What movie trope or cliché that "never happens in real life" has happened to you?

I graduated college, I have three degrees in different fields... But I never graduated high school.

Mid way through my junior year I dropped out of high school to help take care of my very ill brother. My parents had just divorced and he required round the clock care. Always meant to take the G.E.D. (Good Enough Diploma, for you non-Americans) but for some reason never got around to it.

A few years pass, things have settled down at home, and I decide it is time to go to college. I take the ACT/SAT and apply with my scores. I got into a fairly prestigious university, work my way towards a hand full of degrees and then my last semester there I find out they wont let you graduate without a high school diploma. Worse, I find this out because my academic advisor, a total bureaucrat (who in the past had forced me to drop from a class I was already enrolled in because they could no longer find a letter from the professor allowing me into their class) asked me why I had no record of where I had graduated high school.

This person had made my life hell. the anecdote where they had dropped me from a class that had already begun was just one of the many times they had screwed me over in the name of dotting every "i". But apparently this was they day they had started mainlining heroin, or maybe just finally getting laid, because they looked me in the eye, shrugged, said 'I can fix that', and sent my incomplete paperwork on so that I could graduate.

/r/AskReddit Thread