Even If You've Had a Bad Day, At Least You Didn't Eat the Shell On a Hard Boiled Egg

There are a handful of subreddits that seem to exist just to make the rest of us feel better about our lives. “If the discarded toilet I’m using as a planter hasn’t been featured on r/trashy yet,” you can say to yourself, “Then I must be doing OK.”

Bryan Menegus, a senior writer at Gizmodo, scrolled through Reddit earlier this week and discovered a true gem on r/UnpopularOpinion, which is exactly what it sounds like: a place where people post their unpopular opinions. (Some examples that the moderators provide are “Police haven’t become worse or any more abusive. This nation has become liberal,” and “The Ashley Madison hack was wrong, people were harmed and the public reaction was disgraceful.”

The post that Menegus found had nothing to do with societal change or data breaches; instead, it was one person’s unintentional admission that he didn’t understand how a fucking egg works. “Hard boiled eggs are disgusting,” a user called FriezaAndHoushi wrote, adding “I almost died eating one. The crunchy-soft mix is absolutely disgusting. It's like eating a ravioli covered with chips.”

“Nobody has fucked up harder than this person,” Menegus wrote, along with a screenshot of FriezaAndHoushi’s incriminating post.

That started a glorious thread of people sharing stories of people who, in fact, had fucked up harder. Some of these scenarios might be apocryphal or just straight-up bullshit, but man, they improved our feelings of self-worth by, like, one million percent.

One guy thought that, when a cake recipe called for egg whites, it meant that he needed to crush the shells and add them to the mix. Another had heard about an amateur seafood eater who ate all of the rock salt that garnished her plate of oysters. And, during a wedding reception, a third mistook a stick of butter for a lemon cookie. (Actually, that’s something that I’d probably do on purpose, then pretend to be embarrassed when the maid of honor shook her head in disgust).

The best response was a reminder that Dr. Arturo Carvajal exists. In 2010, the Florida man filed a lawsuit against Houston’s Restaurant after he ate an entire artichoke, including the plant’s inedible (and sharp) leaves and stem. Carvajal alleged that the restaurant and its general manager were to blame, and his waiter should’ve explained “the proper method of consuming an artichoke.” As a result of the fact that he’s, like, never watched The Food Network, the man ended up with “artichoke leaves lodged within [his] small bowel.”

Glenn Viers, the restaurant’s general counsel, wasn’t exactly sympathetic. “It's just kind of a silly notion,” he said at the time. “What's next? Are we going to have to post warnings on our menu they shouldn't eat the bones in our barbecue ribs?” (Carvajal lost his lawsuit).

Back on Reddit, several other users wondered whether FriezaAndHoushi was just trolling everyone for a laugh.

Shhhh, no. Just let us have this.