Friends, drinks, good food, and groovy music. What more do you need to get a party started? Every host wants to throw a party their friends will talk about forever, but even the slightest hiccup could bring a party to a premature end. This can result in embarrassing moments that can never be lived down. Just ask these partygoers about the party that went south!
All stories have been edited for clarity.
A Burning Sensation
“When I was younger I went out to a bonfire party with a group of friends. People brought two truckloads of pallets and five gallons of gas. We stacked the pallets in a narrow rocky ravine and dumped the entire five gallons of gas onto the pile. The pile of wood was about as big as a fifteen-passenger van.
I was the only person to bring something to light the fire. So, when it came to getting the bonfire started, I was granted the honors. I was standing about sixty to seventy-five yards from the pile. I planned on lighting a torch I made by wrapping some paper towels around the end of a stick. I remember the air being thick with the smell of gas.
What I didn’t realize was that I was downhill from the bonfire pile. I set the torch down on the ground to strike a match and light it. I lit the match, bent down to light the paper towel, and BOOM!
Before I could react, pain shot through my body. I was suddenly engulfed in flames. Fire ran along the ground the entire sixty to seventy-five yards and lit the bonfire in the process.
My friends said it played out like a movie. All I could manage was a shrill scream as I came running out of the flames. Everyone freaked out.
Once I got myself together, I realized my hair was burnt to a crisp and my shirt was as stiff as a board from the heat. My arms and face felt ‘funny’. Everyone said I looked a little red.
I brushed it off like I was okay, but about five or ten minutes later, I started to feel ‘warm’. I got a towel and gallon of water I always keep in the back of my jeep and douse the towel and drape it over my arms and face. I was aching all over.
My friend drove me to the hospital where they pumped me full of demerol and morphine to stop the pain. It was unreal. The nurses even gave me almost enough morphine to stop my heart before the pain finally started to die down.
I ended up with borderline 3rd degree burns on my arms and face. It was just a quick flash of fire/heat so it didn’t do any major damage.
I do however have a bald spot in the middle of my sideburn now and the left side of my face turns really red when I am out in the sun and is sensitive to heat.
This was the absolute worst party I’ve ever been to because I didn’t even get to stay for the festivities.
I do have a cool story I get to tell though.”
A “Coincidence”
“I used to work for a very large and roundly hated cable provider. The company was incredibly cheap and pinched pennies in every way imaginable. One year they celebrated the anniversary of their founding with a mandatory company picnic. If we didn’t attend, we’d be written up. At the same time, no time off was granted, so it came out of our PTO.
On a dismal Friday afternoon, we bundled off to the ‘big party.’
It gets worse.
Lo and behold, the park where we had the party was directly across from our crummy boss’ house. And this ‘park’ was a patch of grass next to a huge highway overpass. It started raining, but the ‘party’ was not rescheduled. We were still forced to attend.
We were all crammed under the overpass with all the bums in their tent city. Even the homeless people ate better than us because we were each allotted either one burger or one hotdog. They were frozen burgers and dogs from the local supermarket. We couldn’t have alcohol to wash it down.
The ‘highlight’ of the ‘party’ was a raffle drawing for what we were been told was going to be excellent prizes. This at least wasn’t too improbable, since vendors from big companies would send us extravagant gifts to try and persuade us to buy their stuff.
It turned out that the big prize was, in fact, pretty cool – an R/C car that was gas-powered and high quality. The other prizes were little grab bags full of company-branded trinkets or t-shirts.
Naturally, our boss drew his own number. He kept declaring it was a ‘total coincidence,’ but we knew he was full of it because he amazingly drew his ticket for the big prize, which he unashamedly took.
There were exactly enough grab bags for everyone there, except one. Of course, I was the only person who didn’t get one. Mind you, I didn’t care to have a company-branded t-shirt, but it was the freaking parsimonious, cheap-ass attitude that went with it that pissed me off. That, and my asshole of a boss walking over, pointing and laughing at me whole-heartedly and brushing tears from his eyes, saying, ‘Sucks to be you!’
I seriously exercised some willpower and just didn’t say anything. As I tried to leave, my boss yelled after me, ‘You haven’t been dismissed yet, you have to stay until 5!’ Then he pointed and laughed at me some more.
Yeah, that was the worst party I ever went to.”
What’s That Smell?
“I used to live with my girlfriend who lived in Hawaii. One year, she threw a big party for her co-workers. She was a greeter at a well-known supermarket chain. I believe she invited thirty people.
She had a Siberian Husky that was only partially housebroken. By that I mean she had him trained to do his business in one part of the house. I couldn’t take him out on walks myself because I am in a wheelchair. My girlfriend was working long hours, so she wasn’t able to take him out every time he needed to crap. So, she designated a 3 x 6-foot area behind the couch as his ‘toilet’. She put flattened cardboard boxes down for him to crap on. It wasn’t great, but it was the best she could think of.
So, on the day of the party, I cleaned the house really well, and since we couldn’t have a big piece of cardboard behind the couch, we just pulled it out and left the floor bare.
My girlfriend decided to make some blender drinks for the party. She was not a drinker, so she was unaware of how much alcohol she to put in the drinks. Unfortunately, my girlfriend overdid it by a substantial amount. She had to do a lot of testing to get it right, and by the second pitcher, almost before anyone had shown up, she was completely hammered.
So I was pretty much left to host the party myself–even though I barely knew any of the people–while my girlfriend went to bed so that she could vomit copious amounts of rum onto the floor.
Even so, everyone else seemed to be having a good time, and the party seemed to be going pretty well, even though there was hardly any seating. I didn’t mind that bit since with my wheelchair I always have a set, but for everybody else, it was standing room only, other than three people on the couch, and two people on our kitchen chairs.
Since the dog lived in the house, he was there too, and sure enough, he decided he had to take a dump.
Do you see where this is going?
There wasn’t anyone behind the couch, so the dog went behind it and dropped a big dog log on the bare floor.
Nobody else saw him do this except me, and by the time I noticed what he was doing it was too late to stop him, and so all I could do was laugh as I watched the party go downhill.
The smell was pretty remarkable, but there wasn’t much in the way of air current, so the aroma just sort of hung there in an invisible cloud of rank. I could tell though, when the folks on the couch smelled it because in unison they all screwed up their faces. One of them turned around and looked behind the couch.
The look on his face was priceless when he saw the poop. After a few curses, all three of the folks on the couch got up and away from it.
As soon as the three people were off the couch, three more people who had been standing around with nowhere to sit for an hour saw their opportunity and they jumped over and sat down before anyone else could grab a seat. They lasted for about forty-five seconds to a minute before they realized why the couch had been vacated. As soon as they got up, three more people grabbed a spot on the couch.
This went on for about three or four turns before the smell had drifted far enough to empty the room, and thus the house, and that was it. The party was over, and everyone drove home in the rain without saying goodbye or even leaving a note for my passed-out girlfriend.
She never threw another party as long as I dated her.”
