‘My neighbour thought somebody drowned her cat': The worst WhatsApp groups we've been part of
The fallout from the leaked US government war plans has yet to take full shape, but one thing is for sure: that group chats on apps such as WhatsApp and Signal have huge potential to go awry. Inadvertently inviting journalists to join top secret discussions involving US air strikes on Houthi strongholds is, admittedly, one extreme but for the rest of us, finding yourself added onto groups from relentlessly inane school parent chats to street Whatsapps where neighbours mull over wheelie bin hygiene – is often a high stakes exercise in keeping our manners, boredom and simmering rage in check.
Here, our writers discuss the worst group chats to which they've had the misfortune to find themselves invited.
Been there, bought the t-shirt, occupied the veritable land. I've forwarded filthy jokes to the wrong group – not the old school chums one, but the 'Nursery 2' gathering; to me, a worse incident than revealing a nation's plans to bomb annoying terrorists.
'Why does this inane chatter have to start now, nine months before the wretched event?' I wrote recently to my wife. Except it went to the group created to share intel on the wedding, the 'wretched event' to which I was referring, in which our nippers would be page boys.
Thus, the WhatsApp group, a modern phenomenon competing for the hotspot in the Top 10 scourges of the modern age, is now something I studiously avoid. Which means no filthy jokes, no b----ing, indeed uttering nothing that could suggest any character deficiencies. All of which are laid bare in the WhatsApp group. The school groups being the worst: 'Is it Scientist Day?', 'When does swimming finish?', 'Sorry, I didn't realise that drive was one-way', from which the psychologist can build up a picture of sublime idiocy and uselessness.
I shudder at the thought of the social ones in which my lies, as I wriggle out of things, are laid bare. My insatiable need to make stupid jokes and to inadvertently offend strangers sees me now upholding the principle of refusing to engage, of simply muting threads. Except I fear there is no worse a social faux pas, no terrible a societal crime than to effect the dreaded words (which don't quite have the resonance of Elvis vacating the premises): 'William Sitwell has left the group'.
By Charlotte Hill*
As soon as I receive an unusually perky WhatsApp notification from an unknown number, usually saying 'Helllllllooooooooooo ladies', I know that I have been added to the most dreaded of all WhatsApp groups – the hen do chat.
The maid of honour has been charged with pulling it all together, she explains in a message liberally peppered with chicken emojis and exclamation marks. The bride would love to do a few days in [insert sunny European city here] in June. That or two days in Bath, which will, for reasons unknown, cost the same amount as a week in Spain.
I am in at least four of these demented chats at any one time, each one pinging with messages from bridesmaids with the manic enthusiasm of school teachers organising a trip to an Outward Bound centre.
Hundreds of missives follow. You owe £400 for the AirBnb, where you will have to share a bunk bed with the bride's cousin, and a bathroom with 14 others. Please send a picture of you and the bride by 5pm today!!! These will be arranged on the mantelpiece in the rental house like a shrine. The bride is adamant she wants an (ironic!) naked man to appear at some point during the weekend, so your crisps, dips and prosecco (£47.30 each for the group food shop, please) will be served by a slightly greasy 'Butler in the Buff'.
WhatsApp now allows you to create a 'poll' for people to vote, which has unleashed a new level of tyranny. 'Would you prefer to go axe-throwing, go-karting, or to a Sunday morning 'willy workshop' before the train home? Please vote in the poll by the end of the day.'
As the weekend approaches, the messages take on a vaguely threatening aura. Individuals who still owe the maid of honour £84.70 are named and shamed. The 'Hi ladies!!!!' comes with alarming ferocity. Drop-outs are banished from the chat. I long to be banished, too.
*name has been changed
By Melissa Twigg
There are only so many notifications you can get about a near-stranger's stinging crotch or cracked nipples before you start to wonder whether your attention might be better directed elsewhere. Yes, there's an intimacy that is forged from having babies at the same time – but the eye-popping details shared on your average NCT chat are not for the faint-hearted.
At first, it's polite – you meet with bulging bellies in a church hall and create one big WhatsApp group of impending mums and dads to send each other smiling photos of their last dinners out. Then, the actual babies are born, and the men are swiftly booted out because the tone has switched from cheerful excitement to gore and horror. It's all birth trauma, infected scars, bleeding nipples, crotch sprays and weepy 2am voice notes from women asking if it is OK to hate your husband with the heat of a burning star because he is sleeping in the spare room.
Yes, it makes you feel less alone – but when you're deep in the newborn phase, it can all be too much. Also, while everyone is encouraged to share, there is one unspoken rule: never be smug.
Once, about two months in, someone asked if any of us had resumed intimate relations with our husbands yet. Immediately, the replies pinged in: 'Absolutely not!', 'Can't think of anything worse!', etc. But among our group of 12 Brits, there was one lone Frenchwoman and she clearly hadn't picked up on the mood. 'All the time,' she wrote back, 'For us, it is very important that our love comes first.'
The silence was deafening, and no further messages were exchanged. I have long since muted the group, but it clearly made an impression on me: often, as my husband and I run around after a boisterous toddler – our social life, looks and finances in tatters – we turn to each other and say, 'Isn't it lucky our love comes first?'.
By Guy Kelly
You're probably familiar with the moment from Gavin & Stacey when Alison Steadman's Pamela, vibrating with giddiness, explodes: 'It's all the drama, Mick. I just love it!'
This is how I feel about my old street's WhatsApp group. We moved house more than a year ago, but I remain a lurker on the missives of my former neighbours. The content is too rich. The plot too unpredictable. I will never leave.
The culprit – the sole culprit – is a woman who we will call Jill because that is her name. Jill, her possible husband, her indeterminate number of children and her herd of permanently-threatened cats moved in during the latter stages of the pandemic.
The woman herself was so seldom seen as to be almost mythical, but we heard from her many times a day.
Often it is just to claim any – and I mean any – freebie offered up, regardless of its state or size. 'My sons will come and get it,' she always says. Her household seems to operate like a beehive. As the queen, she never needs to leave.
Most of her contributions are of a tinfoil-hat nature. Like the time she assumed, because a cat came home damp, that somebody must have tried to drown it in a bin. 'Some spiteful wicked person decided to hurt my big fluffy ginger cat,' she blazoned that morning. 'He was soaking wet. I hope nobody tried to drown him.'
This would become the first in a series. Whenever a cat doesn't come home, it must have been murdered by a neighbour; whenever she spots a stranger stopping to stroke a cat, she declares a catnapper on the loose. Whenever a Thames Water man appears, she warns he could be a con man.
A noise complaint spat with another member ended with her claiming she has a medical condition known as 'barmaid hearing' – which means she 'cannot switch off to surrounding noise'. She enquired after any planned firework displays taking place on Bonfire Night or New Year's Eve in early July.
Once, she alerted the street to a gentleman thief. 'Watch out, just saw a guy jump the wall wearing a crash helmet a black leather jacket not sure if he was up to something but it's a strange way to leave your house.' People were alarmed. 'I am [No.] 46 so next-door to my left,' she continued. 'White man with grey bushy hair.'
Her bushy-haired next door neighbour, whom she had lived next to for three years by that point, then replied and revealed the mystery man was quite obviously him, leaving through his own garden, as he often does. She did not reply.
Eventually, a splinter group narrowed to a few houses around ours became a quasi-Karen fan discussion. And that is how a good, chaotic WhatsApp group can bring people together. It's all the drama, Mick. We just love it.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Reuters
2 hours ago
- Reuters
Israel strikes Yemen's port city of Hodeidah, Houthi-run Al Masirah TV reports
DUBAI, June 10 (Reuters) - Yemen's Houthi-run Al Masirah TV reported on Tuesday that Israeli forces were conducting strikes on the Red Sea port city of Hodeidah. The report follows a statement from the Israeli military's Arabic spokesperson late on Monday, posted on X, urging the evacuation of the Houthi-controlled Yemeni ports of Ras Isa, Hodeidah and Salif. No immediate confirmation of the strikes was available from Israeli authorities.
Daily Record
a day ago
- Daily Record
John Swinney's youth violence summit must deliver real change not just talk
John Swinney deserves credit when it comes to engaging with the public on the big issues facing the country. Not every minister in his government is so willing when it comes to listening to voices who may not necessarily agree with their party line. The SNP leader will host a summit on reducing youth violence across Scotland in a bid to prevent knife crime. But mum Vicky Donald surely speaks for many when she voiced fears that nothing will be done. She has demanded urgent action and 'real change'. The message is clear – John Swinney's latest summit can't be just another talking shop. The Scottish Government has also pledged that funding for the Scottish Violence Reduction Unit will rise by seven per cent, after fears it faced a budget cut. It comes in the wake of the tragic deaths of teenagers Amen Teklay, 15, and Kayden Moy, 16, who both died this year after being stabbed. Another youth was also seriously injured but survived following an altercation in Edinburgh. The Record has repeatedly reported that violence is a real problem in some secondary schools, with teachers seemingly powerless to punish the worst perpetrators. Join the Daily Record WhatsApp community! Get the latest news sent straight to your messages by joining our WhatsApp community today. You'll receive daily updates on breaking news as well as the top headlines across Scotland. No one will be able to see who is signed up and no one can send messages except the Daily Record team. All you have to do is click here if you're on mobile, select 'Join Community' and you're in! If you're on a desktop, simply scan the QR code above with your phone and click 'Join Community'. We also treat our community members to special offers, promotions, and adverts from us and our partners. If you don't like our community, you can check out any time you like. To leave our community click on the name at the top of your screen and choose 'exit group'. If you're curious, you can read our Privacy Notice. Real action has to be taken so our youngsters can feel safe, whether they are in the classroom or out socialising. The vast majority of young Scots are well-mannered and a credit to their families. But a violent minority cannot be left to cause havoc and risk more lives being lost. Be a donor hero Giving blood is one of the easiest ways you can save someone else's life. It's a quick and painless process that the vast majority of adults could easily undertake a few times a year. Appointments can now be made online, making donating even easier. There are many Scots who give blood regularly but the service can't rely on a few people doing all the work. At least 10,000 new volunteers are needed to step up and help keep bloodstocks at their required levels. More than half of regular donors are now aged 45 and over. Put simply, younger Scots need to be encouraged to step up and help save lives. You never know when you or a loved one could require a blood transfusion. It's never too late to become a blood donor for the first time.
Telegraph
2 days ago
- Telegraph
The Danes have given up on their best warships: Lessons for the Royal Navy
Building warships is hard. To those who have been in one this will come as no surprise but for the majority who have not, and who see them like one's phone or car, then this is not well understood. A warship is a complicated assembly of many different complicated things, most of which need to be networked and connected to each other. Any given class of warship tends to be made in small numbers, too, and there may be major differences even between warships of the same class. The first Arleigh Burke class destroyers in the US Navy, for instance, were 8,400 tons: the latest are 9,700. To some extent, every warship is custom built. And they're so expensive that there isn't usually much scope for prototypes and extensive tests on them before building the actual ship. The Danes, however, do know all this, having lately found out just how difficult it is to get right. The Danish Chief of Defence recently announced that ongoing attempts to repair and upgrade the Royal Danish Navy's Iver Huitfeldt-class frigates will be abandoned. This is painful for the Danes as these three ships are the most modern in the Danish navy: and, on paper at least, they are the most capable. The reality, dramatically exposed in the Red Sea last year, is rather different. In the case of the Iver Huitfeldt herself, an integration failure between different weapons and sensors caused the ship's crew to lose the use of their air defence missiles for up to half an hour during a Houthi attack. They rebooted the command system and subsequently fired more missiles but in the hottest missile environment of recent times, this could have ended very differently. Their fallback option for shooting down drones – twin 76mm cannons – had similar command and control issues with 'up to half' the shells detonating too close to the ship to be effective. The then Chief of Defence was relieved of his position and the ship removed from theatre: red faces all round (which was better than the alternative). The problem was that a ship's detection and fire control radars, other sensors, command system, weapons and power delivery train all need to work as one and all at once. The search radar must find the incoming threat, it must then pass the information to the fire-control radar, the fire-control radar needs to get a lock on the threat, the missile system then needs that information – usually a human gets briefly involved here. Then a missile must launch and acquire the threat itself at some point, either using the reflections from the fire-control radar or its own active radar, or both at different times: or it may be guided initially by networked commands, possibly using information provided from a completely different ship, or an aircraft. Meanwhile the ship's installed generation must be powering and cooling all this kit reliably and in many modern cases driving the propulsion too. Good ships – the US Navy's Arleigh Burke destroyers and the Royal Navy's Type 23 frigates, for example – do all this well. Bad ships – the US Littoral Combat Ships and our early Type 45 destroyers before they were partly fixed – do not. One of the issues is that all the various systems may not originally have been built to work together. The Arleigh Burkes use Mark 41 missile launch tubes, originally built to work with the Burkes' Aegis combat system and its accompanying, hugely powerful radars: that configuration is proven and reliable. The Iver Huitfelts use Mark 41 tubes too, but connected to different, European made radars and command systems. In this case of the Red Sea failure, many fingers point at the Thales phased array radar's ability to talk to the command system, but the detail isn't as important as noting the complexity. The problem is obviously a deep-seated one, as it has evidently proved uneconomic to fix. One lesson that is crystal clear is that no feasible amount of laboratory work, peacetime testing and training can replicate the stresses and strains of combat. Whilst the gun issue was known about before, the missile fire control system problem was not, and only became exposed when real weapons were in the air. Our Type 45 destroyer operating in the Red Sea, HMS Diamond, had the opposite issue when it shot down a ballistic missile previously thought to be outside its capabilities. This is a nice surprise, but it was a surprise, and it shows again that you don't know until you do it for real. Looking back in time, we had terrible problems in the Falklands and in the Gulf with our old Sea Dart and Sea Wolf missiles. (The sole Sea Dart engagement of 1991, in which an antique Silkworm missile was shot down, was claimed as a success. It should be noted that the Silkworm had already – luckily – missed HMS Gloucester and carried on past before the destroyer managed to shoot it down.) The difficulty of weapons systems integration is also why I get a little nervous when plug-in or containerised systems are cited as a more flexible way of fighting ships in the future. On paper they can appear to be but if they don't integrate into the command system properly then you quickly end up with the Iver H problem. And by the time you've spent enough money to get around this, then maybe you should have just made that system part of the ship in the first place.
