Juiciest conversation/message exchange you've accidentally overheard/seen

[Echobelly]

For a bit of fun, have you ever heard a conversation or seen an exchange of messages that you're not supposed to but you can't help tuning into?

About a year ago I was next to an older guy on the tube who was typing out a furious email, presumably to an adult child, along the lines of 'Your grandfather would be ashamed, the businesses of [Family Name] has to be passed on....' and things along those lines. I just caught a glance of it and was transfixed. Serious family melodrama! The whole tone of it was like something from a vintage TV series, I honestly didn't think anyone actually talked (typed?) like that anymore.

I'm a director of ops for a very small firm, and when we had a member of staff leave very abruptly, her mailbox was added to mine so I could intercept urgent emails etc and gradually redirect traffic.

Digging around for some info one day, my advanced search revealed that she was not in the habit of emptying her deleted emails folder - one of my keywords had flagged a personal email she had sent from her work device, and thus the entire conversation.

I couldn't quite grasp the dynamic of the relationship, but there were a LOT of pet names and bizarre, childlike language between them, and it is one the strangest things I have ever read. Certainly shades of sub/dom, BDSM etc.

I read it agog, then permanently deleted it and have spoken of it to no-one. I will take it with me to my grave; but the lesson is never to use a work email account to send something you wouldn't ever want read by a third party not already wearing a gimp mask.

During my lunch break I once received a torrent of texts from someone saying rhat I could have the kids, they give up, they've probably got cervical cancer and I win.

I was 19, female, single, and child free.

Yikes! That's definitely 'sorry wrong number'

I weirdly once got an NHS letter that was evidently a copy of a referral from GP to consultant with my name and address on it, describing me as a 'lady in her 60s with breast cancer' - uhm, no I was 38 and definitely didn't have breast cancer. I contacted the GP to let them know there had been an odd mistake.

I was waiting outside a phone box many years ago and the man in the box was having an absolute blinder of a row with the person on the other end of the line. A phrase that stood out to me was,"....and you've given me a disease."

This isn't juicy, but has stuck with me for years!

It was about 7am, outside a busy train Station and this lady rushes past, absolutely furious and shouting down the phone at someone.

She was going so fast I only caught the words '..and SALAD?!?!'

I cannot express how angry she was. I have never heard the word 'salad' spat out with such venom. I genuinely considered running after her to ask why she was so offended by tomatoes, but alas, she was long gone.

I walked past a young woman in a very small crop top yesterday as she was announcing to her friend in a very loud voice, ‘I’m gonna shag someone in Magaluf.’

The expression on her face made it look like more of a threat than an intention.

I'm awful for looking at phones on the train/tube - the 'I'm desperate for a poo' always make me lol

🤣🤣🤣

Unsure if this one really counts, but I was sat on a bench adjacent to a beachside carpark once, when a car drove in with a mattress bungie-corded to the roof. The vehicle did a circuit of the carpark and then drove off.

I was fascinated.

Did their mattress really need an airing? Were they on the way to the dump, but decided to check out the surf en route? Had they been planning an alfresco romp on the beach, but discovered it was too busy?

I shall never know...

Totally watching this thread for some juicy stranger gossip / overheards. Come on MN. Don't disappoint.

This reminds me of a game my flatmate and I used to play on tube journeys. We’d go into separate tube carriages, then when it stopped one of us would get out and go into the other compartment and react with fake shock at seeing the other person. We would then have a conversation along the lines of the one you overheard, or about a pregnancy or something. I think we had watched too much Eastenders/ Jeremy Kyle. These days we’d have to have another friend film it for Tik Tok or something.

I was on the bus a while back and there were two women sitting in front of me, chatting away. The part of the conversation I caught was when one said to the other 'well you can imagine the shock they got when they found out she'd left it all to the cats home'

I was in a Thai restaurant in Chelsea years ago and heard a middle aged guy tell his elderly mum not to worry about David Cameron being a bit wet, his main backer amongst the grandees was Norman Tebbit and the “hug a hoodie” stuff was just to get past the “nasty party” image.

Heard my bosses through the baby monitor discuss the sex they’d had the night before, where he was telling her she loved it 🤮

Just this morning walking through town with DD a woman stormed past and bellowed 'You're a disgusting tramp' into her phone.

My friend and I were sat in an airport bar and a woman at the table right next to us, clearly a couple of drinks down, was berating her lover on the phone very loudly. That he wasn’t leaving his wife. Lots of insults. All the tables around were just sat in shocked silence. Couldn’t really avoid listening!

Someone I know saw someone employed by a competitor, with some information that they should have been very much more careful with on the train.

"Never mind going on your fucking holidays all the fucking time , sort your kids out ! AND your house!!! "

Overheard someone shouting it down the phone as they strode past me in the local town

Bit like Jiraff, an employee was sacked under bad terms and I was tasked with triaging his inbox and clearing his office. He had taken his personal items with him or so I thought. Turns out, the man was a pathological liar or lived the most complicated life. He was obviously in financial difficulty, although had been on a significantly large salary with us.

He sent graphic sexual emails to women who were not his wife, wasn't surprised always thought him a bit seedy, most of them read like Adrian Mole. He sent emails to (from what I could gauge) creditors, friends and distant relations excusing himself from ever being in contact as he had been caught up in Welsh (?!) organised crime gangs/an illegal organ harvesting conspiracy/an undercover operation against a politician. He seemed to be at times saying he was some sort of law enforcement despite emails coming from his John.Doe@Very DullAccountancyFirm.com was properly odd.

Got worse when I found the letters. Pages and pages of letters to creditors, banks, DVLA etc. All again wild excuses about not making payments. Excuses ranged from the terminal brain cancer he was suffering to not being able to work due to PTSD from his latest military tour.

No wonder he never got any fucking work done!

Oh and another one -
DH and I in a kebab shop when a girl comes in and starts yelling at another girl in the queue about girl 2 having sex with her own uncle. Girl 1 then said…
”You know what that is?! That’s incense!”
This is why joss sticks are known in our family as incest sticks.

I used to periodically receive porn DVD brochures in the post that the man who lived at my house before me was clearly on the mailing list for.

I used to quite often take early evening weekday trains back from London to the North and all the seats would be full of people heading back after business meetings.

The number of men who would ring their wife with a false ETA and then ring their mistress to arrange a quick meeting when the train arrived was both astounding and depressing.

I also heard a ton of confidential business info about redundancies, takeovers, new clients etc., including from people in my own industry.

I was sat in a coffee shop. At the table next to me a bloke was breaking up with his girlfriend swearing blind there wasn’t anyone else.

The second she left he got on the phone: I’ve told her….no I didn’t say anything about you.

Snap not from London another city but it was the same people travelling at the same time. I’d hear calls for domestic arrangements then calls to snuggly woofs or whatever. They seemed to think nobody could hear them

I was on a train recently and an average middle aged man sat beside me, leaned forward and had his phone on full display practically in front of my face.

The first thing a saw was a massive message from a woman dumping him for not loving her, not being attentive enough etc. He put a thumbs up back, and then went on to WhatsApp 5 more woman with messages and love heart emojis. Then he went onto FB and started liking every woman's photo, and then onto messenger telling multiple women they looked amazing and he missed them.

Kept me entertained on a boring train journey anyways.