5 A woman thought she had seen a picture of her unfaithful husband, but it was only herself

In 2021, a woman named Leonora in Cajeme, Mexico, searched her husband’s phone. In fact, several people in different places around the world were probably searching their partners’ phones, and on Juan’s phone there were some photos of him with a woman. One look was enough to realize that this woman was younger and thinner than Leonora.

She got pretty angry. But it turns out that the woman in those photos was actually Leonora herself, from her previous relationship, several years and several pounds ago. Well, that kind of mix-up is something they could keep laughing about. But before she knew the truth, she got a knife and stabbed the guy, and he was lucky that he was able to snatch the knife away from her before she could stab him any more.

The reason we don’t know this couple’s last name is because the police didn’t mention it in this story. However, this concern for privacy didn’t stop them from releasing Leonora’s photo.

After all, Leonora is unrecognizable in photos.

4 Hunter S. Thompson’s wife confused cocking a gun with keys

If you like stories about women misunderstanding their men, with violent consequences, then we have good news for you. And if you read the article to the end, you might read a third one.

Hunter S. Thompson, as you may already know, shot himself in the head in 2005. On the day of his death, he was talking to his wife, Anita, on the phone and told her to come over so they could write a column together. Then she heard him get up and walk a short distance, followed by some clicking sounds.

It sounded like the keys of a typewriter to her. She assumed he had started typing something and was finished with the call. Those were actually the sounds he made as he fiddled with his gun before firing it.

If she had known what she was hearing, she probably would have said something, but she hung up. Then he shot himself. But at least we all know that his ashes were later shot out of a cannon, which was a much funnier shot for everyone involved.

3 Dialing a hotel phone was too confusing

Kari Hunt had left her husband in 2013 and was planning a divorce. However, he was still the father of her three children, and since she was leaving town for a few days, he was the man she had to leave them with. She took the children to his motel room.

Then he attacked her, and the oldest child grabbed the phone and dialed 9-1-1. That didn’t work. The nine-year-old dialed again, then a third time, then a fourth time. Then she just called the front desk, who didn’t understand what she was saying.

The problem was that in a hotel, you would press “9” to get an outside line, so when you pressed 9-1-1 on those keys, the phone interpreted it as a connection to the number “1-1,” which wasn’t a phone number at all.

This confusion was so serious that the FCC implemented new rules that require all such phones to interpret 9-1-1 as actual 9-1-1 calls. It’s not that hard – these phones are controlled by computers, so all we have to do is change the programming a little.

Not that this change necessarily saved Kari’s life. As Brad himself later said, “I stabbed her 21 times in five minutes. Even if a doctor had shown up, there would have been no way to save her.” Brad is currently serving a 99-year prison sentence for her murder, with “9” being the number of this story’s arc.

2 The somewhat high telephone bill

Phone bills can be quite expensive if you don’t choose your plan correctly. In 2013, a customer in France was left with a bill of €117.21. This was an unpleasant amount, as she had recently lost her job and the bill may have included additional charges for cancelling her connection.

However, the company didn’t charge her €117.21. It charged her €11,721,000,000,000,000. That’s more than 11 quadrillion, which is not only too much for a phone bill, but also a number too large to describe any real amount of money. It’s far more than the entire actual money supply in the world and also more than the value of all real estate combined.

When she called the phone company, the staff initially refused to believe that a mistake had been made. Customer service representatives follow scripts, and when a caller says they are being overcharged, the script says to tell them that is not the case.

1 Bad SMS software led to one death and one suicide

In 2008, Ramazan Çalçoban and his wife Emine had an argument over a text message. He wrote her a message that contained the word “sıkışınca,” but on her screen it appeared as “sikisinca.”

These look roughly like the same word. But in the first word there are no i’s. The first vowel is the Turkish ı, which has no dot on top. The dot on top of a I or a J is called a “tittle”, and if a phone does not have Turkish localization software (which was the case for some phones in 2008), you may see an ı with a tittle.

“Sikisinca” is not actually a Turkish word, but “sikişınce” is, so Emine thought Ramazan had typed that. Ramazan had typed a sentence that said, “When you can’t answer an argument, change the subject,” but with sexit looked like he had written instead, “Every time they fuck you, you change the subject.”

As with so many of these misunderstandings, we would never have known about it if it had stayed that way. But Emine showed it to her father, who was offended by the accusation that his daughter had sex with an unspecified group of people. When Ramazan returned home, he found his wife, her father and an entire family physically attacking him.

One of them stabbed him in the chest. He survived, but next he got the knife in his hands and stabbed Emine. She did not survive. Ramazan was arrested for the death and committed suicide in prison.

If you want to talk to your partner about his or her habit of changing the subject, just talk to him or her in person.

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