35 Times People Overheard Conversations That Were Too Good To Keep Private, So They Shared Them On Twitter
Interview
The popularity of Overheard L.A., San Francisco and New York accounts seems to have awakened the nosy little eavesdroppers within us. Although people say that listening to other private conversations is an impolite thing to do, there’s so much small talk happening in public that sometimes we just can’t help it.
Take a look at how many people shared the meticulously documented conversations they overheard with no context whatsoever. Whether someone’s at the museum, grocery store or working for a 3 billion dollar company, these interactions are equal parts bizarre and hilarious.
We have collected some of the best tweets floating around Twitter, so continue scrolling and upvote your favorite ones. When you’re done with this post, you’ll find some more hilarious quotes right here.
This post may include affiliate links.
Stop stereotyping kids toys! My three adult kids chose what toys they wanted, whether a doll for the boys or nerf guns for my girl. Let kids be and stop pushing your gender agenda on them.
Or let boys use nerf guns or girls play with Barbies if they want to. That's ok too!
Load More Replies...
Fast forward 15 years, the girl is an Air Defense Battle Management System Operator and her mum is complaining that she is not married yet.
When I was a little girl, I wanted a sword! It didn't have to be sharp or anything, because I just wanted to wave it around and not hurt anyone, but it did have made of metal! And for some reason, my parents just wouldn't buy me one! (I bought one in my twenties, and I still have it.)
One of the gifts I'm giving my 6 year old daughter tomorrow is some fishing lures because she absolutely loves ice fishing...people think it's something for father and son but she's the best fishing partner!
My daughter goes fishing with her grandpa. I've gone fishing with my dad and brother. One of my brothers takes his daughters fishing. Not sure why anyone would think it's just a masculine activity.
Load More Replies...
That's a girl after my own heart. I was a major tomboy, still am for that matter. These stupid gender stereotypes are majorly outdated and need to go! Let kids be who they want to be!
My seven year old son has plenty of household stuff. I hope he'll turn out to be a helpful husband.
I'm a preschool teacher and often the boys who choose the dolls are the more caring ones. We don't aim any dramatic play at one particular gender as it is more about developing social skills.
Load More Replies...
My grandson wanted a kitchen set for Christmas. Guess what he's getting for Christmas. We've gone from the "days of old" where Barbie = girl and G.I. Joe = boy or pink/blue etc. Let kids do what they do best, be imaginative and PLAY
Years ago all my nephew wanted was kitchen stuff. He did not like pink or things we think of as girly. I could not find any kitchen stuff not painted pink and covered in Barbi or hello kitty pictures. In the end, I got him adult kitchen equipment from a camping shop. Most men in his family at the time were cooks, why everything was girly was just odd. His brother loved pink - and still does, he is straight, but why not ware pink if you want? Toys and clothes should have choices though
Load More Replies...
Nothing is inherently girly so they are just being themselves
Load More Replies...
If this exact situation and conversation actually had happened, I would be very surprised.
I have overheard conversations almost word for word like this from parents. It is particularly grating when said by parents at a kindergarten event. We try to break these toxic patterns all year and parents can undo them in one go.
Load More Replies...
I'm actually in Boy Scouts and the reason I didn't chose Girl Scouts was because I didn't want to sing by a campfire I wanted to be out fishing
In Australia there is no boy and girls scout, they are all the one group. I think it is much better to encourage both genders to give any outdoor activity a go, and do so together. We do still have Girl Guides though, which I would never have been interested in, especially when there was a local one named 'Gumnut fairy rainbow guides'.
Load More Replies...
Way to stick to your blasters, kid! 🤣 Whaddya kids say dese days? I'm dead.
RIGHT? like what person wants to learn how the shackles of their oppression work when you can save the galaxy?!?!?!
If this kid actually exists, she's up by a million points in my book
Let the girl be herself. Stop stereotyping. At least she knows who she is and im really happy that she’s being herself ♥️
My nephews had a toy kitchen when they were small. My SIL got so many comments suggesting it would affect their gender and sexuality! 😂
My view: you are born as boy or girl, there's no denial possible here. (Physical.) Your path after that, can go many many ways, all good. But denying you are born as a boy/girl will set you up for a world of hurt. Embrace your born gender, AND find the (non)gender that is YOU. Embrace BOTH. Denying history is success for future failure. And yes, that last line applies to all things in life.
I have one friend who gets a Lego set from her husband for Christmas every year which I think is amazing. It almost makes me consider dating, but only almost. The best gift my brother and I ever got was probably the mixed box of older Lego pieces from a garage sale. Then we spent the next 10 years fighting over who got to use each particular piece!
Most girls like both. Sometimes they want feminine stuff, sometimes, they want to do other stuff. All perfectly ok.
Many, many, many years ago, when I was probably 3 years old, I wanted a witch mask for halloween. My parents suggested dracula or frankenstein or a ghost, since the witch mask was "for girls", but I wanted the witch mask because it was the scariest. I'm glad my parents got me the witch mask.
Today I learned my mom believes very religiously in gender roles. She saw me looking at this post and went on a rsnt about how it's the psrents duty to enforce their child's gender until they are old enough to make the decision and when that happens, whatever happens is on them
I can't believe this is still happening. It was common when I was a kid, more for boys than for girls, that is, a girl could play baseball a lot easier than a boy could play dolls, although the boys I knew sometimes played with their sisters, but all these years later, I don't know anyone still narrow minded enough to do this. Maybe conservatives, I guess . . . they're the only group I know that still has issues with sexual identity.
Isn't this more a projecting thing than stereotyping? Mum was just more into the pink stuff and her daughter wasn't. Why mothers are sometimes really bad at buying presents because they buy us things they'ld like to have worn or played with. Or being more practical.the universe isn't going to be saved by kids with lightsabers, and neither is the household furniture. 😉
Can't confirm. I would like my girl to be more boyish and like cars and stuff.... she does play with that, as we have lots in the house, but she prefers dolls and other girly stuff. So of course she got a new doll for Christmas!
Load More Replies...
Utensils are not toys. No, not even when they are pink. Let your kids play with whatever they want. Teaching them how to fry and egg, boil potatoes, do laundry and clean the toilet is a basic thing. If you need "toys" (i.e. a pink spatula and/or a blue plunger) to help you raise normal functioning adults you need a therapist
If you’ve ever stood in public transport, waited in line at a café, or just talked on your phone while walking down the street, there’s a big chance that you’ve been eavesdropped on.
When you think about listening to conversations of other people, words like “prying” and “nosy” pop right into your head. However, more often than not, these brief interactions are so confusing, they can make anyone stop and listen.
Bored Panda reached out to Dr. Lauren Emberson, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia, to find out more about why we are so fascinated by what strangers have to say. She and her colleagues did a study called Overheard cell-phone conversations: when less speech is more distracting.
The researchers were trying to see whether the thinking abilities of 41 volunteers were most affected by listening to two people talking, a monologue, silence, or a “halfalogue”, a one-sided conversation. The results showed that overhearing a “halfalogue” is distracting and decreases performance “on cognitive tasks designed to reflect the attentional demands of daily activities.”
When it comes to listening to cell-phone conversations, our brains are trying to break down what the person on the other end of the call is talking about, which makes it harder for us to concentrate. “By contrast, overhearing both sides of a cell-phone conversation or a monologue does not result in decreased performance.”
However, it seems that not listening to private conversations is difficult because our attentional systems do it automatically. “Our study showed that even when we instruct people not to listen to the conversations when they were doing attentionally demanding tasks, their attention was specifically drawn away from their task when they were listening to a cell phone conversation or a ‘halfalogue,‘” the professor explained.
It is not exactly clear why that happens. Dr. Emberson told us that there’s some evidence that the unpredictability of the speech could be the problem here. “Remember that in a cell phone conversation, speech starts and stops,” she mentioned.
“We found that attention is drawn away specifically when the speech starts, not during the silences, suggesting that the unpredictable cell phone speech is hard for you to process compared to a dialogue (even when the speaker changes in a dialogue, it’s not as distracting).”
When asked if people eavesdrop consciously, the professor said that it’s definitely true and that she sometimes does it too: “The inspiration of this study, though, was a feeling that I and many others have that you can’t help but eavesdrop on these cell phone conversations.”
She added: “I really didn’t want to listen to them but I felt I couldn’t filter them out. And that’s why we tested whether it is an automatic function of your attentional system to tune your mind into them and sure enough, that’s the case!”
The study revealed that overhearing conversations can make us feel annoyed and irritated. Yet, so many people take these interactions to the internet and see it as a great source of entertainment. Dr. Emberson has offered one explanation for us: “These convos were very irritating at a time before texting when everyone was talking on their cell phones and it was very noisy with those conversations in public spaces like buses.”
“Now most people text (myself included) so they might be more of a curiosity than anything else,” she mentioned. Her personal opinion is that people find such convos bizarre and funny because “they are out of context (you only hear one half) and that engages your curiosity in a way.”
Best getaway costume ever. Commit crime in the nude. Put on clothing. Become invisible to cops.
John Locke, a professor of language science and author of Eavesdropping: An Intimate History, mentioned another reason why we may see one-sided convos as irritating. When someone is talking quietly, it grabs people’s attention. However, when they are being loud, many become annoyed.
While the presence of a library in a town might appear like something mundane, the absence of it would be somewhat concerning. So yes.
The reason behind it is that loud social behavior violates one basic law of nature: “We don’t like donations. We don’t like it when people present us with information about themselves that we’re not seeking.”
“[People] want to know what you’re truly like inside, not what others want them to think,” Locke said. “We love it when we get something that’s truly genuinely true about others and so we still prefer taking it, or if not taking it, extracting clues on our own.”
Yikes... in his shoes I think I'd be tempted. Sorry if no-one agrees with me but how long can you keep harking on back to something before driving the other person round the twist?
We are very interested in how other people act in private. Most of our lives we spend alone with our thoughts, and it’s interesting to see how others behave when they think no one is observing them. “The only way you can know that is by looking at other people who think that they’re alone,” John Locke mentioned.
Still, one thing we’re sure of—listening to strangers’ conversations can be hilarious. And the fact that we hear only a fraction of the conversation that doesn’t make any sense to us makes it even funnier.
Oh no! They need to explain to him what rickrolling is! Like yesterday! It's the most wholesome thing! <3
houses ? vegetable peeler ? toes ? trees ? too much possiblities, The suspense is killing me !
🤣I’m gonna tell my friend, I love to see her grumbling for 20 minutes all by herself, wiggling her arms around
My first thought when I wake up in the morning is, “I can’t wait to go to bed tonight.”
Note: this post originally had 63 images. It’s been shortened to the top 35 images based on user votes.
I can't share the good stuff, due to privacy, but once long ago, on a public bus, the guy across the aisle looked right down to his crotch and whispered, "Good boy!" and I got off at the next stop.
HOW is it not like the flu shot? BOTH reduce risk of severe illness and death, and both don't prevent illness entirely. Pretty much the same in what is important about them.
I once woke up in the middle of the night to my husband having an argument downstairs by himself saying "no, no. That's not what I said." The next morning I asked him who he was arguing with on the phone last night. He said he was talking to himself. What about, i asked him. He said he likes to practice arguing in case such a situation ever came up in the future. Weekd later, we had an argument and he used that exact same line with me. Looks like I have to eavesdrop on his late night conversations with himself so I can be ahead in the game too.
The front page changes by every reload of the page, so reload it and you’ll get another entry :)
Load More Replies... Living in Nashville TN went to IHOP closest to home; certainly not the worst part of the city, but not a good area either. A group of 4 people get out of a car near ours (all had very thick NY accents) as they were walking in I heard one ask "did you lock the doors?" The driver laughed and replied "this is Nashville TN, not NYC." To this day I still don't understand how a person can be from a place where you're practically born with street smarts can be so stupid to not use them everywhere you go.
CA and NY regard everyone between their coasts to be naifs.
Load More Replies... My 3yo: you're young... Me: (thrilled about my looks) My 3yo:...because you're not dead yet
Three year olds come out with the best things, sometimes you can really understand their logic... sometimes not :)
Load More Replies...
Overheard at the gym- 2 women were gossiping about some woman that had met a new man and he was foreign. She said " I think he's Italian" then she added "or his a Roman, I'm not sure."
Years ago I was standing in line at a convenience store. Three men were in line ahead of me, two were well dressed, the third was not so well dressed and looked really bored. One well dressed man said to the other, "He's a man of conviction". The not so well dressed man's eyes lit up and said, "I have a conviction!"
Overheard at a pub in Sydney: :"I don't know; he's a pathological liar!" "Then why do you still drink with him?"
This is true, I was there standing next to two young guys in a store and they were looking thru DVD. Guy 1: Taken 3?! I didn't know there was a 3rd one! Guy two: Yes, seriously man they gotta stop screwing with the dude's family. Guy1. Yeah, I mean he has special skills! Guy 2: Hells yeah. He was on the A Team. Guy 1: A Team??? Shmay Team. Dude trained Anakin Skywalker!! Guy 2: Dude, he trained BATMAN!
All I gotta say is about some of the comments on the posts. A lot of the OPs have indicated somehow that they were laughing about what they posted and some of the commenters basically had a bunch of negativity to throw around. If I laugh (by putting LMAO, for example) about a post I made and we don't see eye to eye on the situation, go p155 in someone else's Cheerios.
I was thinking 'page 155' 🤔? Lol I've been doing too much proofreading on Gutenberg press
Load More Replies... I can't share the good stuff, due to privacy, but once long ago, on a public bus, the guy across the aisle looked right down to his crotch and whispered, "Good boy!" and I got off at the next stop.
HOW is it not like the flu shot? BOTH reduce risk of severe illness and death, and both don't prevent illness entirely. Pretty much the same in what is important about them.
I once woke up in the middle of the night to my husband having an argument downstairs by himself saying "no, no. That's not what I said." The next morning I asked him who he was arguing with on the phone last night. He said he was talking to himself. What about, i asked him. He said he likes to practice arguing in case such a situation ever came up in the future. Weekd later, we had an argument and he used that exact same line with me. Looks like I have to eavesdrop on his late night conversations with himself so I can be ahead in the game too.
The front page changes by every reload of the page, so reload it and you’ll get another entry :)
Load More Replies... Living in Nashville TN went to IHOP closest to home; certainly not the worst part of the city, but not a good area either. A group of 4 people get out of a car near ours (all had very thick NY accents) as they were walking in I heard one ask "did you lock the doors?" The driver laughed and replied "this is Nashville TN, not NYC." To this day I still don't understand how a person can be from a place where you're practically born with street smarts can be so stupid to not use them everywhere you go.
CA and NY regard everyone between their coasts to be naifs.
Load More Replies... My 3yo: you're young... Me: (thrilled about my looks) My 3yo:...because you're not dead yet
Three year olds come out with the best things, sometimes you can really understand their logic... sometimes not :)
Load More Replies... Overheard at the gym- 2 women were gossiping about some woman that had met a new man and he was foreign. She said " I think he's Italian" then she added "or his a Roman, I'm not sure."
Years ago I was standing in line at a convenience store. Three men were in line ahead of me, two were well dressed, the third was not so well dressed and looked really bored. One well dressed man said to the other, "He's a man of conviction". The not so well dressed man's eyes lit up and said, "I have a conviction!"
Overheard at a pub in Sydney: :"I don't know; he's a pathological liar!" "Then why do you still drink with him?"
This is true, I was there standing next to two young guys in a store and they were looking thru DVD. Guy 1: Taken 3?! I didn't know there was a 3rd one! Guy two: Yes, seriously man they gotta stop screwing with the dude's family. Guy1. Yeah, I mean he has special skills! Guy 2: Hells yeah. He was on the A Team. Guy 1: A Team??? Shmay Team. Dude trained Anakin Skywalker!! Guy 2: Dude, he trained BATMAN!
All I gotta say is about some of the comments on the posts. A lot of the OPs have indicated somehow that they were laughing about what they posted and some of the commenters basically had a bunch of negativity to throw around. If I laugh (by putting LMAO, for example) about a post I made and we don't see eye to eye on the situation, go p155 in someone else's Cheerios.
I was thinking 'page 155' 🤔? Lol I've been doing too much proofreading on Gutenberg press
Load More Replies...