before I pick up a knife, that I’m going to stab myself with it. Once I have the knife, it’s fine.
I have two minor irrational fears. One is elevators – I feel uneasy in them, but not panicked or claustrophobic. The other is dropping my keys down a hole (like a sewer grate). I always hold them tightly when I see a place they might fall into.
A few years ago I had the misfortune of having both of them combine. I had just moved into my apartement complex when I dropped my keys down the elevator shaft (there was a crack when the doors were open). Luckily it was only a four-foot-deep hole and I could see them but it was late at night and I had no way to get in to my apartment. It all turned out well as I eventually found a way to recover them using only a box of stuff that was still in my car (involving string, a lighting track, a clothes hanger, and a speaker).
In fact, I had even planned to start a thread on the SDMB about it at that time, relating my silly story and soliciting similar irrational fears. I was going to title the thread, “Your worst irrational fears realized”. I will be forever thankful that I didn’t write the thread that night. It was September 10, 2001.
NO! Please tell me that it’s not possible to actually drop the keys down the shaft! :eek: That’s my most irrational fear, and it one could actually do it, then it would become a rational fear!
I’ll get my keys out to open the outer door to the apartment building, and then return them to my pant’s pocket to make sure I don’t have them out.
That (when we are camping) a car will drive or roll over our tent in the middle of the night; I always choose a pitch in such a position as to make this unlikely, and park our own car defensively to block anyone from inadvertently mowing us down in our sleep.
Still women. I dread the “Oh my god, you like me?!”