TIFU by throwing away raw shrimp before going out of town, leading to the inside of my mom’s car getting soaked

I (22 M) share an apartment with my mother where we split rent and utilities, so we’re obviously both adults. And I absolutely should have known better, but i wasn’t really thinking.

For context, I work a warehouse job that should be 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, but due to understaffing, we’ve been working 10 hours a day, almost every day, for basically as long as I’ve worked there, and my drive is just under an hour both ways. Sometimes more on the ride home if there’s traffic. Because of this, I often get home super late, and with not much time or energy to do much of anything. ESPECIALLY cooking. This is relevant.

About a week ago, was set to drive out of state to see my girlfriend (we’re long distance) after my shift at work.

Now, I LOVE seafood. Most of all, shrimp. It’s always been one of my favorite foods, but I didn’t get to eat it all that much growing up since my mom has hated seafood basically for as long as I’ve been alive. With me now having grown into an adult who is capable of cooking his own meals, and having acquired an air fryer for Christmas last year (a GODSEND for quick meals) I’ve been getting into prepping and airfrying my own raw shrimp to eat alongside other stuff. I fancy myself as some kind of master seafood chef just starting out his career, experimenting with different seasonings. Horray for me!

Well, a day or so before my departure, I had taken out some shrimp to attempt to quick thaw for another doctored masterpiece of mine after work in the same way I had previous batches. Put the frozen shrimp in a ziplock bag, then throw it in a pot or bowl with some cold water to let it quick thaw in the fridge after reading that you can’t use room temp water to thaw it online. I’d done this before, typically by putting another bowl of some kind with its OWN water on top of the ziplock back to weigh it down enough to not float, so that the whole thing could thaw. Shrimp was ready to be cooked in just under 2 hours the previous instances. This time, though, I thought I could cheat by using a bowl with a lid that I could put over the whole thing instead of needing another dish.

Over complicated, yeah, probably. I think that can clue you in to the way my stupid brain works.

Unfortunately… it didn’t thaw in time for me to cook it that day. So, I settled on making something else instead that night, and cooking the shrimp right before I left! Of course thinking I was toootally gonna be able to crush a 10 hour drive, only a few hours after a 10 hour shift, with only 2 hours of sleep in between, while ALSO having time to cook shrimp in between all of that to eat on the road before hand.

Of course I also had some small preparations to make for the drive after work too. And that was a day with unusually high traffic on the way back home.

Suffice to say, there was no way that shrimp was being cooked. And here’s where my lovely mother who I have been nothing but a blight upon for most of my existence comes in to say to me on the phone while on my way back home from work:

“You know you’re gonna have to throw that shrimp away, right?”

I had been thinking this the whole time I’d been in traffic, and decided to grab some Chinese food for the road instead.

“Yeah, I know. I was already thinking it.”

I said. And well. That was the extent of my rational thinking.

I, in all my 22 years of wisdom (while scrambling to make sure I had everything together before my pre drive nap, of course), having pulled the thawed ziplock bag of shrimp out of the fridge, thought;

“Zip lock bags are air tight right? I’m sure it’ll be fine if I throw this in the garbage. Maybe I should tie a plastic grocery store bag around it for good measure!”

(We always saved grocery bags for miscellaneous uses, such as this)

And I did just that, tossing it into the garbage that was juuuust full enough to have theoretically not been there too much longer, but just empty enough to have seemingly not been worth taking out so soon when there was still plenty of space for more garbage to go in.

All done! I go on my trip, I have a great time with my lady, go to the fair, go to the Gorillaz house of kong expo in New York, bada bing bada boom. I talk to my mom a few times while I’m gone, everything’s good!

Fast forward to today, on my drive back.

I’m on the road, 6 hours away from home. Mom calls me to check up on me.

I’m doing good, drive’s been fine aside from a small near miss, blah blah blah.

She mentions that she’s not sure if the trash was from before I left and figured it wasn’t, and that the day before this conversation, it was absolutely putrid, and that there was something wet in there. She says has no IDEA what she threw away, but it was so bad that there were maggots forming in there, so she took it out.

It’s around 6 am that we’re talking about this, and she stops talking, having realized that, when she went to take out the garbage to one of our apartment complex dumps, she drove with her windows down because of how horrid the smell was- but she forgot to roll her windows back up when she went back into the house, as she was distracted by the need to wipe down the garbage can itself. We both have ADHD, and she’s a OCD neat freak on top of that, so of course cleaning the trashcan that had seemingly been touched by something with MAGGOTS would be her first priority.

It stormed overnight.

The car sits outside of the garage.

I listen to her react in abject misery as she observes that the interior of her car, the one she bought in the middle of last year or the year before, is COMPLETELY. SOAKED. Like, so soaked that water comes out when she presses her hand against the seat, like a fucking towel.

That’s when it hit me.

The shrimp. It was the fucking shrimp. Unless there really WAS something else she put in the trash, the ONLY thing that could have possibly led to this clusterfuck is the shrimp.

I had to listen to my mom beat herself up about making such a blunder that she was only in a position to make because I’m a fucking idiot.

When I got home hours later, she had been working on trying to get the water out with some tools her friend recommended her. All I could do was offer her some little trinkets I’d gotten for her while I was gone, one of which was a crystal that represents “positive and meditative energy” (she’s into that kind of stuff), to which she replied with “I could really use some of that right now”.

If there’s any mercy in the universe, it’s that the car is still fully functional, and that it hasn’t occurred to her that the shrimp could’ve been the culprit. She’s sharp on the uptake, though. I imagine once the stress of the situation subsides she could put two and two together anytime between the next two weeks or the next two years.

Both until and long after I can muster up the courage to own up to my fuck up and tell her, she’s going to be receiving a lot of extra Grogu merchandise and some random drops of money whenever I can spare it.

I want to sink into the earth and never come back out.

TLDR: Decided to be a stupidly lazy idiot and throw raw shrimp away without taking out the trash before going on vacation, stacking the dominoes that led to my Mom’s leaving her windows down due to the horrid smell as she was taking it out and the car being soaked in rainwater after a storm.

Edit: After writing this but before posting it, I was able to help her get the car into the garage by moving some stuff out of the way (she’s been using the garage as a storage space/small home gym) She told me she cried earlier today because of how overwhelmed she was. Today was a bad day for various *other* reasons.

At least I could be at least the tiniest bit useful in some regard.

Ready to accept my “Worst fucking son of all time” award…