I was at the airport once and I saw a woman who must have been in her mid-thirties acting LIKE A FREAKING TODDLER because of a little inconvenience.
And the funny thing was she actually had a toddler with her and that little girl was as cool as a cucumber…and I could tell her husband was horrified by the whole thing.
But guess what? This isn’t necessarily rare…
AskReddit users talked about the worst adult temper tantrums they’ve ever seen in their lives. Let’s take a look.
1. No refunds.
“When I worked in retail, a woman freaked out because I wouldn’t let her return a piece of chicken breast.
It was dated several months prior to this interaction, she had frozen it, and did not have a receipt.”
2. Drunk at the airport.
“I saw a very drunk woman throw a massive temper tantrum trying to board a flight at the airport.
She was slurring her words, only partially coherent, and she couldn’t even walk straight. The poor gate agent tried to break it to her gently, offered to get her some water while they waited for a medic and security, assured her she could rebook her flight.
This spoiled brat was not having it. She started YELLING that she absolutely had to get on this plane and nothing could stop her. Tried multiple times to board the plane, and eventually had to be physically restrained.
Started getting belligerent and threatening the employees that she would get them all fired. One of the people attempting to help her was wearing a turban and she started saying that she’d get him deported.
She demanded every employee’s first and last name (their full names were on their name tags but she apparently didn’t notice this) and when they gave her their full names she kept demanding it (she must be used to employees she abuses refusing to give their full names, I guess) insisting she was going to call corporate and get them all fired.
The guy in the turban was so chill, he actually said “do you need me to spell my name for you? I guarantee it’s going to be a waste of your time and the company’s time and nothing will come of it.”
When it became clear that she wasn’t going to get what she wanted, she called her father on her cell phone and started screaming very loudly that she was being abused and asking her Daddy to sue the airline and get all the employees fired.
“DO YOU KNOW WHO MY FATHER IS? THE ATTORNEY GENERAL OF NEW JERSEY.”
Security finally dragged her away at that point.
The funny thing is that I looked up the Attorney General of New Jersey at the time and he didn’t have any daughters.”
3. What a d**k.
“At Chik-Fil-A one day I saw this obese dude who must’ve been at least 40 slamming a tray on the counter repeatedly and yelling at the staff behind the counter because they didn’t have his favorite sauce.
He started stomping from end to end screaming that he knew they had more in the back and he wasn’t f**king leaving til he got his sauce. When the manager came out to ask him to leave this man-child legitimately sat on the floor and crossed his arms saying he wasn’t moving.
I got my food and left ASAP.”
4. Ouch.
“My cousin lost a match at his MMA gym (it wasn’t an official one) and hurt his shoulder (was not even bruised) and he couldn’t open my front door quick enough.
So he punched the glass in and I got glass in my eye for Christmas.”
5. Ugh.
“EMS. The woman who caused an accident was screaming that the driver of the other car was “faking it for the insurance payout” when we were loading him onto the stretcher.
When the cop told her they were in a bad way, she threw herself on the ground and said, “Well, if he can do it, then I have neck pain too.”
Meanwhile, we’re preemptively shaving this guy’s chest for the AED pads because he’s decompensating so quickly.
Her purse was laying in the road, so we ran it over when we did a U-turn to leave for the hospital.
Also: The guy ended up being okay, but was probably in for a long recovery. Don’t text and drive, it’s always other people who have to pay the price for it.”
6. Happy birthday.
“Working on a local theater project, the lead actress’ birthday was in the middle of the final week of rehearsals.
We’re all packed into the theatre for hours on hour per day, but there’s still time to celebrate. We pass a card around and the director decides she’ll bake a cake.
When we take a break, someone brings the lead actress out on stage so we can cut the cake, sing Happy Birthday and give her the card. Everything is going well.
Then suddenly, there came a great screeching. The director was displeased.
Apparently, no one had asked her to sign the card. To be clear, she’d seen it being passed around, but no one had actively asked her, and she took that as an insult.
She slammed the cake to the floor right in front of the poor lead actress, screamed at us all for being so inconsiderate and stormed off. Happy birthday.”
7. Meltdown.
“It was back in the late summer of 1994 and I was invited to a Carrot Top show. (Back then Carrot Top was a redheaded prop comic and not the bizarre steroid-beast he is today)
Anyway, about 20 minutes into the show he started to freak out. It seemed as though the monitors weren’t working or something because he kept complaining about how funny his s**t was and how well his prop gags had gone over in other venues. To be clear- he was being amusing and the crowd was laughing along as one might expect.
But he wasn’t getting any of that feedback for some reason and he started to spiral into losing it entirely. He yanked one prop after another out of his trunk, faster and faster, and louder and louder. Eventually he had a complete breakdown, burst out into full on tears, started sobbing, dropped everything, covered his face and ran off stage.
The crowd was confused because let’s face it, no one really knew what to expect from the guy. But he never did come back on stage and after another couple minutes the lights came on and we all left – 20 minutes into the show.”
8. Nice try.
“I work at a major electronic retailer and a few months ago, I answered the phone to a customer that told us his iPad was defective, and that he was going to bring it in, and demanded we give him the newest model we had.
I asked him when he bought it, and he responded “Black Friday in like 2015.”
I laughed, and told him it wasn’t happening. He started screaming at me, telling me about how he was going to “own my store and the company”, then demanded to speak to my manager. I told my GM the situation, handed him the phone, and he told the guy the same thing I did, and hung up on him.
The guy apparently tried the same stunt about 2 hours after I left. Not sure what he expected out of it.”
9. Insanity.
“One time when I was working my cr**py fast food job, a coworker no showed so my boss had me call him.
I let a message “Hi, this is Fluffy at s**tty pizza. I was just calling because you are in the schedule today at 10AM and manager wanted me to check with you to see if you are just running late.”
His girlfriend called back (I answered) and kept screaming at me for “talking to her man”. It was the most insane thing ever.”
10. FORMER friend.
“A former friend’s wife.
We were going to a Christmas party at a mutual friends’ house the next day, but I went over to his place to bake the cake I was bringing and hang out and play games. Her sister was there, too.
So I get there, his wife is in their living room, with her sister. The wife is sitting on the couch folding clothes, the sister is in an arm chair holding her baby.
He picked up a present of hers, the new model of Kuerig she wanted, but hadn’t had time to wrap it yet. It’s sitting in the living room, under a blanket, near the Christmas tree.
Their daughter, about 2 at the time, pulled the blanket off the Keurig. My buddy’s wife, who is a director level employee for a ward at the hospital, throws the entire basket of folded clothes into the floor, dumps the rest of the clothes in her lap in the floor, and slides off the couch into the floor, in tears, because he bought the wrong color of Keurig.
She’s crying, yelling at him about how obviously doesn’t care about her because he didn’t get the right color. She should just divorce him because he can’t ever get anything right.
Over a the color of a coffee maker.”
11. First world problems.
“When I worked in retail at a place that sold phone accessories but not as a primary product (office supplies), this lady came in asking for a case for her iPhone 6, which was just released at the time.
Because it was released maybe a week prior, we did not have any in stock and I told her so.
This grown woman stomped her foot, pouted and cried “but I want one!”. I said “I’m….sorry? Maybe we’ll get some in stock soon. Let me ask a manager”. She pouted, stomped her foot again and said “BUT I NEED IT NOWWWW!”
I just walked away. First world problems, honey. First world problems.”
12. Kicking and screaming.
“My roommate Junior year literally got on the floor kicking and screaming because her ex wasn’t talking to her. Literal, actual temper tantrum.
And her ex had verrrry good reasons not to talk to her. My other roommate came out very confused and asked if she could have her fit somewhere else because she had an exam the next day and needed to study.
Temper tantrum girl then proceeds to get up and storm out because we didn’t give her the attention that she sought. She was one of my closest friends but that friendship declined rapidly after that.”
13. Get rid of that one.
“There was this girl that was part of our friend group for a while in our early 20’s; she was the definition of spoiled.
Her parents were amazing – they were immigrants who had started a reasonably successful construction business, and her dad decided after a cancer scare that he needed to spend more time with his family/kids and make the most out of life.
They took her on all these amazing vacations, bought her a decent (new but middle-range) car, designer handbags and sunglasses – the whole 9 yards. They also put a pretty massive down payment on a house for her (probably covering about 50% of it so that her mortgage and other costs were less than her rent).
She calls me one day. Sobbing. She is upset because her parents, who pay for everything (while she spends her money from her full-time job on clothes, makeup, and partying) are MAKING HER dip into her savings on a lawyer to close the deal for the property they bought her.
She is inconsolable – I have to try to explain to her that for most people, their first home will be their entire savings and that her parents have basically given her all these amazing things that other people don’t get.
We hung up for a bit, and I guess she accidentally b**t-dialed me when she was talking to her parents about it, and she was full-on yelling at them for daring to make her pay for a lawyer, telling them she hates them, that she never wants to see them again, and that they’re the most horrible people she’s ever met.
We had already started fading her from our friend group somewhat but it was a fairly quick downhill slope from there.”
14. Sounds like a keeper.
“My ex girlfriend started screaming and throwing clothes out of her closet because her family’s maid had placed them out of order and she couldn’t find a shirt.
This was in Mexico City and I’m from Canada, so I was a bit shocked. I laughed my a** off and told her she was being ridiculous.”
15. Breakdown.
“This old boss I used to have…I was a part-time graphic designer and they stuck me with making this training CD presentation for a client.
I basically had to learn to code HTML to do the thing. Figure out how to get it to autorun, how to organize the pages, organize and build ALL the graphics for it as well as edit this small amount of video they wanted embedded in the presentation.
The only thing I could not figure out how to do was make the video auto-run when the page loaded…so I just had to have a “Click to start video” button on it.
My boss flipped out. He started panicking: “The…the client is coming to see this later today! AND THIS IS IT FOR THEM! IF THIS VIDEO DOESN’T AUTOMATICALLY PLAY, THAT’S IT, IT’S OVER! THEY’LL CANCEL THE WHOLE PROJECT!” He started crying in front of me.
This is a grown, mid-50s man, I’m talking about here…and I was a 19 year old college student at his first job.
The dude finally turns to his business partner, sobbing: “BILL! WHAT…WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO, BILL?!”
And Bill just looks at him like he was fu**ing crazy and said “We tell them to push the godd**n button, Steve, get a fu**ing grip!”
In the end, the client didn’t even notice the video didn’t autoplay…they just clicked the button to play it and they never through twice about it.”
16. Here comes the Yelp review.
“Went to see the Spurs play in Portland and a fan tried to terrorize the poor guy at the ticket window into giving him a full refund because Pops was resting half his roster that night.
Finally the manager had to intervene and patiently explain Popovich is infamous for that, buyer beware.
The guy ripped his ticket up in frustration and started typing up an angry Yelp review of the Moda Center right then and there.”
17. Time to cool down.
“Some people I work with got in a disaagreement over management styles.
One got so pi**ed off she took a leave of absence for a month to cool down.
When she came back it started again and now she’s gone for 3 more weeks.”
18. Anger issues.
“I work with a guy who has such anger issues. I’ve seen him shout and scream at machines.
Ive witnessed him once throw a large socket wrench at the machine it bounced back and hit him on the head. His biggest tantrum happened when we came to work his pen had leaked over his overalls and he blamed someone for tampering with it.
He took the rest of the week off unpaid as no-one would own up to it.”
19. A real tragedy.
“Worked at a Chipotle. A customer asked us not to cut his quesadilla. The newbie forgot and cut it.
And he saw and immediately lost it. “ARE YOU FU**ING KIDDING ME” He yelled at myself, my managers and his young kids next to him. We apologised and offered to make another one without cutting it.
He said, “forget it, you’ve done enough”.”
20. Wow.
“My 53 years old father stomped his feet like a little kid because we were trying to make him pack more than three pairs of underwear for a two week long business trip.
He packed the underwear, btw.”
21. Board games bring out the worst in people.
“On Christmas Eve a couple years ago I suggested my family play a board game. First we tried Scrabble. I turned the word PRAYING into SPRAYINGS and got something like 50 points.
My brother got extremely upset and claimed that wasn’t a valid word. I googled it and it was indeed a word. He got pi**ed and pulled up the official Scrabble dictionary and lo and behold, “sprayings” wasn’t in it.
I told him to just calm down since it was just a game, and he flipped the board over and got the letters all over the place. He then stormed off not to be seen again.
That same night, we tried to make up by playing Monopoly. My brother considered himself a Monopoly expert, whereas everyone else hadn’t ever played it. My sister was super unenthusiastic about the game and refused to ever trade properties with him just to be petty.
My brother was progressively getting more and more pi**ed. My mom was completely siding with my sister which got him so upset he eventually flipped the board over again and got little plastic houses and cards and s**t EVERYWHERE. He started screaming at my mom and telling her that she had failed parenting my sister because she “intervened too much when they were kids”.
The argument ended with my dad bursting into tears- first and only time I had ever seen him cry- and all of us just sitting in the living room in silence.
My brother was 28 at the time.”
Have you seen any epic adult temper tantrums?
Tell us your stories in the comments.
Thanks in advance!
