“I’d have been stuck at the South Pole unable to help her through it.”

"One was an awesome, exciting job in Antarctica. Great pay, cool professional development, once in a lifetime opportunity. But with a hiring process requiring about five million tedious steps. The other was a boring local job with mediocre pay. Hiring process was just saying ‘yes’ to the offer.

I chose the boring job because I was too lazy to deal with the red tape for Antarctica. Felt pretty stupid and knew I’d regret it. Three months later my wife got a brain tumour and needed surgery. If I’d taken the Antarctica job I’d have been stuck at the South Pole unable to help her through it.”

"Yada yada yada... corporate job did the corporate job thing and started sucking hard, so I went back to a state job at the university and the new pension rules were terrible. Turns out because I did not touch my pension funds, I get to be grandfathered into the older, more generous pension rules and can retire early.”

"I figured now, on this unplanned call, would be a good time. I started with pleasantries and was going over how to tell him in my head and my boss cut me off to tell me I was laid off immediately and getting a nice severance package. Had I spoken up earlier I wouldn't have gotten four months of salary and benefits as well as my final bonuses.”

 "I had finished all the coursework but was really dragging my heels on my thesis project. I received an update from the university that the programme was changing to no longer require a thesis. I could graduate and receive my degree based on just my coursework!”

"I attended it with two other people from (150) only because I was too lazy to walk back home and stayed in the lecture hall to play games on my laptop. The lecturer decided that all three of us didn't need to write the final exam, which was a huge blessing, as the exam was extremely unforgiving (and the material during the lecture was completely different from what was on the exam).”

"I’m UK-based, so our mortgage deals are always 2, 3 or 5-year fixed deals. I always went for 2 years as these had the best interest rates. I’d done this for 10 years as mortgage rates had always been low.It was such a faff renewing every 2 years I thought I’d get a 5-year deal. 

As I was looking through mortgage offers, I noticed one bank offered a 10-year mortgage for 2.6% instead of 2.15% for the 5-year.I thought it was worth the extra small payments as I couldn’t be arsed to renew again so soon. Mortgage rates jumped to 6% not long after. Literally saved myself thousands of pounds because I was too lazy to renew my mortgage after 5 years.”

"This ugly suit was custom chosen by the bride and could only be purchased for a whopping $1,250. I begrudgingly paid and picked it up 29 days before the wedding. Two days before the wedding, it came out that the bride-to-be was cheating on the groom. Before calling the groom to comfort him, I called the suit shop and begged them to take back the hideous suit. Luckily I was still within the 30-day return window and got a full refund; the other six groomsmen were not so lucky.”

"When I was a student, I stayed in bed a little too long and missed my train to school. My train derailed shortly after it left, veered onto the opposite track, and was hit head-on by an empty train travelling at high speed. Half of the first car (where I usually sat) was torn off. I’d probably still be deeply embedded in the wreckage right now if I hadn’t been too lazy to get up.”

"I started with the company a few months before I actually needed to relocate. Finally got to the point where I was going to have to move to fully start this new job. I decided I didn’t want to deal with it or figure out the move, so I told my new boss that I couldn’t move and quit. This was January 2020. I went back to my old job and worked out a transition to a better role. Staying in that city led to me having a better career, I met my wife, had a child, and the kicker is that I would have been stuck in a new city with no friends as Covid lockdown was hitting…”

"Get a call from my coworkers wife, she's frantic, can't get ahold of anyone at the warehouse and the news is saying the roof caved in. Turns out putting too much HVAC stuff on an unreinforced roof isn't a good idea. The entire crew I worked with was killed in the collapse, myself and one other person are the only ones alive, she had just left for lunch right before it happened. Laziness and video games saved my life.”

"I couldn't be bothered filling in the paperwork and stuck with the old programme. These days when people hear I'm with the old programme, they act as though I'd won the lottery or been some kind of financial genius, except it was just laziness.”

Additional thumbnail credits: Warner Bros.