In doing my MSc in forensic pathology and anthropology, there is a final practical exam component. The examiner hauled in a large cardboard box. The type/size you would store documents in.

When dumped on the table, it looked like a broken plant pot. No piece was bigger than 1.5 inches diameter. He then goes "could you find all the pieces of *example of bone* and reconstruct it please?

Turns out it was a ~16 year old girl whose boyfriend had caved her head in with a stone and cut her into tiny bits before burying her in a field.

Only reason she was found was because her decomposing flesh caused the plants right hear her body to be oddly large and lush for a dry forgotten field.

So, not forensics (entirely), and not me. I had a professor in college that was pursuing her doctorate while working at the Mayo Clinic.

Year after year, a man came in to be tested for a disorder/disease that [ended] his father at that very hospital. Year after year, he tested negative. But every year, he got tested in an effort to stay ahead of it. Because, genetics.

One year, he tested negative as usual, but the staff had an idea. They cracked open the archives, dug his father's file out & put it next to his. DNA wasn't even close.

Poor guy has no idea his late father was never his biological father at all. And the hospital has no right or obligation to inform him.

I’m a paramedic. I have plenty of bad parenting stories, but perhaps one of the worst cases I have seen was a baby girl that was starved. She was about 6 months old. We were called to help a smaller service and when we got there we found out that it was the grandma that had called us. She was seizing due to malnutrition and sheer neglect. The little girl was just skin and bones. We rushed her to the hospital where we were met by her angry parents. They were mad at us and the grandma for taking the little girl from home to get her medical help.

Oh boy here we go, I lived in Abitibi, back in 2013 for about a week, my hometown was the coldest town on earth. I was at a friend's place, playing cards and his 4 years-old daughter was a real pest, but hey, it's a kid, I could tolerate with ease. At one point, she grabbed my deck of cards and threw it on the wall, messing it up somewhat, but nothing too bad. Her dad then took her, started yelling and took her to the patio, locking the door. She was in her pajamas. I started giving him an earful and he told me 'relax, it works every times.' WHAT?!?!?! I shoved him away, took his daughter back in, she was already so cold! I called the police while he was berating me. He's still out there, but divorced and his now teenage girl don't want anything to do with him.

My cousin had a kid, poor little guy, and she just gave him a screen all the damn time. He got to 6 years old and could barely speak. He got so frustrated that he couldn't communicate his feelings he developed really bad anger issues and had to have therapy. That's a side of the family I ignore. So horrible, I hate to think what else went on with him.

Working in visiting at the jail I’m employed by. Mom brought in a two week old baby to meet the father. When she handed the baby to him he said “i don’t want that” and threw the baby on the floor, not dropped, thrown.

We had the medical team rush to help and we called an ambulance for the baby. No idea how that kid is now. This was five years ago.

I had a coworker steal a mango smoothie from the fridge. Long story short, I knew without a doubt that she was the one who stole it, yet she denied it regardless. It was probably a $5 smoothie, and I couldn’t have actually cared less about the smoothie itself, but was annoyed by the blatant lying about it. After she left work at the end of the day. I stole the M, A, N, G, and O keys off of her keyboard. I placed them in the fridge where my mango smoothie previously resided, strategically to spell out MANGO upon opening the fridge. I don’t think she found it particularly funny the next day when she arrived to the office with an incomplete keyboard, but to me, it was the perfect, humerous revenge.

More than 25 years ago, I worked at a factory and about a few weeks prior, I started to notice a snack missing from my lunch. Some days it was just my potato chips, but it had started to become the cookie every day. Just one, as my wife would normally pack me two. I asked around and of course nobody knew anything.

The only out of the ordinary thing going on at the place was a very rotund and arrogant young man that had started about a month earlier, about the same time that I noticed bits of my lunch had gone missing. He had also said that it wasn’t him.

So I came up with a devilish idea. I made a big batch of chocolate chips cookies and brought them in for everyone to enjoy, except for two larger cookies that had an entire box of chocolate exlax baked face down into into them, which remained in my lunchbox.

It was the Wednesday before thanksgiving and my shift started at 11pm that night. I passed out the regular cookies to everyone at work to set the trap. 1am, nothing. Both cookies were still in my lunchbox. Oh well, I keep working.

3am rolls around and one of the cookies is missing. I joyfully go around telling everyone what I had done and to keep an eye on the restroom for the perpetrator. He should be easy to spot since he will likely be sprinting.

4am, I return to my workstation to realize the 2nd cookie was now missing. Uh, yeah I didn’t expect that they would take both cookies. It was usually just one. Whoever the suspect is now had enough exlax to propel the to the stratosphere.

5am, nothing yet but everyone’s eyes are on the restroom.

6:15am, this streak of safety gear wearing a hard hat comes bolting from the corner of the plant, screaming in agony and busts through the restroom door. It was indeed the young rotund probationary employee.

Everyone had a good laugh and a couple of coworkers decided to stand outside of the stall door and harass this poor young man. “I’ll bet you’ll never steal anyone’s lunch again kiddo”. “Now you’ll be spending Thanksgiving on the can. Your mama can slide your dinner under the door for you”.

The kid still denied it was him. Nobody believes it though, but my lunch was never messed with again.

I didn’t specially order the food in spite but one day I catered a huge order from a popular bbq place and didn’t tell the coworker who stole people's lunches (more than once from several people)

When he came down to the break room and he saw most of the company in there enjoying the food he asked why nobody told him. I looked over at him and said “we’ve been starving all week because someone keeps stealing lunches from the fridge, you never seem to complain about it so I didn’t think you were hungry.”

We had an employee who stole food & drinks all the time. Let's call her Erica since that's her name.

She had a habit of stealing my single-serve yogurts from the fridge. I used a syringe to inject ghost chili oil into a strawberry "fruit on the bottom" cup. What she thought was strawberry "juice" instead made her mouth burn, her eyes water, and made her vomit.

I stayed late at the office that evening, fished the offending yogurt cup out of her trash, and deposited it in her top drawer so that she knew that "someone" was watching her.

I was once hired as an "unpaid" marketing intern in exchange for college credits. The role required me to work 20 hours a week, spread over 4 hours a day. During my first week, the woman who hired me assigned a task that would clearly take 6-8 hours to complete, all within the same day. I politely informed her that while I would do my best, it was unlikely I could finish it within the day's deadline and asked if that would be acceptable.

Her response? A cold, "Excuse me?"

I reiterated my concern, and she abruptly ended the call. Minutes later, I received a WhatsApp message from her stating that I no longer needed to work there. Within the hour, she contacted my professor to inform them they had "let me go." I ended up in tears on a Zoom call with my professor, who was supportive. As a result of the incident, my college blacklisted the company for future internships as they were clearly unprofessional.

The Battle of Blair Mountain. Coal miners wanted to unionize and mine owners wanted more money. A million rounds of ammunition were fired and the National Guard had to intervene.

That's a shamefully short summary of it, but it was literally a war for labor rights.

To quote Robert Evans on Behind the Bastards (Part 1 on YouTube [here](https://youtu.be/XWvVdjmBhHc?si=ekzrYcd3taBhmSg0)):

>We never talk about the time they got bombed and gassed and shot at by machine guns. We just leave that out of history books. The 8-hour work day was entirely gained by polite people with signs protesting. That's how we have a weekend, not the men who charged machine gun nests and sniped at corporate guards.

>All these things we consider just a part of life like the fact that you're supposed to get a weekend; all of these things were bought in blood by men who are willing to kill for these rights who are willing to die for these things. And we don't talk about that even though it's cool and interesting because it might give people ideas.