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AIBU to ask what's the worst thing you've ever overheard someone say about you?

233 replies

Buttercup212 · 22/12/2025 19:16

Just that really. Luckily I haven't overheard anything about myself yet, but it occurred to me today that it must happen fairly often and I'm just curious to be honest! Also, if it happened to you, did the relationship survive afterwards or did you fall out?

OP posts:
Northcoastmama · 22/12/2025 22:20

My friends mum saying I would be a ‘high class hooker’ when I was 14 because I had danced with a minor celebrity at a party 🤷🏻‍♀️

Fetaface · 22/12/2025 22:20

When I was working as a teacher in a local school we had an awful boss. She was leaving and wrote ppl cards. In mine it said....

You'll make a great teacher...one day.

I had been qualified for 5 years and always had excellent results.

familyissues12345 · 22/12/2025 22:19

My DH’s “lovely” step mother - she’s said a selection of things over the years, commented that I was fat, needed my hair trimming and that she doesnt like the Christmas presents I buy (which she’d guessed were down to me, as she’s a stereotyping cow).

More recently I was overheard her say “ooh, does like her biscuits!”. In other words, was bitching over how fat I am.

Thankfully we have little to do with her!

SpoonBaloon · 22/12/2025 22:16

When I was at uni I walked through the doors into the lecture theatre and I heard a girl turn to her friend and say “everyone’s so ugly, aren’t they?”.

It amused me because I actually loosely knew her older sister who was absolutely lovely and absolutely gorgeous. But the younger sister had always had hard features and looked like she’d spent her childhood smoking 20 a day whilst working down the mines. Not helped by a hairstyle that aged her by about 25 years. But who am I to judge?

Also, when I was at school I somehow ended up briefly speaking to a girl I hadn’t spoken to before but who I had been to school with for a few years.

She was a bit clingy and I suddenly couldn’t get away from her. It was a bit awkward but she was tolerable. I didn’t understand why she was always attaching herself to me at breaks and lunchtimes.

Anyway after a few weeks of this she said to her friend that I was very annoying and that she was sick of me! I ignored her after that and essentially hid from her. Funnily enough she spent a few breaks and lunchtimes desperately looking for me because she had no one else to talk to.

StellaMary · 22/12/2025 22:14

At boarding school one of the boys scratched STELLAMARY IS A SLAG into a door and the school left it up for two years.

TheatricalLife · 22/12/2025 22:12

It does stick with you for life doesn't it.
Being called 'up myself' still makes me paranoid others think that and it's on my mind every time I speak to new people. I'm 44 now so it's been with me for 24 years. It changed the way I talk to people forever.

Menopausio · 22/12/2025 22:11

My then manager saying I walked like a drunken sailor and having a good old giggle. I have a chronic hip condition and was on crutches at the time.
I confronted her, the nasty witch.

Dontyoulooktired · 22/12/2025 22:08

TigerRag · 22/12/2025 21:52

Overheard two woman debating whether I'm faking my visual impairment because I dared to open something

Newsflash: we can hear you. Not everyone with a visual impairment has impaired hearing

Oh, im sorry, I get this too. I am partially sighted. I’ve even had comments on here saying “how are you typing this then?”

rainbowsinheaven · 22/12/2025 22:07

When I was 15 I worked in a restaurant and all the chefs, in their 30’s and 40’s used to make jokes about me having big hands amd
calling it man handling etc. I’ve hated my hands ever since.

Dontyoulooktired · 22/12/2025 22:07

My dad, when I was 14, and I’d done something really fantastic and brave and won a great accolade for “she was better than I thought she’d be, I thought she’d be rubbish.”

Fucking crushed the last bit of self esteem I had to hear that. I was badly bullied at school and it took a hell of a lot for me to get up in front of hundreds people and act in a short play that I’d also written. He also wouldn’t belive I wrote it. He said I must have stolen it from someone.

Then, I took the award from the arts festival into school to show my drama teacher.

As I walked out the room, she burst out laughing and said to another teacher, “well, that’s her peaked in life then, who does she think she is?”

So two crushing comments about the same thing. I never bothered again, I’d already been through so much and I just gave up.

Aworldofmyown · 22/12/2025 22:06

I was driving some friends to a weekend away, one of them was having some issues so I made a suggestion. I happened to look in the rear view and she was rolling her eyes and mocking me talking from the back. Ot still stings even though I know she's horrible.

CloseEncountersOfTheTurdKind · 22/12/2025 22:02

I helped out on a kids camp in my late teens and one of the adult leaders said that no one liked me and no one wanted me there.

PersephoneSmith · 22/12/2025 21:57

I found out recently that someone who bullied me dreadfully in high school was recently awarded an OBE for ‘services to disabled people’

The main theme of the bullying was my being a ‘spastic cripple’ due to being a wheelchair user.

That wasn’t something I overheard though, obvs, I just wanted to share.
I once overheard someone tell her friend that she was to ‘shoot her’ if she ever ended up looking like me :(

FunnyOrca · 22/12/2025 21:53

I used to listen in on my mum’s phone calls on the landline by picking up another phone in the house. Anyone else do this?

I had just had my first formal school dance with boys (all girls school, about 11 years old) and she was telling my aunt how ugly the dress I had picked to wear was and how I had no idea how odd I looked. The whole incident altered my brain chemistry.

TigerRag · 22/12/2025 21:52

Overheard two woman debating whether I'm faking my visual impairment because I dared to open something

Newsflash: we can hear you. Not everyone with a visual impairment has impaired hearing

ModernLife1sRubbish · 22/12/2025 21:51

Yes at work about 20 years ago. I'd been suffering from depression and had received some shocking family news which I had kept to myself at work. One of my colleagues, who had always made it plain she didn't like me, was on the phone to another member of staff, and looked towards me, and said "She's got a face like a slapped arse as usual", then gave me a horrible smile as she carried on her conversation. If that happened now, I would say something but, at the time, I felt so down and so fragile, I couldn't say a thing. I was distraught. Since then, Ive always given the benefit of the doubt to people who seem miserable or negative because you don't know what might be going on in their life.

MassiveBackstory · 22/12/2025 21:49

When I was 14/15 someone referred to me as ‘The Elephant Man’. That wasn’t great. Also a couple of years earlier than that I walked round a corner at school to find one of my friends doing an impression of the way I walked to amuse a sizeable audience of other girls (she had her back to me and said ‘Look at me, I’m MassiveBackstory!’ while the rest of the girls could all see me approaching!).

Kagoule · 22/12/2025 21:43

When I was 14 I overheard my one of my two best friends saying they’d had enough of me; I was so boring and “sad” it would be easier if I just killed myself so they didn’t have to dump me. They dumped me anyway, despite the hassle to themselves, the following week on my birthday and literally neither of them ever spoke to me again.

Later, I discovered I am not boring (though perhaps I was indeed a “saddo”). I am kind, funny, intelligent, witty, gregarious and charitable. It was their horrible bullying for three years that had sucked the life and personality out of me.

True to form, the universe hasn’t punished them and they are living wonderful lives without a backwards glance.

BengalBangle · 22/12/2025 21:40

Walking past a girl in my year when I was 13, I heard her say about me "She's got monkey lips and can't talk properly".

tinytemper66 · 22/12/2025 21:39

when I was a student teacher, I heard my mentor at my second placement tel another teacher that she wouldn’t want me teaching her kids. Has always stuck with me.
I complained to the university and was moved placements. Just retired after 25 years in teaching but I will never forget how that teacher made me feel.

Buttercup212 · 22/12/2025 21:36

@Wildflowerswildhorses That's so horrible and mean! I can understand why you would be so upset and shocked, but he sounds like a complete idiot and not remotely worth listening to. I'm sure it said far more about him and his own perverse need to assert himself by putting you in your place in front of your boss, than anything to do with you or your appearance.

OP posts:
TheatricalLife · 22/12/2025 21:35

When I started a new job at 20 I was one of three women out of around 300 members of staff. I was also the youngest women by many years.
I once overheard a group of men in the kitchen saying that I was up myself and they bet I was a right slag on a night out and other stuff along those lines. "Pretty but thick" was mentioned. Really hurt my feelings as I absolutely wasn't up myself at all and actually had very little confidence at all, plus I had a partner (now DH) so wasn't a "slag" in any way and had never given them any reason to think I was. Nor am I thick and was extremely good at my job.
I didn't say anything (being young and scared) and they were all always extremely nice to me outside of that conversation. One of them asked me out a month or two later 🤷‍♀️. I like to hope it was stupid male banter and showing off, but it still stings a bit years later and I remember how much my heart hurt listening to it. It was a really toxic workplace and I was constantly catcalled and touched up.

Iwantsandybeachesandgoodfood · 22/12/2025 21:29

“She’s clearly helping herself to the money.” Said by a relative of my mums who had learnt that I had POA of her finances (as well as health but that was irrelevant to the narrative). I didn’t hesitate to put them straight but it was still horrible to hear.

Clairee2 · 22/12/2025 21:25

Getting ready for a night out on a hen do, someone who I didn’t really know said far too loudly that I was ‘dressed to get a good shagging’. I was wearing a very standard dress for the hot country we were in.

XenoBitch · 22/12/2025 21:25

At work, I overheard someone say they had bumped into me in a different part of the building we worked in. Other person said "XenoBitch is such a dog".