Belieb it or not, horrible birthdays are pretty common.
On March 1, Justin Bieber created international headlines—and sympathy—with one simple tweet: “Worst Birthday.” His 19th birthday was cut unexpectedly short after his entourage was denied entry into a London nightclub. While the Biebs himself was finally of legal drinking age (at least as far as Canadian law is concerned), other members of the group were not. Rather than split the group up, Bieber decided to simply call it quits.
It’s really difficult to grasp the lifelong emotional trauma that comes with your entourage being denied entry into an overpriced British hotspot. And it’s even more difficult to top it.
In our effort to help the most popular pop star on Twitter, the Daily Dot has culled Reddit for birthday stories that very well may be just a tad worse than Bieber’s.
One year, for my birthday, an ex broke up w me via email. We were in a LDR.
The next year, there was a blizzard that shut down the entire city, canceling a friday night party, the saturday burlesque show in my honor, and numerous other things.
The next year, I was physically assaulted by an ex (I broke up w her a few days earlier). That was in the early afternoon. I committed to to getting a restraining order because she showed up at my house pounding on the door.
I stopped celebrating my birthday after that.
(tomcatx2)
I had to go to work (I was a pool cleaner at the time) and right as I was about to clock out I got a phone call that someone had shit in one of the neighborhood pools that is in my area.
I drove out to the pool and I saw a 40-ish year-old guy in the corner and I then saw the shit in the pool and noticed there weren’t any kids in the vicinity of the pool at that time. The man approached me and told me that he was the one who shit and he wasn’t going to tell anybody until a mom saw shit literally falling from his pants as he went up the steps out of the pool. He couldn’t even look me in the eye he was so embarrassed.
In the end I felt really bad for him because I can’t imagine something like that happening, plus I had to drain the pool which took like an hour. It was a bad day.
Skin cancer diagnosis came in. Had it removed that day and stitched up. My 30th.
When I was 8 years old, I invited everyone in my class to come to my birthday party and no one came. :*(
Was my 10th birthday, my dad was taking me to an amusement park and we were parked on the roadside so he could look at a map to get there. Some Chinese lady was digging in her purse instead of watching the road and drove into the back of our car so hard my face bounced off the dashboard, proceeded to throw her car in reverse and took off. I had to be taken to the hospital, was treated for a broken nose and whiplash and still have neck problems to this day. Worst birthday ever.
It was a Bad Luck Brian moment…
Turned 21 on a Sunday… Dry county.
I spent my 24th at a dubstep show, secretly hating every moment of it.
Only my girlfriend remembered my 16th birthday, and i spent the whole day in the car on the way to chicago being ignored by my family. i was also told to stop being so mopey a lot. it was a 10 hour drive. closest thing i got for my birthday that year was a soda at a gas station.
(booziwan)
Once went to a nice Mexican Restaurant with my family for my birthday. When the hostess was bringing our drinks, she tripped and the entire tray of water, sodas, beer, and tea came crashing down on my head. What made it even worse was the fact that random assholes started laughing profusely at the situation. We didn’t even get a discount, just an apology and a towel.
Worst Birthday Ever.
“I was in Berlin for my 20th (New Year’s Eve) with 3 of my friends, got on the subway so we could go closer to downtown, got jumped by a bunch of Turkish guys trying to rob us, ended up with 3 broken ribs and a few broken fingers. Two of the attackers chased us up the stairs into the street and got hit by a car, one guy was obviously dead, don’t know what what happend to the other guy or the rest of them. We ran out of there as the fireworks were going off.
So that sucked.
My friends threw me a birthday party at one of their houses. On the way over, I had learned that one of our friends had OD’d and died earlier that night. Saddest birthday of my life
In 2010, my ex fiance (we were together 10 years) left me 3 days before my birthday and 3 weeks before our wedding. (I discovered he was cheating on me and it was a nasty, painful break up) On my actual birthday, I was still pretty heartbroken. Just about everyone knew about the break up, so there was a lot of awkwardness. No one wanted to say “Happy Birthday” because everyone knew it was anything but, so most people just avoided me. I went home after work and stared at my wedding dress for a few hours and eventually cried myself to sleep. I was awakened around 2:00 AM when my ex came home (We were still living in the same house) VERY drunk and smelling so heavily of cigarettes you could smell him across the room. The chick he cheated on me with smoked. He and I did not, so I knew he had been with her. Happy Birthday to me.
I invited a few friends to come and celebrate my birthday with me in my home on the coast of Ireland. I was going to be 20. A Scottish friend of mine came over; it was his first time in Ireland and he was super-excited. We drank and played Trivial Pursuit and had good times the night before my birthday. In the early hours, he and another of my friends went for a walk outside. I was upstairs, and tried to call them back in. They ignored my warnings; we were all drunk and they were having a good time.
I was woken up by a phone call the next morning. My friend had been swept into the sea and drowned. They never found the body. That day, I got to meet his parents for the first time, when they came over from Scotland. Basically, my 20th Birthday was the worst day of my life by some margin.
My parents split up on my 13th birthday. That was pretty bad”
(nick7776)
When I was 17 and still on myspace, a random guy added me. A week latter he sent me a message, told me I was pretty, and asked if he could call me since it was his 21st birthday and he was alone.
I let him call me and we talked for four hours. He got extremely drunk during the phone call, and eventually passed out. I had a fun time talking to the fella, and we never talked again after that.
I’ve had crappy birthdays before, but I’ve never spent one the phone with a stranger 5 states away.”
On my 18th birthday, I was dragged by my parents to see this mystic. Said mystic promptly outed me as a lesbian in front my parents. My mom tearfully asked if it was true. I saw no reason to keep lying anymore and said “Yes. Are you kicking me out? If so, I’ll be on my way”.
She promptly said “Of course not! That’d make me look bad”.
Nothing is quite like the realization that your mother cared more about how people perceived her than a very personal information about yourself. The ride home was full of “it’s just a phase. You’ll get over it” which eventually escalated to “I’ll beat it out of you” due to my silence. Once we reached home, I locked myself inside my room for a good week or so.
It is my twenty-first birthday today. I wasn’t able to get the night off from work, and I couldn’t buy alcohol before work because I lost my ID. So I gave my friend some money to buy liquor for a birthday celebration after my work shift was over. I will simply say that there was no party ready for me, and she never got back to me with alcohol or my money. So, I’m at home, on reddit, watching a celebrity diving competition.
It’s not a horrible story, but I am very disappointed.”
My 20th birthday aka last year. I was broke, it rained, hailed, and thundered. I also found out that my sister had a brain tumor, too.”
9/11.
See, it’s not so bad Biebs.
Photo via Daniel Oldfield/Flickr
