Innocuous things that cause you to experience schadenfreude

-when someone sprints down the hall to get an elevator and the door closes right in their face
-someone trekking hours to see a concert without a ticket only to find out it's sold out when they get there

along the lines of the first, when someone runs to catch a bus or train and it pulls away just as they get there

Couples breaking up on the street

a restaurant (or other business) has weird hours/is closed mondays/etc, & some poor fools are about to find that out the hard way

(great thread idea btw)

Clive James nails this:

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy's much-prized effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles
One passes down reflecting on life's vanities,
Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews
Lavished to no avail upon one's enemy's book --
For behold, here is that book
Among these ranks and banks of duds,
These ponderous and seemingly irreducible cairns
Of complete stiffs.

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I rejoice.
It has gone with bowed head like a defeated legion
Beneath the yoke.
What avail him now his awards and prizes,
The praise expended upon his meticulous technique,
His individual new voice?
Knocked into the middle of next week
His brainchild now consorts with the bad buys
The sinker, clinkers, dogs and dregs,
The Edsels of the world of moveable type,
The bummers that no amount of hype could shift,
The unbudgeable turkeys.

Yea, his slim volume with its understated wrapper
Bathes in the blare of the brightly jacketed Hitler's War Machine,
His unmistakably individual new voice
Shares the same scrapyard with a forlorn skyscraper
Of The Kung-Fu Cookbook,
His honesty, proclaimed by himself and believed by others,
His renowned abhorrence of all posturing and pretense,
Is there with Pertwee's Promenades and Pierrots--
One Hundred Years of Seaside Entertainment,
And (oh, this above all) his sensibility,
His sensibility and its hair-like filaments,
His delicate, quivering sensibility is now as one
With Barbara Windsor's Book of Boobs,
A volume graced by the descriptive rubric
"My boobs will give everyone hours of fun".

Soon now a book of mine could be remaindered also,
Though not to the monumental extent
In which the chastisement of remaindering has been meted out
To the book of my enemy,
Since in the case of my own book it will be due
To a miscalculated print run, a marketing error--
Nothing to do with merit.
But just supposing that such an event should hold
Some slight element of sadness, it will be offset
By the memory of this sweet moment.
Chill the champagne and polish the crystal goblets!
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am glad.

People leaving bands to start solo careers, never to be heard of again.

internet breakdowns

People who score a touchdown/goal/basket and run around celebrating, unaware as of yet that it's been disallowed by the official

People who show up at the wrong venues for things (there's a local movie theatre here called the Plaza, but also a concert hall called Plaza, and people show up at the concert hall thinking it's the movie theatre all the time). One 75 year old guy showed up there once for some movie during a Tech N9ne concert, not at all confused by all of the Juggalo-esque people around him that were getting patted down.

or people who buy a ticket for a show and buy it for the wrong city, or mistake a show in another city for theirs.

my friend bought a ticket to see Heart once at Hard Rock, and kept talking about it all week on FB. None of us really noticed anything weird as none of us were going, but it did seem odd in retrospect that literally nobody else talked about it, given how many people I know who are Heart fans.

Two hours later, said friend dejectedly logs on FB and says..."There's a Hard Rock Live in California"? Apparently only discovering her mistake when she got to the venue only to find no Heart.

People who score a touchdown/goal/basket and run around celebrating, unaware as of yet that it's been disallowed by the official

― Hammer Smashed Bagels,

ya this is a good one, that penalty one is obv the best of the genre

men in their twenties who are already starting to go bald

here now

sorry for your loss :(

(:'(

(fwiw I have 2.5 years left until I turn 30 & I come from a family of premature balders. Schadenfreude often ends in Scham)

People who walk out and realize their car has been towed (I've been on the receiving end twice tho)

seeing multiple cars skidding out into the shoulder during a snowstorm — not serious accidents, but simple "you're gonna need a tow" situations

(one time I counted 4 such cars in the space of a quarter mile, and I skidded into a guardrail and smashed my headlight a few seconds after the Schadenfreude had registered)

"Jesus, it's like none of these people have ever driven in New England before"—*crash*

People who walk out and realize their car has been towed

Along the same lines, people who return to their car to find a traffic warden booking them for parking illegally and arguing in vain with him not to give them a ticket

People who walk out and realize their car has been towed (I've been on the receiving end twice tho)

― Hammer Smashed Bagels, Saturday, March 21, 2015 6:12 PM (26 minutes ago)

i love this even though it's happened to me (used to live where parking spots up front were tow-away 4-6 and would sometimes come home early from work and forget). i hate when people park illegally. especially in bus stops, by fire hydrants. i delight in seeing them towed.

People who turn up at the supermarket on the verge of closing time and are not granted entry
People whose shopping bags split open and their shopping falls on the ground
Any instance of a cyclist being bested by a car or bus, the annoying fuckers

protesters getting battered

someone odious continually updating their social media account w/ complaints about their life

Religious proselytizer on the street being confronted by a religious proselytizer of an different faith

a not an

I screamed "Hail Satan" at a few of those last night (they're all over downtown O-Town). small gesture but every little bit helps!

-People who come to a shop to buy something but I (or someone else in the store) has just snatched the last copy

*have

one of my favs, the moment a blowhard has yammered on insisting he/she is right about something for an hour and is finally disproven and then tries to backpedal

-when obnoxious fans of a sports team are silenced by a goal/touchdown/homerun/three-pointer/spike etc

England post thatcher