Well thank you. 
When I have a brain fart, generally something memorable happens that’s for sure.
No people were hurt, but my Dad’s wallet was rendered significantly lighter(metaphorically) by the following act of non-thinking.
Dad and Mom had been out for the evening, but had met at the event in separate cars. Dad followed Mom home. Dad got to be less than a block from the house and pushed the button on the garage door opener. This brought the garage door down on top of Mom’s mini-van. The paint was damaged and the door came off its tracks. They manipulated the door so Dad could park in the garage. Soon afterwards, they realized that the last place one wants one’s car is inside a garage with a non-functional door. With the help of some neighbors, they got the door propped upright and tied to prevent entry. The door has since been replaced- to the tune of $800. Mom is not as mad at Dad as many of her friends think she should be.
The cars were outside the garage when the door was tied shut. No people were hurt, and the only damage to the minivan was to its paint.
I do stupid stuff all the time, so let me just list the two I realized yesterday:
I threw away my wallet yesterday, without realizing it. I think I meant to put it in my messenger bag next to my desk, but chucked it into the garbage can instead. I tore apart my desk and bag after realizing that my wallet was missing, and only searched the garbage in desperation.
I also bottled my previous batch of beer without adding any sugar at the time of bottling for carbonation. Yesterday I started bottling the latest batch before realizing I hadn’t added the carbonating sugar, so I poured it back and added the sugar. Then I started thinking about the batch that’s been (supposedly) carbonating and aging for a month or so. I popped a couple bottles - not carbonated. Ugh. So I had to add sugar to every bottle in that batch and recap them.
Speaking of cars – my BiL very carefully laid a long post into his Mercedes M car then slammed down the back hatch and shoved the post thru his windshield…made it hard for him to be upset when my SiL closed the garage door on it…twice.
Gotta say that this thread made me sign up (after weeks of reading on and off). Especially DRM - who I find strangely inspiring…
Dumb things that spring to mind are: taunting my brother (was about 7 at the time) by standing behind him and cackling insanely as he’s about to take a drive down the fairway. Nice scar on temple.
Shoving a compass into the plugs on the workbench in school, obviously to see if I’d get a shock… didn’t, so presumed the supply wasn’t on. Turned to my mate sitting next to me who’d gone strangely pale. Just as I was giving him a mouthful about BS, the teacher comes rushing out in quite a temper, asking who tripped the power supply… much fun was had by all. N.B. The cane was a popular prop at our school :smack:
Anyways, proud to be a Doper at last!
My brother and I once placed a teddy against a heater in his room, and made guesses on how long it would take to burn. No, we didn’t burn the house down.
I’ve posted this story at least half a dozen times, so I’ll post it again. When I was about 10 years old I took a ten-speed bike out with me instead of my Huffy dirt bike (I don’t remember why). At the bottom of a long hill was a small wooden ramp some other kids had been using to jump off of and had left it there. I decided to go off of it myself. I learned the hard way that ten-speeds were not designed to be ridden like a dirt bike. After my second run at it I lost control of the bike as it landed and threw me off of the bike about 20 feet away. I found myself face-down to the pavement with a chipped front tooth, nearly knocking myself unconscious. I went to the dentist the next day for him to repair the damage. Then for several years after that day I had an ugly pale yellow false footh in my smile before I had the dentist replace it with a real-looking cap.
Same thing as STARTS: finger stapling should be an art form. 
I was around 10 and helping my stepfather close up the flea market booth for the night.
We just stapled a big tarp over everything until the next day.
He gives me the big-ass industrial staple gun to hold.
I had it in my left hand and was wondering how much pressure one has to apply to the trigger when I found out. :smack: I had stapled my index and middle fingers together.
I realized what a dumb ass I was, bit my lip and pulled it out before my stepfather saw.
I didn’t cry though.
Hehehe…does that sound like an epithet to anyone else?
Conincidentally enough, I just finished reading the “editing typos in your posts” thread too.
Ah, you and START reminded me. Last year in Art I was stapling a grading sheet and my drawing together, only I accidently stapled my finger to the sheet and drawing. I didn’t notice it until I tried to turn it in, and it wouldn’t come off. Then once I got my finger out, I stapled my sleeve to the drawing. :smack:
I needed to get from one balcony to the balcony below and jumping looked like the quickest way to get down (the balconies were staggered so it wasn’t like I’d miss.) I thought maybe it was too far to jump, but then told myself “Don’t be chicken.”
Result: Broken foot, six weeks in a cast, six years of limping, fear of heights so bad that I can’t go more than 3 rungs up a ladder (and that’s on a good day.)
Moral: Be chicken. Be very, very chicken.
I also sprayed toilet bowl cleaner on myself by mishandling the bottle while I was carrying it (nozzle loose, hand on squirt handle.) Luckily I had it pointed at my elbow, not my face.
Never stapled myself, but I did get my hand caught in a ring binder once. This is actually not very painful, but it’s difficult to get out of because you need two hands to open a ring binder and of course one was caught. I got one of my co-workers to let me out of it.
I was in the seventh grade and riding bikes with my friend on a sand road. We were coming up on a verrrry steep hill and I remember yelling to her that we would have to go down the hill real fast so we could make it up the hill. I was riding my brother’s much bigger bike. I started down the hill at breakneck speed and of course, hit a rock, which sent the bike into a wobble that kept getting bigger and bigger until I finally tipped over, dragging my right knee and my chin into the sand and rocks.
When I could finally get up, I could see the absolute pure whitness of my kneecap. There is nothing whiter on the face of the earth, I swear! We had to walk at least a mile home, pushing the bicycles, and my mom had to take me to the emergency room. The doctor pumped the wound full of “caine” and proceeded to pull up the edges of the skin to pick out rocks. He asked my mom if she wanted to see it and she graciously declined, after listening to him scrub it with a scrub brush they use on their hands when going into surgery. He told her there was not enough skin left to suture, because the edges were so ragged and torn. So he merely taped my knee and told me to keep it straight until it healed, which was easier said than done, being in a junior high with stairs.
I still have a very puckery scar there after probably thirty-five years, but I will never forget how white that bone was!!!
This is the funniest thing I’ve read this month, because you can see how it almost makes sense.
I’ve done a couple of stupid things quite recently. Yesterday I parked my car and sat reading for a moment. Then I got out, closed the door, and slapped my hand on my pocket, a habit I have to make sure I don’t lock my keys inside. Of course, they weren’t there. But I have an extra key in my wallet for just this situation, so I unlocked the car door and looked inside. No keys. 
Then I remembered I had put my keys in my shirt pocket, which I never, ever do. I have no idea why I did it then, either.
And just today, in a meeting reviewing project-development status: We’re going down the dev list, and the dev manager mentions “the <vendor> project,” which because it’s confidential is not on the public list yet. I turn to my department colleagues, who are participating in the meeting for the first time, and say, “Have you heard of the <vendor> issue?” They say no. I say, “We’re canceling their contract because their service sucks.” The dev manager says, “Uh, no, actually, that’s the <other vendor> project.” I mixed them up and we had to spend a few minutes explaining both projects to my co-workers, because I wasn’t supposed to spill the beans yet on the one I mentioned. Duhhr.
Trust me… The bright red light on the underside of an optical mouse is painful to look at.
Well thank you. You know, at the time in my head as far as I got was “It’s raining, the patch of pavement is dry, I’ll stand there.” Even as I think of it now I’m snickering.
Meh, I’ve done that before. The flashlight one is worse.
Let’s see…
There was the time I had done my own bicycle repair, and forgot to bolt my front wheel back on. I was popping wheelies on a gravel road when the front wheel fell off. I went head over heels and gashed my knee so bad that I ground gravel in the gash so bad that I thought it was skin. I only found out it was gravel after I limped home (over a mile) and started cleaning the wound.
One time I was doing maintenance work on a rental house. The previous tenants had kicked holes in a hollow core door, and I was attempting to replace it. I didn’t have a plain, and after I installed the door almost perfectly, I needed to shave one corner to keep it from sticking. Well, since I didn’t have a plain, I decided to use my razor knife to trim the edge of the door. I know have a nice scar on the fat pad below my pointer finger of my left hand.
On day I decided to take up whittling. I was going to whittle / carve a wooden chain with a pocket knife (without a locking blade). I was cutting away on 2" x 2" piece of white pine when I unsuspectingly came across a knothole. The knife flipped over and slammed shut on my hand as I bearing down on the knife. I can’t make a fist with my right hand because my pointer finger won’t curl around enough.
I once wondered if I could shoot a hole in my bedroom wall with a bb gun. The bb ricochetted of the wall ( and God only knows what else ) and hit me in the cheek. It just left a little cut.
I was down ‘at the bridge’ shooting bb guns with a friend of mine, when I found an old tin can that I put on the barral of my gun, and tried to shoot it off. Somehow that ended up with my best friend’s head getting cut open. I can’t remember if it was the can or the bb that did the damage.
Oh yeah, I just remembered. I used to peel potatos and make french fries at a hamburger type of restuarant. Actually machine would peel the potatos for me, then I would take the potatos, cut out the bad spots and cut them into french fries with this aparatus that looks like devices that are used to crush aluminum cans at the office. You raise this big handle up in the air, set the potato on the grid of razor sharp blades, and lower the handle, smashing the potato through the grid, making french fries. Well, we were always under the gun to hurry up. In a moment of outstanding brilliance, I cut the bad spoots out of a potato, raised the handle of the french fry cutter up to put the potato in (I’m still holding the knife in my hand), and managed to jab the tip of the knife up my nose. Thank GOD the top of the paring knife had been broken off. Even then, blood went every where. Not to mention I ruined an almost full bucket of fries.
I’m sure there are more.
E3
I’m so glad I’m not the only one here with a stapled-my-finger story. One day I was just idly shooting staples out of an open stapler, just to watch 'em fly though the air. It was very Beavis & Butt-head: “Uhuhuhuhhuh… This is cool!” Something distracted my mind for a split second and somehow I ended up with my left hand in front of my right, which was still holding the stapler and clicking out staples on auto-pilot. Sure enough, I stapled my thumb good - that sucker went all the way in. I just stopped and stared at my thumb, stunned at the profound stupidity of what I’d done. It didn’t hurt at all until I pulled it out.
I onced flicked the voltage switch on the back of a computer while the computer was on, at University, in a room of 30 other students.
BANG!
Everyone pretended not to notice and I got away with it.
Has anyone ever actually poured coffee on themselves to look at their watch?