Stories about Bad Decisions You Regret and Bad Decisions You Don’t

Before my talk at Trampoline Hall on Monday, my friends on Facebook generously gave me stories about their bad decisions. The ones I’ve posted here are done with their permission and my thanks. The discussion on Monday night eventually asked the obvious question: what is a good decision? I suggest that a good decision is an act of self assertion that affirms who you are and respects the rights of others to be who they are. Anyway, drum roll–some slightly abbreviated stories about bad decision you regret–as they were told to me. (Tomorrow: stories about bad decisions my friends and myself don’t regret.)

BAD DECISIONS YOU REGRET

Letting Mom Down
Mary Paterson: My mother and I traveled to Toronto by bus from our hometown of Belleville. We spent the day together shopping, eating out, and went to the ballet. When it came time to leave in the early evening, there was only 1 seat left on the bus. I wanted to get back for a party so instead of waiting in Toronto with my mother, I took that 1 seat on the bus and left my mother alone to wait for the next bus which was hours later. My wonderful mother offered to stay back, and told me it was fine for me to go home without her, but she looked extremely sad. I ignored the feeling that I should stay with her instead of leaving for some stupid high school party. Shortly afterwards my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. That selfish act of abandoning my mother to get to some party has stuck with me – I have always regretted it and by the way, said party has disappeared from my memory, which proves how lame it was. Today my mother is no longer alive, and I can describe the exact look of disappointment and sadness on her face as I sat looking at her through the bus window.

Letting Wishful Thinking Get the Best of You
Don Oravec At the age of 34, I decided I had had enough of Toronto and decided to retire and move to Montserrat in the British West Indies. What a great idea to escape the cold and snow and stress of Toronto life! Or so I thought. I bought a lovely oceanfront condo; however, I hadn’t counted on a category five hurricane hitting the island. It took a year of so to recover from the damages and by that time I decided Toronto wasn’t so bad after all and I moved back. A mere four months after selling my West Indian condo the long-dormant volcano erupted on the island.

Renting the Apartment from Hell
Cheryl Runke I took an apartment sight unseen. The former tenant was an animal hoarder. The floors were embedded with animal feces and urine. That was June 2014. I finally get to move out this Friday.

Listening to a Fast Talking Hubby
Natalee Caple My ex believed that he could guess the stock market — could figure out the likely futures of penny stocks. He was an excellent talker and I believed in him even when what he became convinced that investing in a little known stock based on an invention to sort cow sperm by gender would be a huge success. So I took all my money out of GICs and bought the cow sperm stock. It was a bad decision I really regret because the stock plummeted.

Failing to Estimate a Real Estate Risk:
John Oughton My ex and I decided to buy a country house together so our daughter would have a base to support her horse riding. Once she was in university, we intended to sell the house and make a few $$. After viewing many properties, we settled on one on the edge of a village next to a vacant lot. We were going to pay for the smallish mortgage by splitting the costs. A month later, my ex was diagnosed with breast cancer. She survived, but she has never been able to find full-time or well-paying work since. So I’ve been paying all the expenses on the house and its mortgage (which went up because I’d got into debt, and she needed cash due to her illness.) I still need to live in Toronto for work, so I am effectively paying two rents. The vacant lot next to us (which we didn’t bother to check out carefully) is zoned industrial because it was once a petroleum storage facility. No one can build a house there without having the soil all cleaned or replaced. Last year we finally got an offer on our country house, but it fell though because the prospective buyers didn’t want someone else to take over the nearby vacant lot and put up an industrial site, and they didn’t want to spend money fixing the environmental problems. Then, the church across the way doubled in size and developed a bad in-house rock band that rehearses loudly at odd hours…