Nowadays, especially for you professionals recently out of college or trying to by house, having money in your checking account is a luxury few can afford.

Sometimes even paying of a credit card bill is a luxury few can afford. So having upwards of $10,000 sitting in a checking account is a stretch for most of us, right?

Tenille Sokolow posted TikTok asking the same question when she got a call from Bank of America informing her that she would be charged a maintenance fee for every month that her checking account was lower than $10,000.

She swears she could hear the employee laughing on the phone. Her outrage, which was echoed by many others, prompted @LilAnxiety1999 to share her own horror story with Bank of America, and the combo has people enraged.

She shares that she’s had an account with Bank of America since she was 17. They house her longest-standing credit card as well as multiple bank accounts. She’s never missed a payment or so much as an overdraft on any of her accounts. She’s 25-years-old and she works a regular, salaried position.

Unfortunately, she got scammed, but she was able to freeze and cancel all of her accounts before the scammer could get any money from her. Because she’d been such a solid and loyal customer, she didn’t think she’d have any trouble getting back into her Bank of America accounts, and at first, she didn’t.

But about a week after she got back into her account, she tried to log in only to find it locked again. Naturally, she called Bank of America and the customer service representative helped her change her username and password and get back into her account.

But this time, she could only see her credit card.

She’d heard horror stories about banking with Bank of America before so these were secondary accounts, but she still needed access to her checking and savings to pay her credit card bill. The customer service representative transferred her to an accounts representative.

Thsi account representative took down her name and her date of birth and told her that she was no longer eligible for a Bank of America checking or savings account. Essentially, they had decided she was no longer fit for these accounts, and had closed them on her behalf.

Naturally, she was very confused and upset and asked why they’d chosen to terminate her accounts. It turns out that’s something officials at Bank of America can just do, with no explanation necessary.

Now, without checking and savings, she’s also worried that they’re going to randomly cancel her longstanding credit card and ruin her credit. So she makes an appointment and goes to a Bank of America location in person, explaining her whole situation and her concerns. She asks them if she can get a written agreement stating that Bank of America won’t cancel her credit card without her permission. The employee tells her that she can’t speak on behalf of the company and when she asks for the manager he says the same thing.

They told her that when signed up she agreed that Bank of America could do whatever they wanted with her accounts. Then proceeded to advise that she open another credit card with another company and begin building credit elsewhere because they couldn’t give her any guarantee or reassurance.

Commenters are suggesting that she join a credit union instead, which is a not-for-profit organization that is a community-oriented way to keep money and take out loans, often eliminating fees and complicated agreements, according to My Credit Union.

Some chimed in with their own horror stories using Bank of America, pointing out that multiple lawsuits and legal troubles weren’t usually the mark of a good place to keep your money. Many had also had their accounts closed without their knowledge and one woman even said her husband had been banned from opening an account until 2135, despite never working with Bank of America.

Former employees even chimed in saying that even they would never bank there, echoing some of the same sentiments of the employees she talked to herself.

The general sentiment is “Credit Unions all the way” and it seems like people are even trying to start their own in the comments. @LilAnxiety1999 hasn’t updated on whether or not her credit card ever closed or how she got her money back, but she did make one thing very clear.

Her mantra going forward is, “Screw Bank of America.”

The world’s most popular social media platform, TikTok, has made a bold and desperate move in hopes of changing its seemingly inevitable fate in the United States.

Last month, after two years of concerns that TikTok is a threat to U.S. national security, the United States Congress passed a bill to ban the social media platform unless ByteDance — the Chinese company that owns the app — sells the service. H.R. 7521, called the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act,” states that “Under the bill, a foreign adversary controlled application is directly or indirectly operated by (1) ByteDance, Ltd. or TikTok (including subsidiaries or successors that are controlled by a foreign adversary); or (2) a social media company that is controlled by a foreign adversary and has been determined by the President to present a significant threat to national security.”

In immediate response, TikTok CEO Shou Chew took to his platform to suggest that TikTok will fight against the ruling, saying, “The facts and the Constitution are on our side and we expect to prevail.”

Now, ByteDance has followed through with that promise by filing a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington D.C. against the United States government, arguing that the congressional ruling meant to ban TikTok is unconstitutional.

The lawsuit reads, in part:

“For the first time in history, Congress has enacted a law that subjects a single, named speech platform to a permanent, nationwide ban and bars every American from participating in a unique online community with more than 1 billion people worldwide.”

TikTok also questions the evidence presented by the U.S. government to back their claims that the app poses a significant threat to national security, especially considering that the government, and not TikTok, shoulders the legal burden of proof.

Furthermore, the social media company states that a ban arising from unstated national security concerns does not justify the ban’s impediment to free speech. Many TikTok users agree with the company, believing that the ban ruling is an attempt to violate or at least curtail their Constitutional right to free speech.

Additionally, the lawsuit argues that Congress is creating unfair rules exclusively targeting TikTok, while not applying such rules to other social media platforms.

TikTok also suggests that if the ban were to occur, then it will only serve to silence millions of Americans who use the app. “The Act (law) will force a shutdown of TikTok by January 19, 2025,” the lawsuit reads, “silencing the 170 million Americans who use the platform to communicate in ways that cannot be replicated elsewhere.”

The bill that bans TikTok, or attempts to force its sale, was passed by the Senate on April 23, 2024, and signed into law by President Biden the following day.

A TikTok user has shared a student’s experience in which she found herself being escorted from prom by armed security simply due to the fact that she was wearing a quinceañera dress.

Today’s story is a pretty frustrating one, get used to it TikTok is full of them. In a video shared by user @djlostone (Dj Lost One) he recounts the story of the anonymous student, who goes by the name Jasmine. Jasmine is Mexican-American and a sophomore in high school with her quinceañera around the corner. A quinceañera is essentially a big celebration of a girl’s 15th birthday, it’s a pretty big deal coming of age celebration in Mexican and Latin-American cultures. Anyways, Jasmine put a lot of effort into her dress, so decided she’d also wear it to prom. However, Jasmine ended up being kicked out of said prom due to “cultural appropriation,” but I wasn’t aware it was possible to appropriate your own culture.

Obviously, this is a pretty frustrating situation, considering Jasmine was well within her rights to wear a quinceañera dress. It was discovered that a complaint had been made about her wearing the dress prior to her arrival — apparently, a claim was made that “she would make other students feel uncomfortable for wearing the quinceañera dress, as it was cultural appropriation.” Once again, Jasmine is Mexican and therefore, her wearing the dress should not be a problem. Despite this, she was still removed from the prom and her night ruined over basically nothing.

In his investigations, Dj Lost One discovered that there were only 5 Latino students attending Jasmine’s school, and so he determined that it was likely that the students who made the complaint were white, which makes the whole thing even more frustrating. 

TikTok users shared their own thoughts on the situation, suggesting motivations for why the students would report Jasmine, as well as expressing anger at the whole situation.

soo… those girls were jealous, bc I know Quince dresses are always fabulous!

So she got escorted because her dress was too pretty? Like is this for real???

beautiful dress.. sounds like these others girls where jellious

Of course, this was a big mistake on the school’s part; as it turns out, the parents of one of Jasmine’s friends are actually lawyers who specialize in racial discrimination cases, and they’re now apparently engaged in a civil lawsuit seeking $250,000 in damages.

In a follow-up video, Dj Lost One says that he thinks they should be suing for even more money, he also gives a few details regarding what the dress looked like — and honestly, it’s a very nice dress. He also shared a rough estimate as to how much it would have cost. In case you’re wondering, it cost somewhere around $180.00 for the base, but the modifications she added brought it closer to $300.00. I probably would have wanted to wear that dress to prom, too, if I’d spent that much on it.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I aspire to one day have so glaringly few problems in my life, that I can afford to channel whatever indignation I have left towards someone on Instagram who happens to share my name; a name I acquired through marriage to a stupendously wealthy family, no less.

That’s precisely the life that one Katherine Asplundh seems to be living right now; having apparently just married into the Asplundh family (who reportedly have a collective net worth of $3 billion dollars; more on that later), the next step was to update her Instagram handle to reflect her new surname. If you’re unable to imagine her horror when she discovered that the handle she had in mind was already taken by another Katherine Asplundh, not to worry; TikTok‘s @nosybystanders has captured the saga in full, and by golly, does Mrs. Asplundh ever take some bold swings in this exchange.

What begins as a friendly message asking if the OG Katherine Asplundh can change and/or sell her handle (a message that’s met met with an equally friendly decline) eventually turns into an accusation that the OG Katherine is only pretending to be named Katherine, followed by empty threats by the newly-minted Katherine Asplundh to report the OG Katherine for fraud, demanding proof that the OG Katherine actually is named Katherine Asplundh, and whipping out what she seems to believes is a gotcha moment in claiming that her new family is the only Asplundh family in the United States. This moment is countered when the OG Katherine reveals that she is one of billions of people in the world who does not live in the United States. Furthermore, not once does it seem to occur to Mrs. Asplundh that her new name can be reflected in handles other than the one she’s harassing OG Katherine for.

Needless to say, Mrs. Asplundh’s crusade didn’t end the way she hoped, with the OG Katherine gifting her nothing more than two reports (one for harassment, and one for trying to persuade her into selling her username; a bannable offense in the world of Instagram) as the spoils of this particular war. If Mrs. Asplundh hopes to make it in the influencer business, she may want to sharpen her bartering skills, and perhaps her attitude as a whole.

The U.S. Asplundh family — who has ties to Dr. Mehmet Oz of The Dr. Oz Show — owes their worth to Asplundh Tree Expert; a company founded in 1928 that specializes in tree trimming and other utility-centric services. Ownership of the company is divided amongst 200 members of the Asplundh family.

Ownership of OG Katherine’s Instagram handle, however, remains as undivided as ever, much to the dismay of the Asplundh family’s newest member.

It is now official: The recently-announced cast list for Wednesday season 2 does not include Percy Hynes White. And, it may be the case that no one will fill in the role, thus writing off the character of Xavier Thrope from the series despite the character’s part in the narrative suggesting Xavier had more story to explore.

If the allegations against White are true – and there are plenty –  his removal from the cast cannot be helped. Take it from me, I was personally quite taken by Xavier’s psychic, reserved, and tortured artist character archetype, more so than with the clearly too-nice-not-to-raise-red-flags Tyler, but that’s no excuse to instinctively discredit any potential veracity of White’s alleged condemnable past deeds without daring to dig deeper.

These sorts of allegations are not to be taken lightly, and while the original posts from the alleged victims and witnesses are now gone, it may well have been due to legal reasons or threats from overzealous fans who cannot seem to help but take the side of the celebrity they like, even without knowing them personally to be able to legitimately vouch for their character.

So, what were these accusations that led to Netflix dropping the 22-year-old Canadian actor from the popular series?

Alleged systematic predatory behavior

A girl going by “Aries” as her Twitter username was the one to blow the whistle on the alleged inexcusable behavior Percy Hynes White enacted during high school. Message screenshots paint an elaborate, detailed, and damning description of the kind of predatory, misogynistic behavior of which the actor is accused. Not only that, but Aries also attached message chats featuring inappropriate photos of someone who clearly looks like White. Some of these were allegedly sent to minors.

The allegations claim that, while he was a teenager in Toronto, White mistreated girls, both girlfriends and the girls who rejected him, being said to resort to insults and body shaming. He and his group of friends are accused of hosting parties and getting girls so inebriated they were unable to consent to sexual advances, having been ultimately assaulted. One girl alleged the to-be actor watched her assault from the sidelines. When this situation happened, White called the girl in question and was allegedly more concerned with not having law enforcement involved. If this situation could not get any worse, White is also said to have taken non-consensual sexual pictures of girls, and even shared them online.

Instagram screenshots seem to suggest White seemingly corroborating at least part of the allegations by conceding that what he had done was “a complete scumbag thing to do,” claiming that now that he is an adult, he knows better. Some people pointed to a video of White touching Jenna Ortega’s chest during a red carpet appearance to argue that his behavior had not really changed by the time he became a star on the Netflix series.

On top of all of these damning accusations, old tweets are said to have surfaced – these are now gone – of White using slurs and other inappropriate words.

As a result of this firestorm of allegations and people coming forward, and after a period of silence, White came forward to say the rumors were untrue. Variety quoted him as writing:

“Earlier this year, somebody I’ve never met started a campaign of misinformation about me online. Because of this, my family has been doxxed, and my friends have received death threats. Underage photos of me were used, and examples of me acting in character were presented as hateful. My friend Jane was falsely portrayed as a victim, and her attempts to set the record straight have been ignored. She gave me permission to include her in this message. […] The rumors are false. I can’t accept the portrayal of me as someone bigoted, or criminally negligent of people’s safety. These are the kind of baseless, harmful claims that can create mistrust toward victims. It’s very distressing to know that this misinformation has upset people. I’m really thankful for everyone who’s stood by me and helped share the facts. Harassment of my family, friends and coworkers needs to stop please. Thank you for taking the time to read this.”

In this kind of he-said/she-said conundrum, there is often no easy way to get tangible evidence that will satisfy some. But for those who think so in regards to the former Wednesday actor, this is not even a she-said/he-said, in this case, many people pointed the finger and Percy Hynes White replied saying it was nothing but a “campaign of misinformation.”

Mouth-watering recipes, pre-planned dance tutorials, step-by-step DIY projects — there’s not much that doesn’t take place on the magical, social media realm known as TikTok. And while the other features listed are undoubtedly eye-catching, it’s now apparent that the social platform is becoming popular for its particular shop page.

I mean, let’s face it, a large majority of society now is wholeheartedly obsessed with following the latest fashion trends. Not only that, but the same thing can apply to the latest eye-popping gadget or smart device, so it’s no wonder the orders being made on the TikTok Shop page just seem to increase with each passing day. And while clothes are surely a big portion of the items being sold, other concepts such as a bagel guillotine, a sky projector, and a shoulder massager are certainly special finds that TikTokers love.

As alluring as these products are to those of us mindlessly scrolling through the Shop page every single day, a fair amount of TikTokers are interested in learning exactly how long it will take to get these items in their hands.

So, how long does TikTok Shop take to ship and deliver?

At the current time of this writing, the TikTok Shop-loving masses luckily don’t have to wait too long after placing an order on the platform — with an official TikTok video explaining that all orders on the Shop page are shipped within 3-7 business/working days. Of course, this is a typical timeframe for most items that are ordered online (except Amazon), so being patient is definitely an essential part of the entire ordering process.

Then again, patience is a virtue, so it makes sense as to why TikTokers are scratching their chins and wondering how long they’ll need to wait before possessing these particular items. Nevertheless, remain patient for a few days, and your items will be at your doorstep before you know it.

Paul McCartney has finally returned a message to a diehard fan, some 60 years after she originally professed her love for The Beatles icon.

In the 1960s, a woman, now lovingly dubbed “Adrienne from Brooklyn”, became the face of Beatlemania, after a brief interview with her was broadcast on CBS. “I love The Beatles and I’ll always love them,” Adrienne gushed in a thick Brooklyn accent during the now-iconic vox pop. 

“Paul McCartney, if you are listening, Adrienne from Brooklyn loves you with all her heart.” Now, six decades later, McCartney himself has responded, taking to social media to share his reaction to the Beatles superfan.

In the video, uploaded on May 4, the guitarist and vocalist addresses Adrienne directly, saying he finally “saw your video” and informing her that he too is in Brooklyn as part of a ‘Beatlemania’ photo exhibit in Brooklyn Museum.

“Adrienne from Brooklyn if you are listening,” he wrote in the accompanying caption, “Paul McCartney from Liverpool loves you too.” McCartney’s video has since garnered over 17 million views and 2.4 million likes. While no one knows for sure the exact identity of Adrienne, one family came forth claiming to be related to the superfan. They too uploaded a video in response to McCartney, revealing that Adrienne is their mother and that her surname is D’Onofrio. 

“Hey Paul,” the D’Onofrios said in their response video, “we hear you’re looking for our mother.” The family goes on to explain the first time they were made aware of the footage of their mom from the 60s, stumbling upon the CBS segment while on YouTube six years ago.

“I knew that was Mommy,” one family member said, before revealing she would’ve been aged between 12 to 14 years old at the time of the interview. 

Reiterating her superfan status, the family recalled Adrienne telling them stories of skipping school to see The Beatles during their US tours, constantly playing their albums, and the scrawled message addressed to McCartney on one of the album covers. While social media was responsible for quickly tracking the family down, the D’Onofrios said that Adrienne had unfortunately passed away at the age of 41 in 1991, after a long battle with lymphoma.

According to Rolling Stone, who tracked down the D’Onofrios for a recent profile, Adrienne was a mom of four, and her children have continued her love for The Beatles by continually revisiting the old albums kept by Adrienne. As for how Adrienne might have reacted to McCartney’s reply, some six decades in the making, the D’Onofrios said she would be “ecstatic,” but joked that the Beatle would have to go through their father first.  

It might not be the happy ending TikTok users were looking forward to, but Adrienne’s story is nonetheless a wholesome testament to the endurance of music fandom. 

Telehealth may be the way of the future. For one TikToker, Capturingclouds, however, her experience with a telehealth provider, Teledoc Health, led to a potential stalking situation. It began when a Teledoc Health representative used the information she provided in her session to contact her on WhatsApp.

In the first TikTok post, Capturingclouds explained she ID’d the guy, Josh Robles from Dickinson, Texas, when he sent her a WhatsApp message. “Josh decided I sounded cute on the phone,” she said, “saved my phone number, and hit me up on WhatsApp.”

Capturingclouds said that Robles admitted what he’d done in a WhatsApp message, and she was seeking information about Robles and whether he was still working at Teledoc (he told her he quit) so that she could “remedy” the situation.

According to Capturingclouds, she tried to contact Teledoc Health services about what happened via email, phone calls, and DMing the company on two separate platforms. “Very f***ed up, and I need someone to contact me,” she said.

Josh Robles wasn’t a doctor

In her second TikTok post, Capturingcloud said she found out Josh Robles wasn’t a doctor but a customer service representative gathering her information for an appointment. “He pulled my information and was sending me inappropriate messages on WhatsApp that did pertain to my medical information,” she said. A HIPAA complaint was filed, she added.

Several people had contacted her with Robles’ contact information, she continued. She said she didn’t want him to be doxxed but wanted to find out if he lied about quitting Telehealth or if he still worked there. She also wanted to know if he had a wife. “I thought that might be someone who wanted to know about this,” she said, and according to her TikTok post, those questions were answered.

Robles has an arrest record

According to Capturingclouds, she also found out Josh Robles has an arrest record for “indecency with a minor,” she alleged. “Now I’m wondering why this guy was hired into healthcare in the first place,” she said. She said Teledoc’s vice president of privacy and compliance had contacted her.

“I’m a little overwhelmed. Enraged is putting it lightly,” she added. “I don’t want you to doxx this guy. I’m looking into a lawyer. So, we’ll see where this goes,” she said.

Baby Reindeer ⏤ you know it, you probably love it (Stephen King did), it’s probably made your skin crawl, it’s probably elicited a few laughs out of you that you weren’t expecting, it probably made you cry a whole awful lot, and you probably can’t get it out of your head.

In other words, to say that Richard Gadd hasn’t made something profoundly special (and, indeed, important) here would be insincerity of the highest order. But that gong has been sounded aplenty. It’s instead high time we took a closer look at the multi-pronged elephant in the room that has taken root ever since Baby Reindeer shot to the top of the Netflix charts. Indeed, it’s time we turn our attention to those who have made it their mission to identify the real-life Martha and Darrien, often to the detriment of innocent people who now have to contend with death threats and harassment.

How at fault is Baby Reindeer for the false accusations it’s inspired?

Let’s get one thing straight: making a piece of autofiction and including characters based on both your stalker and your rapist and expecting the internet not to do their best Sherlock Holmes impression afterward is severely naive. That’s not to say that Gadd and company were working under any such illusion, but the fact that such a reaction didn’t seem to be anticipated is, admittedly, something of an oversight on the part of team Baby Reindeer (even if Gadd has since come forward to tell everyone to stop).

More importantly, though, I want to challenge the idea that the existence of Baby Reindeer is to blame for this influx of false accusations. It’s true that Gadd could have addressed this phenomenon in a more timely manner, and it’s also true that “Baby Reindeer didn’t directly endorse this, so it isn’t Baby Reindeer‘s fault,” is hardly a helpful statement. It must be said, however, that the moment we turn the accountability mirror towards Baby Reindeer itself, we’ve relieved the internet sleuths of precisely that same accountability, which is both a dangerous and insulting precedent for everyone involved.

The Baby Reindeer situation, then, is a fantastic opportunity to open up conversations and dialogues surrounding healthy media consumption and how social media has mutated our obsession with drama and gossip by effectively giving us the tools to get directly involved with it ourselves (or, at the very least, get some impression of involvement).

With Baby Reindeer specifically, this is a very grounded, very intense show that had many viewers reacting strongly to it; it’s subsequently no surprise that — presumably in lieu of any palpable sense of self or fulfillment — those strong feelings about Baby Reindeer became the primary thing in their lives that those viewers could attach to. Toss in the fact that it’s based on a true story (i.e. real people, i.e. people who have harmed or otherwise abused Gadd, who many such viewers now feel a connection with) and these viewers now have the opportunity to give those feelings a more palpable purpose by putting that energy towards tracking down those who have hurt Gadd. Moreover, the fact that Martha and Darrien are varying sorts of abusers allow these viewers to easily paint them — and therefore the people these viewers accuse — as bad people, which in turn distracts from what can only be their own failings in life (emotional and otherwise). Make no mistake; the Baby Reindeer situation is, perhaps appropriately enough, a mental health issue in every way that matters.

It could, of course, be said that the real-life Darrien at least deserves to be put on full public blast (per Deadline, Gadd has reportedly been quite open about the real-life Darrien’s identity to those in the British entertainment circuit), and there’s certainly truth to that statement. But, as we’ve witnessed, taking such matters into one’s own hands has resulted in a myriad of death threats (among other such disturbances) against innocent people, and no one should be okay with doing such a thing.

Going off of that, one might say that, given Gadd’s pleas to the public to stop their investigations, he himself has a responsibility to let the public know who Darrien really is. It’s an understandable sentiment; no one would want someone who abuses his power and influence in such ways to continue to be able to do so, and he should absolutely face justice for his crimes. But, to put that specific responsibility on Gadd’s shoulders isn’t the right call either. His assault was his experience, and no one has any business telling him how he should be navigating it (which, for all we know, has included reports to the police). All we know is that it happened to him, and one of the ways he chose to navigate the aftermath was to make Baby Reindeer, a show that’s quite literally about navigating some of life’s most complicated interpersonal dangers, how we end up hurting people after we ourselves have been hurt, and facing it all with a rugged blend of compassion, humility, honesty, and self-preservation.

Baby Reindeer is a challenging show in all the right ways, and to blame it for the less-savory actions that people have taken in light of its subject matter downplays the importance of said subject matter while freeing the real perpetrators of personal responsibility. If one Mr. Donny Dunn has taught us anything, it’s that personal responsibility is one of the first steps one must take on the road to healing.

“This is a reminder to always check your surroundings. ‘Cause you hear these stories and you think ‘That will never happen to me’… It happened to me today.”

That’s the alarming opening to a video from TikTok influencer Gabrielle Moses in which she reveals that she had just experienced something terrifying, something that seems far-fetched and unlikely to happen in your everyday life — but which Gabrielle’s story makes abundantly clear certainly can.

Gabrielle was driving around, running some errands, when something peculiar occurred at a stoplight. A car in the lane next to hers was honking a lot in a bid to get her attention. Once she looked over, the driver pointed at the vehicle behind Gabrielle in her lane; a white U-Haul van with no front license plate.

Now alerted to the van’s presence, Gabrielle took a few turns in order to test if the other vehicle was following her, and sure enough it was. A quick Google told her the nearest police station wasn’t anywhere close, so an anxious Gabrielle decided to go to the busiest place nearby — a Costco.

Freaking out by now, Gabrielle lingered in Costco in the hopes that the van driver would get bored and leave her alone. At least 35 minutes later, however, the van was still there, circling the parking lot and clearly trying to locate Gabrielle’s car. Filming the evidence, she finally called 911 and the dispatcher offered to send officers out to investigate. By this time, though, Gabrielle had lost sight of the van and it appeared to have driven away.

Going by Gabrielle’s follow-up videos, she didn’t see the van or its driver again, but her story serves as a valuable list of do’s and don’t’s in case anyone else finds themselves in this situation. As many pointed out, Gabrielle really should’ve called the cops straight away once she got to Costco. In an follow-up, however, she admits that initially she thought she might’ve been imagining or worrying too much about the situation.

Many commenters also encouraged Gabrielle to get her car checked over, in case the van driver had AirTagged it while she was inside Costco. Unfortunately the police were slow in checking up on her, but at the great advice of a friend, Gabrielle went to the fire department instead so they could help her out. Luckily, they didn’t see anything.

What’s more, it also helps that Gabrielle drives a Tesla, so any footage of anyone that gets too close to the car is recorded. Again, this didn’t reveal anything sinister in the Costco parking lot, but Gabrielle stated that she was planning to take her car to a mechanic the next day to give it one final check-over.

As an ultimate, and very intelligent, precaution, Gabrielle explained that she wasn’t going to spend the night at her apartment, having a friend pick her up so the car would remain there. Another precaution Gabrielle could’ve taken was pointed out in the comments: “NEVER TURN ON THE LIGHTS IN YOUR APARTMENT WHEN YOU 1ST GET HOME. If you’re ever followed they’ll watch to know which place is yours.”

While a god-send of a gadget for those looking for lost luggage, Apple AirTags have sadly become irrevocably related to more nefarious purposes too. As per ITV News in April 2024, incidents of GPS tracking in stalking cases have risen 317% over the past five years, thanks to the leaps forward in technology. In this case, Gabrielle is thankfully safe, but her final warning is one that everyone should bear in mind: “Ladies, watch your back and know how to protect yourself.”

Sometimes, you look back on your life and feel melancholic: all the sandwich-eaters you regrettably harassed, all the missed leftovers and crumbs, all the cobblestones you never got to bombard with your excrement, and will never get to. You may pass a pigeon on the street and see it coo with a smile, but behind that coo just might be a whole lot of blue.

This was a discovery that @owen.oj of TikTok made too late when they happened upon one such feathered visitor to their balcony: a visitor presumably armed with all-consuming demons and an inviting patch of dirt a couple of stories below its feet. With the aforementioned dominos all set up, it was the pigeon’s turn to fall, and he wasted no time exuding as much “you’ll miss me when I’m gone” energy as he could muster.

The stage was the perfect tragedy; an impossibly still subject, a devastating operatic drone in the background, one last defiant look at the world (read: sidewalk) that spited him, all ending in a stiff tumble over the edge. That’s one less prospective courier in the now-slightly-darker world, and one more debutante to the darker side of the circle of life.

For those of you wondering, no, the pigeon in question probably isn’t actually dead; what we just witnessed was likely a bold, dramatic takeoff that ended with the pigeon spreading its wings, taking a glide of indeterminate length, and stopping at the first curly fry or earthworm he came across. I assure you that the public is doing everything it can for the sake of pigeon mental health, which is to say that we are not and probably never will be equipped to engage with such a thing at all, and I profoundly doubt that the pigeons would take us up on such an opportunity anyway.

Granted, harassing anyone who just got Quiznos to go isn’t the sign of a well-adjusted individual, but hey, we all have our vices.

It’s a tourist’s worst nightmare. You arrive in a scary new city and you’re suddenly alone. Two best friends experienced this on TikTok when they were mistakenly separated in the subway just a few short minutes into their first trip to New York City.

The video was posted by Moriah (@riahs.rehearsal) on April 28 and shows herself and her friend being accidentally separated by a train door, as fellow commuters look on in horror and amusement. The video, which has since garnered 1.1 million likes, sees the pair giggling during the subway mishap, before panning to selfie mode and showing Moriah in the middle of a nosebleed.

It’s not known what caused the nosebleed, but it is somewhat of a jumpscare given that the video is soundtracked by sound effects seemingly pulled from a horror movie.  The nosebleed saw viewers flock to the comment section to check on Moriah’s well-being and ask whether she was able to relocate her friend. “Girl, are you OKAY??” one user commented, while another added that they were “not ready for the nosebleed.”

In response, Moriah replied to a comment saying that the nosebleed might’ve happened because she ran into the subway door, but that she wasn’t sure since “it all happened so fast.” After a swathe of comments begging for an update, Moriah posted another video with her best friend in tow, revealing that she was able to find and reunite with her after the hilarious incident.

“We found each other and we’re good,” Moriah reassured users, before revealing that the horror soundtrack to the video was not intentional. “I just now realized that TikTok added that music over [the video],” Moriah laughed, “it actually was that dramatic in real life.”

Proving further context, Moriah revealed in the comments section that the dramatic moment while the pair were trying to alight the train but “someone got between us.” She went on to joke that they “hold hands now” and that she will only travel via bus from now on. While it might seem like a rare occurrence, Moriah’s comment section was flooded with users who spoke of similar subway mishaps. 

“This same thing happened to my parents and I,” one user commented, while another added that the video is “the most NYC thing ever.” The video was so popular that it caught the attention of TikTok star Ophelia, who has over 12 million followers and wrote that she was concerned about the duo “for an hour.” 

“I’m such a big fan,” Moriah said in a response video, “I’m ok, thanks for checking in.” It appears Mariah’s trip to New York City has improved since that doomed subway encounter, as she has posted her visits to Broadway and even joked about going viral “like once.”

We suppose the moral of the story is to always keep your bestie close, or perhaps avoid the subway altogether and get in a nice brisk walk (who are we kidding, maybe an Uber?).