The Most Pathetic Things Poverty Makes You Do

what's the most pathetic thing poverty has forced you to do i thought about making a throwaway for this but frickit when i was 13 years old had to use socks instead of pads because we were so broke couldn't afford tp or menstrual products stolen napkins from restaurants work too back when food stamps were actual paper stamps my mom and i would go buy penny candy with them walking to multiple stores they gave you actual change for that we would then take that accumulated change and pay bills with it or buy things you can't buy with food stamps ate nothing but rice and sugar and powdered milk for a week once when food stamps got cut off all of this is embarrassing as frick but i like to think it made me a better person now my mom is a proud wonderful person who despite us going through some rough times when i was young always made me feel loved luckily i'm above the poverty line about low middle class now but i am not ever gonna starve and i live within my means i think all of this did contribute to my gatonis somewhat though i'm envious and suspicious all at once about people who have always had everything handed to them in life collecting metal from abandoned houses and car wrecks to sell at the scrap yard just to get cash and buy some food the guy behind the counter at the scrapyard didn't say anything but his look said everything as he weighed in the small bits of copper aluminium and stainless steel chopping down small trees on state-owned land just to get some heat in the cottage i was living in during the winter because i could not afford to turn on the electric heater sneaking in at the local recycling plant landfill at night to look for usable things to sell or things that i could use myself it was a couple of tough years but i pull through my wife gets annoyed at me at times though because i see possible cash in everything and twigs thick as pencils are stringed together to be used as firewood guests and things never leave the mind hey those aren't bad skills to have sorry to hear about your crappy situation earlier though hugs stole money from my grandfather's wallet when he started to get alzheimer's family blamed him for the lost money years later when i was back on my feet and making good money i repaid it and took full blame he forgave me but i still feel bad about it upvote for taking accountability for your actions my mom sold the wheels from our trailer for 50 dollars some scrap metal guy came and sawed them off and hauled them away i remember sitting in the living room listening to the sore because it was really loud and scary true story well dang thread over not me but my wife she grew up extremely poor one winter was really bad and they were down to the last of the mayonnaise sandwiches they had been eating for over a week a moose was hit by a car on the highway and my wife's family picked it up and canned the entire carcass in mason jars my wife still says it was the best thing she has ever eaten tldr my wife ate roadkill and still craves it i'm from a very redneck area and if you hit a deer you take that sucker home my grandmother had my mother at 16 two more daughters by the age of 20 when my mom died my sister was going through her stuff and found this note written by my grandmother i'm guessing it was when my mother was four years old beverly was the youngest an infant at the time my daughters are hungry and we have nowhere we can go to get help beverly has not eaten in 10 days except for water and sugar in her bottle and i have stolen the sugar if god will only find someone who will feed my daughters i make a solemn vow unless they want to find me i will never interfere in their lives in any way i swear by every breath in my body god help me for they are my life my grandmother gave up all three daughters to foster care and spent the next several years prostituting to survive along came the guy i grew up knowing as my grandpa pulled her out of that life married her and they lived a prosperous life to this day i don't know how my mother and her two sisters reconnected with my grandmother the grandparents i grew up knowing were happy loving joyful to be around i didn't know until much much later from what depths she had risen once there was this really annoying girl in sixth grade she was bossy rude and i hated her guts because she was upper class and boasted about it treating people below her less than human the only reason i even associated with her was because we got stuck together for science fair but by this time of the year most people either knew or guessed i was poor because of my clothes and how i got free lunch and had to take some home sometimes anyways we were behind and dragging our asses on science fair so when worse came to worse we had to pull an all-nighter at her house meanwhile at my house my dad had passed away and my mom was in the hospital on her chemo we had no heat no electric and it was mid-winter so for heat i would take my little brother to the local grocery store it was 24 stroke 7 and we would sleep in their bathrooms lull to sleep by the cliche christmas music that would play to taunt customers my brother didn't understand yet he thought they were playing a concert just for us i was basically the mom to my little brother so i had no way of going to her house long story short i ended up having to go and taking my little brother that girl's parents were naive and so thoughtless girls wanted a play friend the most degrading part was that she knew that girl knew and she was throwing out hints and subtle comments about it all night that's okay though i got my brother a warm bed that wasn't my arms on a cvs bathroom and a free meal that wasn't stolen from seven stroke eleven or stuck in a backpack for eight hours brought from school regardless of what anyways says in the back of my mind i know it's pathetic but i'm proud of struggling for my brother this was back when i was a youngster in college and it was over spring break and everyone was gone and there were no services or help i literally went almost two days without eating before i walked just off campus and found an unlocked window at a nearby house with no one home i climbed in and made a beeline for the kitchen i found a plastic bag and took around 50 worth of food a fork and nothing else i left them a note telling them how sorry i was for taking their food but i was really hungry and hadn't eaten in days still haunts me i found some people going through my neighbor's trash once looking for food and gave them 100 worth of stuff from my kitchen that was non-perishable and that they could eat without cooking or a can opener i was making about seven dollars and fifty cents an hour at the time but i could eat at my restaurant job seriously if someone could use food more than me i wouldn't mind nothing too bad left home at 19 so when college breaks came around i had nowhere to go so stayed in the dorms i was the only person in a 22-story high rise for about two weeks the cheapest food i could find was fish sticks and fries that i could cook in my little toaster oven so every day after coming back from my gas station job i'd get my yummy fish sticks and fries i haven't eaten fish sticks since then i just finished paying a quarter of a million dollars for my son's college tuition he has no idea how good he has it you should probably tell him couch surfing at my buddies because i didn't have the rent money for my own place he'd go to work i would go to the bookstore to read then go to costco to eat free samples for food repeat it for about two weeks i think i spent about 20 bucks over the course of 15 days some of the employees started hooking it up though like giving me half a pulled pork sandwich on the sly full gogerts and crap compared to most mine is not that pathetic but once i paid for five dollars in gas and rolled up pennies the woman at the gas station said at least you roll them most people don't been there last year actually paid for 11 of e-10 fuel and 20 c pieces a c-k-x taught me that if you hammered a quarter three or four times it would be the exact same size as a dollar coin i would take my fake quarters put them in vending machines and press refund to get four quarters back the trick was to not hit the same vending machine more than a couple times i only did this a few times so i could buy lunch but i still feel gross about it to this day in my nutrition and wellness class in high school we had a pitch in for thanksgiving i brought in hawaiian bread and ham sandwiches no biggie there's this classmate that reeked of body odor and wore the same clothes almost every day he often got made fun of because of that anyway he told me that he loved those sandwiches so i told him to take all of the extra sandwiches since no one else wanted them he then told me gee thanks my family will love these i stood there in silence for a good minute or so just thinking that there are people that have bad home situations so i told a few other classmates and they offered him leftovers at the end of the period his arms and backpack were packed with food dessert soda etc he had the biggest grin i had ever seen this made me so happy kids actually helped with this i just got divorced and i was living in an efficiency apartment in the ghetto suddenly i was laid off i had to take a temp job whose salary left me with a deficit i lost 30 pounds due to lack of food i sold everything non-essential i would steal toilet paper from public restrooms i even would refill old cups from mcdonald's with pop i would walk right in and go straight to the fountain machine and they never called me on it the whole time frame i lived there was filled with a bucket load of pride swallowing moments but i survived got a better job and walked away with a new perspective i've noticed most employees won't call you on it in stories like this and it's because the cost of filling a medium-sized drink there is something like two or three cents they probably are aware you're struggling to get by and the deficit the company suffers are literally meaningless i've also worked in a movie theater with syrup-based soda machines and know the profit margin to be true pathetic things idk resourceful things however i've done okay i guess a few pathetic things too no coffee maker let alone expensive filters so we made cowboy coffee throw grounds in a mason jar add hot water let ground settle and pour yourself a cup need an evening pick me up boil water and pour it over that morning's used grounds otherwise save the grounds for tomorrow morning grounds are always used twice i love mushrooms but they are expensive bulk loose carrots celery potatoes and cabbage are what were in our price range one day we were at the recycling center behind safeway getting cash for the cans and bottles that we'd gleaned from the neighbors recycling bin and saw a grocery employee throwing away boxes of old unsellable veggies we came home with an entire flat of blown mushrooms the caps had opened up and they were dark brown and a little slimy and spore covered we laid newspaper under the wood stove and carefully put those ripe ripe mushrooms under it to dry we had mushrooms in our soup all winter that year wanted to bbq they couldn't afford a grill or charcoal so we would dig a hole in the backyard and light a fire in it but when the coal settled just set the oven rack on it and grill away fill in the hole the next day dish soap for laundry bath hair laundry soap for dishes hair sometimes shampoo for dishes and laundry depends on what kind of soap you had left until you could afford some more oh yeah baking soda when you are out of toothpaste mayonnaise in cakes when you were out of eggs and oil and it was someone's birthday egg whites and sugar mixed together to substitute for hair gel that was junior high i had bad hair ideals used wads of toilet paper poured it from public bathrooms as pads every month the only bread we had for years was the leftover pieces people didn't eat that i'd bring home from my restaurant busing job at the end of the night this one kinda grosses me out now but i would eat the leftover pieces of steak etc from people's plates at work that way i could bring home my one shift meal for my daughter to eat use a sharpie from your friend's backpack to draw eyeliner on use cornstarch as oil absorbent face powder cover up use cooking oil as body hand lotion rub rosemary bay leaf pine needles whatever is strong scented and growing outside on you to mask the bad smells of cooking oil improperly washed clothes lack of deodorant whatever the stinky issue was at the moment shop at garage sales flea markets goodwill and salvation army were too expensive for everyone's christmas presents all my christmas presents were from garage sales flea markets or homemade too pretty awesome except for when i was between the ages of 13 16 now i'm having a hard time thinking of pathetic things like opie asked for all i can think of are the little things we did because we were so poor i would eat the leftover pieces of steak etc from people's plates at work yup when i was washing dishes my co-workers called me l map ash the raccoon i used to live in a shed one christmas i was given a duck as a present he was dyed my favorite color green i love that duck we ate very little usually cereal i came home one day from school after my duck had grown a bit and there was mysteriously real food on the table sometimes we ate in the family's house who owns the shed chicken i asked where my duck was and was told he was taken by an owl but i knew he was delicious tl dr i ate my pet we couldn't pay the trash bill so we would let the trash bags pile out back in the middle of the night my mom would wake me up and throw the bags on the back of our truck we would drive around and dump the bags in trash bins it was embarrassing but we had no choice i hated doing it till that there is such thing as a trash bill back in college my truck ran out of gas in a taco bell drive-through this was right around the lunch rush i had to push it out by myself while all the employees and customers watched angrily one butthole wouldn't stop honking his horn steal from walmart almost daily it's not the most pathetic thing but still it sucks to have to do that to eat oh and sometimes i would volunteer at the homeless shelter's kitchen for the free food afterwards i volunteer either way but sometimes it was specifically to get a meal at the end that was probably a bit worse oh and sometimes i would volunteer at the homeless shelter's kitchen for the free food afterwards uh that is not pathetic that is the least you deserve my parents came here dirt poor and did everything to save money so we did a lot of things with my parents on special occasions they would pay for a movie in the morning matinee prices at the time were three dollars sneaking food and stay the whole day in theater hop this happened maybe once a year i remember i really wanted to see teenage mutant ninja turtles after weeks of constant bugging they relented but we didn't just watch that we watched silence of the lambs pretty woman and another movie as well this was a strange family movie experience for little ass munch they would go to fast food restaurants and buy souvenir cups for their drinks they would go home wash it and sneak it in my mom's purse and pretend they ordered drinks it didn't matter that the cups were faded and were years old they still did it didn't get the concept of a babysitter i remember being home alone at age four on a few occasions they would do other ultra cheap crap like reuse vacuum bags keep bags of rice and wheat with insects and then rent out rooms in their house to some sleazy people when we were kids etc sad part was they probably don't think any of this is pathetic my husband told me a story about when he was 23 he wrote a check for a hot dog at a gas station because he had no money he said he remembered thinking that the hot dog was going to end up costing him more later in fees but he did it anyway because he was hungry i can envision him doing this so well that i can't even think about a hot dog without getting sad i volunteer at a church gift drive every year let me tell you you hear some storied one mr featherstone my favorite regular you won't find a nicer man than him i've trusted him from the moment i've met him he helps the staff by running gifts to people's cars just so he can stay longer and get warm food it's an ohio winter and he still sleeps outside that might be the only warmth and love he gets that month two toothless mr brown i hate this guy sometimes we have a lot of families with the last name brown we leave things in marked bags for the families he took a family with four children's bags to sell the toys for drug money luckily i had assembled a gift bag for this exact purpose so t.j.e kids still got toys but still it takes a legitimate jerk to steal from children in a family poorer than yours three cereal and jose every time i see this pair i have to try not to cry jose was born with a horrible cleft lip and they can't afford surgery to fix it his elderly grandma sarah is the only one looking out for him in this world i'm a bit concerned for him considering his grandma is getting more and more sickly for grandpa he never gave me his name grandpa always shows up near the end of the day when we stop passing out gifts he asks if we have any sports toys left he has 14 grandsons and he wants to make them happy has an endless arsenal of funny stories about his flock makes me smile to see him trying his donna desk to give his grandkids an awesome christmas tl dr you see what poverty really does to people at the christmas drive if my friends every caught me doing this i would be humiliated but picking up half smoked cigarettes and using the tobacco to make new self-roll death i am nicotines bee that makes two of us homeboy when i was first divorced i was flat out broke my ex was a drug addict and didn't pay any child support so i was on my own with two little kids and a mortgage and about ten dollars in the bank it was christmas time and it was the first year my four-year-old son really understood about santa he was so excited i didn't know what i was going to do because like i said i had less than no money a few days before christmas my dad gave me a 100 gift card to cvs that was part of his health benefits so i bought all of my son's christmas gifts at cvs i can so clearly remember wandering around the store trying to figure out what to get and feeling like such a failure as a parent i picked up a package of clothesline and put it in my cart and just lost it i cried like a baby in the home improvement isla cvs because i was reduced to giving my sewn clothesline for christmas he did end up getting a lot of nice toys from my family who felt sorry for me and he was perfectly happy fast forward to the next christmas and i was in a much better position in life i was cleaning out the toy box to make room for the new toys we'd be getting that year when i realized that of all the things my son had gotten for christmas the previous year there was only one thing that he still played with the clothesline he played with that dang rope every single day of the year he built traps for bad guys used it to lasso horses the dog used it as his spider-man web every day was something different that's when i really understood that the simplest things are the best things ever since then i've always put rope in my kids stockings every year to remind me that gifts don't need to be expensive or fancy to be the perfect gift tl dr was so poor i gave my son rope for christmas best gift ever one night in our first apartment my husband then fiance and i had .30 cents in our bank account and all we had to eat was one single pack of ramen noodle and one can of spaghettios instead of doing the smart thing and each having one of those two things we were each burned out on those foods since we were literally surviving on them and decided to get creative and combine the two we made spaghettio ramen and if i recall correctly they were the weenie kind it was the most disgusting thing either of us had ever tasted apart from spoiled meat and we had to eat it anyway because it was literally all the food we had left that freaking sucked at least now it's something you could look back on and laugh at i did that once with all the bits of veggies we had left it would have been delicious had i left the jalapenos out then it became what i now fondly call fire here a friend recently told me years ago she was so broke she lived in an empty apartment literally a blanket and a crate with a clock on it and nothing in the fridge but stolen jelly she had nothing to feed her cats but jelly for four days and says they were never the same after that during one bad stretch once a week i asked my friend to borrow his car to run errands in reality i couldn't afford to pay my power or water bills and i wanted the access card on his keychain to his gym so that i could take a hot shower well it worked out okay we ended up dating and then living together for six years but i originally agreed to date him because he could afford pizza and beer i decided to sell several of my xbox 360 games to gamestop for cash in order to buy liquor i had exhausted all of my other options so i was becoming desperate the employee condescendingly explained to me that if i were to take store credit i would get more money than i would if i took cash i told him i needed cash he sarcastically responded yeah because nobody needs to buy things i mumbled sure i guess i was already worn down by the depressing magnitude of my addiction he looked up from his register looked me in the eyes and said i was being sarcastic my self-esteem was so low at that point i was not able to give him the frick you he deserved i took my cash and left a broken man frick you ryan at gamestop in cromwell ct you're an arrogant c and i would love to strike your face repeatedly with my left hand had three roommates and i started to eat all of their food from the trash old food stuff i wouldn't have been interested in when it was fresh if i had the choice they started to notice i think and one would dump his hair clippings it seemed like to a starving soul directly onto old food so i would have to wash it off before i ate it my father honorably served in the military and shortly after his untimely death at 39 the government cut the benefits that would have helped me with college tuition sadly he got cancer from nuclear fallout from atomic testing but good old uncle sam denied responsibility and left its victims and their families holding the bag but my mother remarried but they had no intention of helping me with college let alone fill out a simple form that would have allowed me to get some grant money the university town where i moved for school wouldn't give food assistance to students and the community knew students would work for minimum wage so i was flat broke all semester every semester my first year in school my rent was 150 a month which left me about 50 a month for the bus and food during the summer i would get jobs back in california where i could make a lot more money to pay tuition and books the summer after my junior year i worked with a group of mormon guys in orange county after an entire summer of sales for this company they ended saying they didn't have the money to pay me a summer's worth of commissions that i was owed i was stuck and so ca living in my car with a bad tyre and a very loud cv joint showering from a sinking gas stations and totally broke not even enough money to get home i begged for a few bucks and bought a bucket and a squeegee and went door to door asking people to let me wash their windows i made enough for food i used tire and gas so at a max speed of 35 miles per hour i began the long drive back to utor the fastest speed i dared to go since my cv joint was already squealing loudly this was just all part of the adventure for me the greatest tragedy was that i couldn't afford tuition and had to drop out of school with only two semesters to go i felt totally demoralized and was stuck in this p-hole town with nowhere else to go nor the money to leave it took several years to recover from the loss of my dream to get my car running again and another decade to pay off my school loans i made payments on hamburger buns to be fair it was poverty and alcohol combined but the whole story is that i had some cheap hamburger meat i wanted a cheeseburger but i couldn't afford cheese as the day went on i ended up drinking at a friend's house i don't remember who bought the beer but it wasn't me while going through his fridge i noticed he had about half a dozen blocks of cheddar cheese so i took one and put it in my sock because it was the only place i thought he wouldn't notice so i got home later on and i had hamburger and cheese but no buns i had about 70 cents to my name and there was a gas station across the street that i went to all the time by now i'm pretty wasted so i went in and explained to the cashier that i only had 70 cents but i promise i'll come back in with the rest of the money tomorrow if he lets me take the buns he did and i ate a cheeseburger that night the next day i borrowed 50 cents and fulfilled my promise if you are new to the channel you can subscribe i publish new videos every day until then check another video [Music] bye for now

Channel: On Tap Studios

Views: 21,710

Rating: 4.9471073 out of 5

Keywords: pathetic things, humiliation, poverty, poverty documentary, poverty in usa, poor vs rich, poor versus rich, #updootst, updoot, reddit, r/askreddit, askreddit, ask reddit, r/, \r, best of reddit, reddit stories, reddit story, top posts, funniest posts, funny, funny posts, funny askreddit, reddit funny, askreddit funny, askreddit stories, sub, reddit cringe, memes, comment awards, dankify, toadfilms, updoot everything, updoot reddit, chill, story, stories, reddit on tap, reddit stories 2021

Id: 9kkUO_MaPTY

Length: 27min 20sec (1640 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 07 2021