Please tell me about times you have massively overreacted so I don't feel like such an idiot!

[Lalalalalalalalaland]

DD aged 5 is home from school today as it i shut.

DD and I were in the living room while I was doing the hoovering when suddenly I had this overwhelming feeling someone was stood behind me, i turned round to see the back of a man dressed in black slipping in to my kitchen.

Absolutely crapped myself, left hoover running, ran to DD whilst motioning for her to be quiet, the terror in my face mesnt she actually complied for once. Grabbed the only threatening item I could see around me which was a bloody plastic shoehorn! My head went a million miles an hour but figured if we went out the back patio doors from the living room i could put DD over the fence to next door and then climb over (its only 4ft).

So I'm backing up to the patio door so as not to turn my back on the murderer in the kitchen, clutching a terrified DD and a shoehorn when the man steps out of the kitchen.

Its fucking DSS! I had forgotten he was here (though he has been here a week) he had just woken and come down for a drink, he just stood there looking at us all confused, shrugged and then trotted back up upstairs.

Now feeling like a right twat! Has anyone else massively overreacted like this!

I had the phone in my hand to report DS14 missing, he hadn't come in from school, no shoes, no bags. I checked with the neighbours, no one had definitely seen him on the bus. I knew the first question from police would be 'have you checked the house'.
He was upstairs in his room. For once in his life he'd tidied his stuff away.

Back in the 90s I worked in a bank. We were all gathered for a meeting where we were told that we weren't allowed to give any literature to minors, a colleague went off one one, saying how disgusting it was that we were discriminating against miners, and that just because they were on strike was no reason to persecute them. I mean a full on rant in front of everyone.

The manager giving the presentation said to her, errrrr X we are talking about people under the age of 18, not coal miners priceless

I'm laughing at the thought of cobwebfew hovering!

Aah all these are classics. I've done the whole "someone is looking through the window" heart attack plenty of times only to calm down when I've realised it's actually me..
My reflection looking back 🙄🤦🏼‍♀️

Most recently however, I had just put DS (1year old) to bed, closed his baby gate and took myself off downstairs. Immersed in the TV programme I was watching & nearly shot off the sofa when DS exclaimed hiya!
I still don't know how he managed to get the gate open.

Love danadas catnapping, sorry I mean rescuing, a three legged cat!

Well there was the time DH and I were woken up by a scuffling sound from downstairs. Clearly we had An Intruder. DH grabbed the nearest thing to hand which happened to be his cricket bat and headed downstairs to find....
Next doors soppy moggy having broken in, found a box of catnip which we thought had been tidied away, had split the box open and was merrily rolling in it, high as a kite.

Or the time I was around ten, woke up and thought I'd gone blind. I could see a vague beige blur with indistinct shapes that I couldn't focus on. I shrieked.
Then I remembered I'd gone to bed with my head at the other end of the bed to usual. The beige blur was the painted wall and the indistinct shapes just reflection.
Sigh.

Reminds me of this badly injured “leopard” found in the road which turned out to be a discarded onesie

Helps if you attach the pic...

Ffs!

Ha ha my dc used to regularly make me jump when they were toddlers. One memorable morning I woke up in bed gasping to find my 2 year-old looming over me holding a teddy on my face Thankfully he hasn't grown up to be a psycho.

These are so funny, the poster that got attacked by her own coat rack made me laugh.

When my first child was about 4 months old, sleepless nights, hormones making me worry about everything.
One day, we found 3 weird looking fingerprints on out patio door. Neither my husband nor I could figure out how they appeared and agreed they weren't human fingerprints... we concluded it must have been some kind of elves.
For a week I slept in my child's bedroom in case they wanted to climb through his (closed) window to kidnap him.

I don't often tell this story...

Number of years ago now, when we still lived in our old house... DH (then DP) headed off to work in the morning and I went back to pottering around in the kitchen. Next thing, I hear the side door opening and completely freak out that he's forgotten to lock the door and someone is breaking in! So I bolt through to the lounge in a complete panic and fully open the sash window to climb out, somehow managing to cut all my back in the process. Only for it to dawn on me the second I was out the window that DPs car is back on the drive. He'd forgotten his bag. By the time I turned round he was stood staring at me from inside the lounge looking completely bewildered

Oh gosh I love this, ive let my bath go cold because I couldn't drag myself away! When I was younger, and full of self importance I answered the door to a man who passed me a tablet and a set of car keys and just said sign please. I snatched the keys and ran out the front thinking my parents had bought me a car for recently passing my test! I was jumping up and down and couldn't wait to set eyes on my new shiny car... he pulled out a letter from his pocket and asked for his keys back. The embarrassment still stings!

My son came out of preschool carefully holding a plastic bag so I enthusiastically bounded over to him in front of the other parents to see what he'd made. Cakes? A model? Wow you clever boy!

No the bag emitted a stench. It contained his soiled pants after a toilet accident. Cue sheepish walk past parent queue

I’m a massive arachnophobe, embarrassingly so (relevant).

When dd was around 2ish she was toddling around the living room, suddenly she bumbled up to me and handed me a massive fat spider. I did what any good parent would do at this point and screamed and jumped up from the sofa to flee the devil beast.

Unfortunately, in my haste as I threw my legs up and back down I somehow managed to dragon kick dd across the room. It was of course at this point I realised she’d actually handed me some random black thread

Oh gosh I cycle to work past a building site and one day last summer one of the builders shouted, “Hey, baby” at me as I rode past. I stopped and had a right go at the increasingly confused builder, who had just shouted something completely different to his mate and clearly had no idea what the mad woman was yelling about. I cycled off slowly uphill as quickly as I could but I have to go past them every time and am still mortified.

Ohhh so many moments

1. I had a highsleeper bed as a teen, I had fallen asleep and woke up in the pitch dark to hear creaking. Realising someone was climbing the ladder to my bed I grabbed my hardback book, screamed and smacked it as hard as I could on top of the creepy murderers head. Creepy murderer turned out to be my mother coming to check on me 😂 we laugh about it now.
2. when my youngest daughter was 4 weeks old I took her and her big sister to the shops, I looked in the pram to check on my lovely newborn only to find the pram empty. I panicked and was about to call for help when I realised I was feeding her.
3. I once rang my partner to tell him that someone was trying to break into his mum's house, while hiding in our wardrobe. It was his brother, he had forgotten his key, didn't realise I was indoors and was climbing through the dog flap.

Oh and my mother once threw a whole bucket of water over me in the middle of winter while de-icing her car because I made her jump (or maybe it was revenge for the book incident 😂)

When Dd was a baby my DB would look after her two days a week to help me out whilst I worked. My dad would drop him off at 5am, on his way to work, and DB usually would let himself in and fall asleep on the sofa until we woke up at 7am.

I'd got my days mixed up and I came downstairs to my living room door open (I always shut it at night) and realised someone was in there. I just saw a hooded figure bent down in the dark and I ran in brandishing a sweeping brush and screamed at him to get out of my house. He then started screaming looking behind him and crouching down. We were both just high pitch screaming and I realised pretty quickly it was my brother but the adrenaline had taken over and I literally could not bring my voice back down from a scream and I was screaming an apology and explanation at him.

I'm crying laughing trying to write this 😂

I've done the screaming and running,thinking my Dd as a toddler had handed me a huge spider,when it was actually a bundle of black thread.
An incident that happened to me a good few years ago wasn't so much scary as hilarious. My Dd,who was about 15 at the time told me to come and look out of the kitchen window one night.'Look at that window' she said,pointing to a house that backed onto ours. 'It looks like someone is dressed as a devil,and is dancing,just inside the window'. Sure enough,that was exactly what it looked like. It was only after it had gone on for several hours that we started to wonder whether it was actually the case. It was only the next day,in the daylight,that we realised our 'dancing devil' was in fact the top of a pointy tree (like a fir tree) just in front of a first floor window,swaying from side to side in the strong breeze. From where we standing,we imagined that bits of the foliage were a long cloak,horns and a 3 pronged fork. Talk about feeling daft. Our 'dancing devil' is family folk lore now.

Danadas.

I have no idea, its quite long but doubt it would inflict any pain. I have now decided i need more weapon-like ornaments around my home!

Cinderellassecrets

Oh god that book one has reminded me of another overreaction.

My evil older sister had forced me to watch 'the ring' with her when i was about 10. I had a loft bed with a light above it. Just to set the scene... my mum is very pale with long straight black hair. I very rarely saw her with no makeup on and her hair down, she always wore it up.

So I've fallen asleep in bed and half wake up and see the top of this black straight head climbing up my steps and scream absolute blue murder. Only to realise as the face popped up that it's my mum! She went 'oh my god lala what is the matter' and the first thing thst spluttered out when i stopped screaming was 'mummy you are so scary with no makeup on'

Never lived that one down

I once walked out of my utility room to my kitchen sink at night, husband on nights, kids in bed I stood at the sink about to make a drink when I saw the reflection in the kitchen window of a tall man with shaved hair in my dining room behind me (open plan dining room) my blood ran cold I think my heart stopped I stood there plotting how I'd get up stairs get the children out of bed then run to a neighbour whilst ringing my husband........ turned around slowly to start the escape and he'd gone, turned back round he was back but it was then I realised it wasn't the reflection of a strange man it was my next door neighbour stood in his kitchen, our kitchen windows are almost facing each other so it really looked like he was in my house!! I still can't explain it properly but I was terrified!!

I laughed properly at @Leah2005’s fantazmarooni meeting the police over the imaginary intruder.

Just the other evening I was sitting in the living room when there was was a bang bang bang against the internal door. It stopped then .... bang bang bang again.

The dog started growling, and the cat on my lap jumped off in fright. I was terrified!

So I grabbed the tv remote and slowly went towards the door.

I flung open the door .. whilst shouting "Fuck you wanker!!!" And waved the deadly tv remote around.

It was the fucking robot vacuum ....

I was shaking when I went back in the living room!! I had been sooooo scared!!

Getting out of the car in our residential car park, DH crept around the car, shrunk down and gnarled at me. My brain could literally not understand what I was seeing (evil death gremlin?) and my mind FLIPPED THE FUCK OUT. I let out a horror movie scream, before my husband realised what was happening, stood up and apologised (I have no idea what came over him!!) and we settled into our house.

We had security on the site, who peeked out of the window and saw my DH go in the house. He came to the door with his very vicious Alsatian and nearly set the dog loose after my husband answered the door and said "Everything's fine, no trouble at all". He understandably didn't believe him till I came out to apologise for all the fuss.