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#1
08-30-2005, 12:46 AM
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Tell me things you've accidently broken.
So I was in Wal-Mart the other day.
I had a big backpack on...which I know I probably should have left at the front, but for some reason, was carrying it with me. At the back, in the glass aisle, I turned when someone called my name. Enter backpack into a shelf full of fishbowls. Luckily for me, it only knocked one off and to the ground. It shattered into a million peices. I offered to pay for it, but the manager who came said to just forget it. Tell me some things you've broken in your lifetime. Material things, not like "someone's heart" or "my neighbor's jaw" (although your neighbor's jaw IS a material thing, you should get the idea) 
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#2
08-30-2005, 12:58 AM
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A few months before I got married, I accidentally dropped and broke a little ceramic shepherdess figurine that belonged to my mother-in-law. I don't think she ever forgave me. Of course, what she was really pissed off about was that I married her baby boy and took him out of her clutches, but the broken figurine was a more socially acceptable thing for her to spend years grieving over.
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#3
08-30-2005, 01:08 AM
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Too many drinking glasses to count
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#4
08-30-2005, 01:21 AM
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Several keys off old saxophones and clarinets. The brasses used to make them were soft as Tootsie Rolls and, brass being brass, the more you bend them to make them comfy to the hand, the harder it gets to bend them at all. But they'll quite easily break.
My favorite baby dish. Not a cherished heirloom (well, maybe by me), just a dime-store plate that I didn't think for a moment wouldn't be safe to warm some cookies in the stove. My left clavicle. Bike accident, 8/15/00.
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#5
08-30-2005, 01:53 AM
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Well this one time at
My mom vacuumed the next day bumped the stand it was on, only to have it shatter again. She was rather upset about her clumsiness. I have already let her know the real facts in "The Case Of The Lamp" so no need to call her on me. 
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#6
08-30-2005, 02:24 AM
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Oh! I forgot!
 Not one, but TWO tempered glass shower doors!Door No. 1 was a poorly-conceived Kohler affair that came with no instructions, so the mental giant that installed it fastened down the track with caulk. Surprise surprise, one day a year or so later, the track lets go as I'm stepping into the stall and sliding shut the door. Corner of tempered glass hits metal stripping and BLAM! Door shatters like it's been shot with a 12-gauge. I escape with only a shrapnelized thumb, but have to clean up approximately 10 lbs of chipped glass. Door No. 2 didn't even make it out of the shipping carton. Corner touched floor. BLAM! Oops. I then called an outfit that does only shower doors. Got 3/4" thick glass instead of 1/2", drilled and screwed track fittings, and so far, it's worked like a charm... (Doug looks warily through open bathroom door. Cue string motif from Psycho.) WHEEP! WHEEP! WHEEP! WHEEP! WHEEP!
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#7
08-30-2005, 02:39 AM
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Well, I've got shaky hands, so this is my kind of thread.
Drinking glasses. Plates. A digital camera. A table. A dresser drawer. A television. A car window. My guitar in a fit of musical passion (no, not smashing it). Got it fixed, though. My keyboard. A house window. My stereo. A toy airplane. My wooden poseable doll's head Those damned hard plastic CD jewel cases. ...Why, yes. I am a klutz.
__________________
People tell me I'm a hypochondriac. Ugh, it makes me sick.
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#8
08-30-2005, 02:42 AM
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On my fifth birthday - I had wanted a china piggy bank for MONTHS. My aunt came to visit and brought one out of her suitcase for me. I was absolutely thrilled and took it into the kitchen to show my mum.........
....and dropped it onto the kitchen floor, where it smashed. Absolute heartbreak, I will never forget it. And I never did get another one. Sniff.
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#9
08-30-2005, 02:56 AM
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Digital camera on Friday. Damn, I'm still pissed about it.
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#10
08-30-2005, 03:32 AM
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This is (thankfully) only a close call and it wasn't me, it was my kid. Anyway.
So Alex (son, 2) and I went to my grandmother's for a visit; she'd recently come out of a pretty serious battle with pneumonia, and I hadn't seen her in a while anyway. She travels a lot so her house is full of stuff she got from places I'll probably never visit. She has this ball from China. It kind of looks like those cheap plastic balls you use to decorate Christmas trees, but it's not; it's glass and expensive and beautiful and, every single time I've been there since she got it (a few years ago), she marvels about how this thing was painted from the inside. I think it might be her favorite souvenir. Alex bumped it and it fell off its shelf. I almost died, my grandma freaked out in the calmest way possible, Alex started bawling... but it wasn't broken, or even cracked. It was still perfect. I haven't really had the balls (HA!) to go back since that day.
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#11
08-30-2005, 03:46 AM
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The most spectacular was a ten gallon tank full of about a dozen African Spiney Mice.
I had a bunch of crap on the mammal room table, so when I pulled it out to clean, I just kind of stuck it over to one side. I tried to walk past and somehow managed to knock the whole thing off the table. Shattered three sides and the bottom. The good/bad thing was that I didn't injure a single mouse. I did, however, get to spend the next hour or so chasing the snappy little blighters.  Those things bite!
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#12
08-30-2005, 04:32 AM
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A $250,000 mass spectrometer. Always make sure the current is off when cleaning.
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#13
08-30-2005, 04:41 AM
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The axle of a car.
I don't want to talk about it.
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#14
08-30-2005, 05:56 AM
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A brand-new, long-awaited, carefully-selected, perfect ultra-light fishing rod.
Cast one. Cast two. Cast three. I'm in heaven. It's delightful! Cast four. SNAP! It wasn't defective, it wasn't a big fish, I did it. I held it by the tip and it bent too much. I'm still trying to think of how to fix it, but it would never be the same.
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#15
08-30-2005, 08:23 AM
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I suffer from a disorder known as Congenital Clumsiness, inherited from my mother. Both she and I are frequently victims of "tromedies" (traumatic/comic accidents.) I am also Cosmically Fucked, meaning everything I touch will behave in a bizarre fashion, and I attract weird shit like an electromagnet.
To list how many things I have accidentally broken would take more bandwidth than this board currently can support. Thus, I will mention only the important things. I work in a museum, possibly the worst place of employment for a person with CC. Thus far, I have broken two artifacts. The first was a toy wagon which dated to the early 1800s. As impossible as it sounds, it simply came apart in my hands as I carried it. Cosmically Fucked, I tell you. The second happened in a storage area. Though my actions now make me cringe with embarassment, since no one saw me, I simply reassembled the item and walked away. My curator lifted it the next day, and when it "broke" he assumed that he had done it. Shamefully, I said nothing. Years prior to this, I broke a shelf of my grandmother's Hummel figurines through a series of unfortunate events. I locked my keys in the house, decided to crawl through a window, forgot the alarm was set, and neglected to notice that the window was too high for me to crawl through easily. I had to grab a neighbor's lawn chair, and with the alarm wailing, I squeezed through, fell, and landed on the shelf just as the cops arrived. That was an interesting conversation, let me tell you. In my home, I've broken dishes (generally it happens when they're full of food), glasses, appliances such as a TV and a sewing machine, knicknacks and on one memorable occasion, a bed. (No, you dirty-minded thing, not like that. I was jumping on it, trying to swat a hornet.) I've also broken my car several times, running into various things. I'm a dangerous person.
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#16
08-30-2005, 08:55 AM
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My grandpa used to buy my grandma LLadro figurines. As a child, my favorite one was Cinderella, and Grandma told me it would be mine one day. So naturally, the day I was standing on the bed and hurled a Frisbee at my brother in anger, that's the one I hit. It only broke off her tiny finger, but it was a bitch finding it again in the deep-pile carpet while crying my eyes out. I was convinced it was totally Jim's fault for ducking and not taking his Frisbee like a man.
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#17
08-30-2005, 09:45 AM
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Had a scary episode once, while buying a thermos. I was checking out a cheap plastic one, and I noticed that the bottom unscrewed. So, I unscrewed it, exposing the glass inner liner. The liner then spontaneously exploded in my hands. It was pretty frightening. Fortunately, none of the shards cut me.
I gave up my search and bought some stainless steel thermoses online.
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#18
08-30-2005, 10:18 AM
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a few memorable ones
When I was relatively little and visiting Grandma, I thought it would be a good idea to play with a set of glass figures she had (three green glass ducks of descending sizes). She knew I was doing it, but it seemed like they barely tapped one another when the head of the biggest one came off in my hand. I felt terrible and wonder to this day that they were indulgent enough to let me play around with such a thing.
A couple of Christmases ago, I broke a wineglass and the hostess said, don't worry, it was just a wedding gift  I guess that fact that it was from her first marriage eased the pain.Finally, when I was around 8 or 9 my parents got a new refrigerator in what was then the fashionable brown of the times. I had a tool box I played with and will never forget scratching the brand-new fridge my Mom was so happy about with the corner of the toolbox as I walked by.
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#19
08-30-2005, 10:21 AM
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Fore!
When I was 11 I was trying to learn how to play golf and teed up in the empty lot next to our house. I sent a shot right into the neighbor's living room window right across the street. My mom was mad that I broke the window and my dad was elated that I could do that with an 8-iron.
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#20
08-30-2005, 10:46 AM
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I broke my parent's hookah
when I was about five. I didn't understand at the time why they were SO upset.  Besides, it was in the game room, so there.
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#21
08-30-2005, 11:06 AM
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When I was five, I picked up the cup that my Dad left on the bathroom counter, to see what he kept in it (I was too small for my head to reach the countertop).
It had my Dad's false teeth in it. I was so scared at seeing a cup full of teeth that I dropped it on the floor, & broke the dentures. Dad gave me a paddling that day, I can tell you!
__________________
There's an Initiation Ceremony. It involves a Squid and a Goat. You're gonna be good friends with that Goat. The Squid will not exactly be a stranger, either. ~~Me, on the SDMB Initiation
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#22
08-30-2005, 01:49 PM
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My most recent, and most annoying incident was one fateful morning where, as I was putting in my contact lenses, noticed a black speck on one of them. As I scraped this off, I heard a small crack.
"You've gotta be kidding me," I thought. Yup, I somehow managed to scrape that speck off in just the right way to crack my contact lens in half. And later that day, I was slated to take a test for a job I was applying for a job I was applying for. Also, the prescription on my glasses was ~3 years out of date. Hilarity ensued. And this one isn't mine, but the person to whom it belongs doesn't visit the SDMB, so I'm probably safe in telling it.... One night some friends and I are out at Tony Roma's. We had one of those little candle-lantern type things at our table (basically a lantern, but almost mini in scale). For whatever reason, one of my friends decides he wants to see what's on the bottom of the thing. So he turns it upside down to look...and the glass top of the thing falls off and breaks into a few hundred pieces.
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#23
08-30-2005, 02:04 PM
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Quote:
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#24
08-30-2005, 02:09 PM
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does (accidentally) setting a toaster on fire count?
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#25
08-30-2005, 03:10 PM
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I haven't broken many things; the worst was a bagpipe chanter (the part with the finger holes). I'd taken lessons and had just gotten my very own first set of pipes. I was twisting the chanter to remove it from the bag, and was holding it too low -- the torque just snapped it. I was heartbroken; never felt the same way about playing again.
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#26
08-30-2005, 03:25 PM
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The most recent was a wee fighter from Rockemen. Now, they look cheesy and fragile, but actually, they're not. They're made to be disassembled and reassembled many times and are really quite durable.
In the hands of mere mortals, that is. My husband just gaped at me. "I've never seen anyone break one before." Now, he managed to shatter an opened bottle of red wine against the stove. Result: Two shards of glass lodged in feet, one in finger, red splashed all over the place (well, that wall needed scrubbin' anyhow) and a distinct yeasty odor throughout the house.
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#27
08-30-2005, 03:49 PM
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I've managed to break several boxspring mattresses. Every once in a while I get the idea that it would be amusing to fling myself on the bed from across the room, and crrraaaaack!
I broke my in-laws sink too, on the second or third time I met them. Turned the faucet knob a little too far with a little too much force and it came undone. They had to go outside and turn the water off; I wanted to just sink in the ground and disappear.
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#28
08-30-2005, 04:11 PM
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At Trader Joe's, I pulled out a container of milk from the case and it fell to the floor. Milk everywhere. They were cool about it and refused to accept my offer of money.
Just yesterday, I broke a window in my classroom while trying to kill a yellowjacket with a textbook.
__________________
"This isn't Wall Street; this is Hell. We have a little something called 'integrity.'" --Crowley, Supernatural
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#31
08-30-2005, 07:02 PM
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I broke my mom's cake plate lid when I was eight or nine. I didn't pull it out far enough from the overhanging shelf when getting a donut.
I broke a glass dish when I was a freshman in high school, not realizing that putting the hot dish in the cold sink would crack it.
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#32
08-30-2005, 07:37 PM
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both my little fingers
neither one bends correctly as a result
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#33
08-31-2005, 10:04 AM
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Soccer ball. Huge (8'x10' at least) Plate glass storm window. You get the picture.
I also broke a 5-gallon glass jar that was partially full of change. The hippie who owned it was cashing in the change at a coinstar machine. I was working at that store and hit the jar with a line of carts that I was bringing in. The guy was cool about it but after he was gone the manager pointed out one of the pieces of glass where it said "1872." Man, I could have gotten that jar for free from the guy after he was done with his change and sold it for a couple hundred bucks. Oops.
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#34
08-31-2005, 10:37 AM
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Once I was emptying the dishwasher, and managed to shatter a glass mixing bowl on the marble countertop which overhangs the infernal machines (it and I have issues, shall we say). My mother, attracted by my loud cursing, just stood there and said,
"You know, that was an heirloom." Well geez, mom, thanks for making me feel sooo much better. We have a greenhouse type thing that replaced our old porch. Part of this involved covering the window wells into the basement with extra-super-strong glass. Well, I managed to break one of those (just a few weeks after they were installed, no less) by leaping onto the antique loveseat that was sitting on it. My concentrated weight on the little peg-leg cracked it with a startlingly loud crack. My parents just kind of looked at me in their "Oh, there goes our clumsy daughter breaking something again" look as I slunk sheepishly away into my room.
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#35
08-31-2005, 10:49 AM
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My birthday cake.
I was turning nine (I think) and we were all staying up at our cottage on Lake Joseph in Muskoka, so the only way to get a good birthday cake was to get into our motorboat and drive over the bay to the docks at the northern end of the lake. They had an ice cream parlour there between the fishing-bait shop and the convenience store, and the people there built us a gorgeous, smooth, perfectly cool, chocolate-frosted cake. It had roses and swirls and my name in big letters on it. It was a mouthwatering thing of beauty. I held it on my lap as we drove back, cutting an arc of rainbow spray through the bay as the waves splashed against the hull. We pulled up to our boathouse in the back and I was ready to jump out, still clutching the box.. ...when a wave tipped the boat just gently to one side, I tripped, and the cake went tumbling, over and over--in slow motion, like you see in the cartoons--to land with a 'splat' on the dock. All in pieces. *sniff*
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#36
08-31-2005, 10:57 AM
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Quote:
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#37
08-31-2005, 11:04 AM
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I sat around waiting for days, hoping the very expensive digital camera I dropped in the pool would still work once it dried off. It did! Hurrah! So scratch digital camera off my list.
I still managed to screw up my car though.
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#38
08-31-2005, 12:20 PM
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Quote:
When I was five or six, I broke a porcelain collector's doll that had been sent to me as a birthday gift by an aunt I had never met. It was basically a miniature stand-up version of the traditional porcelain "baby doll." I wasn't familiar with these though, since I only played with Barbie dolls. I thought this doll was some kind of fancy Barbie, so I happily pulled it out of the box...and its little arm came off.
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#40
08-31-2005, 02:43 PM
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Hearts. Everywhere.
Oh, wait. Heart (singular), and it was mine... Quote:
__________________
"Beuvez touours, vous ne mourrez jamais." Rabelais
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#41
08-31-2005, 02:47 PM
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Several cell phones.
And my right foot.
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#42
08-31-2005, 03:14 PM
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I'm sooo guilty
A malaysian Ornithopteran (Giant Grasshopper). Sigh. I was volunteering at the school insect museum, and I was moving the newly pinned specimens from the temporary box to their new labeled homes. This specimen was something my professor had collected personally from his trip to Malaysia. Yes, I broke it all to hell. I was so embarrassed I put the biggest pieces all in a box and put it in the back of the "Ornithopteran" cabinet. Probably still there. I've never fessed up to anyone.....
IT WAS ME!!!!! I DID IT!! Sorry Dr. Stehr.
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#43
08-31-2005, 04:09 PM
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Quote:
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#44
08-31-2005, 06:50 PM
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My best friend's wedding. She has been my best friend for 20 years, so I can say with great certainty that she is not very organized. She special-ordered toasting glasses for herself and the new hubby for the wedding - so special that they arrived the day before the wedding.
I was maid of honor (and, as it turned out, event coordinator, crisis counselor, mediator, and general dogsbody). I realized about ten minutes before the toast that the special glasses had not made it out to the table - they were still in the box in the bridal couple's room (it was at a lovely resort, yadda yadda). They had not been unpacked or washed. I broke one of them while I was washing them! !!!!!!!!!!  Thank God she ordered four instead of two. I, obviously, didn't tell her about it until the next day.
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#45
08-31-2005, 11:30 PM
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Story from my father-in-law....
This was MANY years ago, when Corelle was first making it's inroads onto the tableware market with it's "unbreakable" plates. My FIL dropped one on his kitchen floor... ...on purpose ...repeatedly JUST to see if he could make it break. He couldn't. Until one evening, during a dinner party (and, I'm sure, after several glasses of wine) he lifted one of the plates and announced to the gathered guests "Look everyone! Won't break!" ...and he casually dropped it to the floor... where it (yeah, you guessed it) EXPLODED into a quintillion tiny shards. He said it sounded like a gunshot when it broke. Hilarity ensued.
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#46
09-01-2005, 12:38 AM
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When they break, they shatter. I used to juggle them (unbreakable, right?) but found out that sometimes they do.
What else juggling? Ah, raw eggs. Then I discovered the realistic rubber ones which I would replace in the sealed plastic egg cartoon (as they come in Japan) and juggle them in my performance, before throwing them into the audience.
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