People Break Down Their 'I F*cking Knew It!' Experiences

Sometimes you feel like you just know something is true, even if you can't prove it.

You may find out you're completely wrong. People usually don't like to talk about or acknowledge when that happens.

But people love sharing the times their instincts or preconceived notions were correct. We love being right so much that we inflate the times our biases are confirmed over the times we were wrong.

This is especially true about stereotypes we cling to. People love to brag about how intuitive they are, conflating the 1 time we were right while weignoring the 100 times we were wrong.

Reddit user Unique-Landscape-202 asked:

"What was your biggest 'I fucking knew it' moment?"

Locked In

"I’m a huge Atlanta Falcons (NFL) fan. During Superbowl 51, they got a 28-3 lead over New England."

"I absolutely 100% KNEW the Falcons would lose that game."

"In the 3rd quarter, when our entire sideline was celebrating and essentially congratulating each other on this huge win, the camera panned to Tom Brady on the sideline with his head down in deep thought."

"It was then, that I knew we’d find a way to lose that game. Tom became the definition of 'locked in' for that intense focus."

~ OldNational

Bennifer 2.0

"When Ben Affleck married JLO, the whole world knew they would divorce."

"Everyone, but them, just knew."

~ Pure-Guard-3633

Secondhand Smoke

"Grew up being told I have asthma and that I needed to use inhalers all my life. Thought something wasn’t right—I never really trusted my parents judgement fully."

"As I got older, I realized I didn’t need the inhalers as much. It was just cause they were smoking cigarettes around me while I was a kid!"

~ irandom97

Income Inequality

"Always had a certain feeling about a former coworker in the accounting department. Just a sneaking shady vibe I couldn't shake."

"One day the head of HR accidentally printed a document that showed the salary and raise/bonus/profit sharing structure of every single employee to a shared printer instead of his office printer, and I found it."

"Shady coworker was getting paid WAY less than I expected her to be making for all the work she was legitimately doing. Like despite my suspicion about her, she was actually a seemingly good employee and had worked her way up to a role with significant responsibility."

"The moment I saw her pay structure, I knew she was making money off the company in other ways. There was NO WAY she was settling for that salary after being there for so many years and for the work she did."

"I just....knew."

"Fast-forward a few years and turns out she'd been embezzling significant amounts of money from the company. Submitted false expense reports to pay for everything from groceries to gas to food delivery to vacations, and no one caught it because she was the head of the department."

"All came to light when a new junior employee saw a suspicious Amazon expense and brought it to the COO. Investigation led to the discovery of 10s of thousands of dollars in embezzled funds.

"I quit soon after the discovery, but I hear they're pressing criminal charges against her. Somehow I just KNEW!"

~ kitteh_pants

Sibling Rivalry

"My sister and I had a big fight about something, and after it escalated, I told her, 'You’re not borrowing my dress (she wanted to wear it to a wedding), find your own'. A day later, I went to my cupboard to get my clothes out for the next day, and my dress was gone."

"I said to my parents, (she had moved out to live with her boyfriend, but I still lived at the family home) 'Has (sister) been over this morning?' Parents said no, they hadn’t seen her. I thought this was weird because that dress was always on its hanger—it can’t have just disappeared."

"I called my sister and said, 'Did you take my dress?' She responded that my dress was very ugly and that she hadn’t taken it, she didn’t need it anymore since I was a b*tch, and she’d bought her own which was a lot nicer."

"I said, 'Okie dokie, well, where is mine then? The exact one you wanted to borrow is missing now'. She became irate and was furious that I was accusing her of stealing."

"I asked, 'Where else would it have gone?' She replied I better check my clothes pile in my filthy room. Which wasn’t filthy, it just had clothes on the floor because, well, where do clothes go when you’re a messy 20-year-old?"

"We had another argument, this time about the dress being missing. She was adamant that I was extremely rude, accusing her of stealing, and I was angry because she had slinked into my parent's house unbeknownst to any of us and taken it."

"Anyway, she goes to the wedding and posts a photo of her outfit, and indeed, it’s not the dress that is missing. It’s a different dress."

"One week later, we’d sorted our other differences, and she demanded an apology for the accusations of stealing. So we sort things out, I apologise, we’re cool."

"So I go to her house after work. At this time, I’m working in hospitality (stiff, formal uniform), so the usual routine was always that I go over to her place to hang out, and I change into some sweatpants and another of her shirts to be comfortable."

"It’s just normal for me to grab something out of her closet. But this time, she flies into her room and pushes me out of the way, saying how dare I go through her things. I say, 'What are you on about‽‽ I’m getting some pants!'."

"She says, 'I don’t go to your house and wear your things!' I said, 'Why are you hysterical about this? What’s in there‽‽' And it dawns on me… 'It’s my dress, isn’t it? The one you made me apologize for accusing you of stealing!'."

"Her boyfriend at the time, who was lying on the bed, said, 'The jig is up (sister); just give it to her.' She couldn’t believe he would out her like he just did and became irate at him at this point."

"I pulled her out of the way, flung her cupboard doors open, and there it was. My dress. She really had snuck into the back door of our parents' house and taken it when I was right down in the other end of the house, snuck out again, and gone home with it."

"I looked back at her and said: 'I f*cking knew it'."

"She only bought a new one for the wedding after she realized I knew mine was missing. She planned to wear mine then sneak it back into the house, until me discovering it was missing ruined her plans. She made sure to post the photo of the new dress to 'prove' her innocence."

~ snagsinbread

Accurate Diagnosis

"I watched a lot of Maury Povich as a child, before he turned into Jerry Springer 2.0. They had several episodes about children with Tourette’s Syndrome."

"Around the same time, my younger brother was going through testing for a possible learning disability. I told my mom he had Tourette’s, based on the show and his symptoms."

"She got really upset with me about it. But lo and behold, when he finally got a diagnosis—it was Tourette’s."

~ saratonin84

Say What?

"Was gaslit by my ex for six years telling me I was hard of hearing. She would mumble things constantly making me ask her to speak up."

"She said I was old and my hearing was going etc... even though I never had to ask people at work in a busy office to speak up or repeat things."

"After six years, she f*cked up though. We live in Hawaii, and some of her college girlfriends came out to visit and stay with us."

"After two days, her and her friends are walking and talking when finally one of her girlfriends snaps and yells, 'Why are you talking so quietly? What the hell is wrong with you? No one can hear you! You never talked under your breath before, ever! What the hell?'."

"She looked at me and knew her a** was busted. So for years and years, it was just a petty, passive-aggressive way to put one over on me, I guess."

"This was a thirty-year-old grown a** woman. Ill never understand it."

~ ssshield

Which Came First...

"I was planning a month-long work sabbatical as I had been with the company for 10 years. In the lead-up to the date I was going to start my sabbatical, I kept procrastinating for one reason or another on making the final arrangements."

"I couldn't shake this sense of dread for some reason. I even mentioned it to my boss about a couple of weeks before in our 1:1. I told her I hadn't ever been away from work for so long."

"She reassured me that it would all be good. We then talked about how next time we'd discuss my career plans for the upcoming year. I can't emphasize enough that when we talked about this, it sounded like it was going to happen, but I felt off about it."

"Fast forward a week, and I get an invite from my bosses boss. It was a Zoom meeting with our VP of engineering to lay me off."

"Were they laying me off just because I wanted to take a break—my first in 10 years?"

~ staticjak

Academic Fraud

"There was someone in my PhD cohort who worked a few labs down the hall from me. They always seemed to get positive results with no protocol troubleshooting, and the results were always the sort of thing that journal editors looked fondly upon."

"Somehow this person was 2X as productive as even the super smart, 60+ hour per week working, creative grad students in others lab."

"This person won pretty much every graduate, then postdoc award you could get and ended up a professor at a well-regarded university with a huge startup grant."

"A year in to them starting their faculty position, their former postdoc lab—upon not being able to repeat any of their experiments or build on the data submitted—figured out that the person had fabricated or fudged at least 60% of their lab results that had been published in top tier journals."

"We're talking outright fabrication, not just a slightly too contrast-enhanced micrograph or blot. The university reported this to the funding agencies and there was a full investigation. The person lost their grants, and the university fired them."

"In talking to someone in the person's PhD lab (different from the postdoc lab that exposed them as a fraud), it turns out a similar thing happened in that lab. There were some really questionable western blots that had been overly processed and cropped in ways that were definitely misleading."

"At least one master student burned a year trying to build on that faked work and got nowhere."

"Turns out one of the golden children of my PhD program and someone who was featured by funding agencies as the next big thing had built their scientific career mostly on lies and it took ~10 years for anyone to really catch on."

"There are some really great scientists who just happen to land on fruitful projects... but no one is that productive and lucky all the time."

~ spicypeener1

Cold Case

"When I was a kid, the day after Christmas I would always check out the pawn shops near my grandparents house so I could spend my Christmas money on used video games. There was one where the owner was very chatty but always gave off a creepy vibe."

"Couldn’t quite pinpoint why but his shop always felt uncomfortable."

"Eventually, it came out that he had murdered his ex girlfriend in the basement of the shop. He got away with it for almost fifteen years until his son testified against him."

"I f*cking knew it!"

~ IAmNotScottBakula

Criminal Enterprise

"A town I lived in had a 'Fast Fashion' store take up shop on the far end of the commercial district, too far to get any foot traffic. The displays in the windows never changed, and I never saw a single person going in or out."

"Every time I drove by I said to my partner, 'That place HAS to be a front for something'."

"One year later, it was busted for being an illegal grow operation."

~ cyclejones

"There was an Italian restaurant owned by an Italian family in town. It was rumored they were running a backroom casino."

"Turns out there really was a casino on an upstairs floor. When it was busted it didn't affect the restaurant because that upstairs floor couldn't be accessed from the restaurant itself."

"Also, they couldn't really charge anyone with anything big because there wasn't any cash kept on site, so they couldn't prove the gambling was for money. They got charged with something like running an unlicensed arcade or business, not gambling."

~ spiff2268

Communication Lockdown

"We had a couple private Facebook groups at work for internal communications. Just asking co-workers for help on tasks, stuff like that."

"Came in one morning to find we were locked out of the Facebook groups."

"Me: 'This doesn’t feel right. Something’s happening'."

"Co-worker: 'You’re just being paranoid. It’s just a computer glitch'."

"The upper management showed up mid-morning to start handing out layoff notices."

~ originalchaosinabox

Potential Pyramid

"About 15 years ago I was hired to assist on an inventory and appraisal of the wine collection of a guy who lived in the Caribbean and ran a bank there, specializing in selling long-term, high-yield CDs."

"I went down and spent a week doing that and spending time with him and some of his very few employees, none of whom seemed to do very much work at all."

"As soon as I got back I set up Google alerts for the guy's name and Ponzi scheme. A month later, it started going off like crazy; he'd been indicted, assets frozen, fled in his private jet, and eventually got picked up at a cheap motel in Canada."

"A year or so after that I got interviewed by the FBI, mostly questions to establish who of his 'employees' I had met, some questions about his lifestyle—presumably to try to make a tax fraud case, although they ended up just getting him on Ponzi charges."

~ EggCzar

Mother's Instinct

"When my son was 14, he lost 30 lbs within a few months. I wasn’t terribly concerned out of the gate because he started on the heavy side and also because he seemed to be working for the weight loss."

"However, he went to Mexico for a week with his dad and came back 10 lbs lighter and alarm bells started going off because my brother is a type 1 diabetic."

"Kiddo had an awful migraine-like headache, so I decided to take him to his pediatrician to have a blood sugar run. I expressed my concerns and the doc pooh-poohed me, spending a lot of time congratulating my son on his weight loss."

"She was resistant to running a blood sugar, but I insisted. Sure enough, type 1 diabetes with a dangerous blood sugar of nearly 500."

"Sometimes moms just know. Also, f*ck that doctor."

~ beatrix0

Have you ever known something was true, even if you had no proof? What happened when you were proven correct?