“On backing up, the car went off the curb, smashing the radiator.”
Radiator fluid all over the street. At least I didn’t have to clean it up.
The drop off the curb smashed the radiator? How big was the curb?
Big enough, apparently.
I did not look to see how big a hole was made. Fluid was still draining when the car was being put on the flatbed tow truck. Perhaps I should have written the radiator received a thumping, as opposed to implying the whole unit was smashed.
I’ve clipped enough curbs and popped many a tire, so I know curbs can be dicks. But radiator thumping is a new one I never would have thought to attribute to them.
No kidding. Count me in this small club as well. I’m six foot two and a fairly big guy and I tortured myself trying to do exactly what you did. When I found out there was a screwdriver slot on the top I about wept.
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20 years ago, while volunteering for a conservation and rural development organization in Mexico, I was in charge of surveying property lines in the tropical rain forest for some villagers. My assistant (a local teenager) and I had to make stakes (to mark the boundary) by cutting small trees with our machetes. We whittled a sharp point at one end of each stake, to easily pound it into the ground.
One day, the kid was standing about 30 feet away from me. To save the few seconds it would take to walk over to him, I tossed him a stake I’d just made. Instant javelin! Man, that thing flew. It struck him in the mouth, just above his upper lip. Poked through, bounced off his teeth.
We walked out of the jungle and drove to the clinic in the one town, nearly an hour away. A few stitches, and he was okay (probably still has a little scar). But man, was that stupid of me. I could easily have blinded him, even killed him.
Not me but my mother-in-law: She was making chicken soup, and went to strain out all the chicken bones and vegetables. She put a colander in the sink, and poured in the broth. Right down the drain.
If it had been me, I wouldn’t have told anybody.
I love this thread. It serves as a corrective to the tendency to prematurely self-diagnose senility.
My chicken stock story is teeth-grindingly infuriating. I was with some mates on our annual fishing trip, which tends to get a little gourmet. So I went to hours of trouble to make a stock, and left it in a pot in the sink to cool so that I could more easily skim fat later.
Mate comes along and pours the lot out thinking it was just soaking water from cleaning the pot. I was a tiny bit furious. But apparently it was my fault, because (insert bullshit here). Still shitty.
To another dopey moment (this time my fault). The institution for which I work has a number of campuses, and once a week I have to travel to one in another town about an hour away. The organisation provides a work car for such occasions that are accessed by a phone app that remotely locks the car, as an added process in addition to the keys.
So I finish up at the distant campus (by which time it is dark) and return to the car park, where I spot my car from the others nearby still parked there. I proceed to unlock it by pressing the appropriate button on the keys. The locks go thunk, and out of the corner of my eye I see the parking lights flash. But the car doesn’t open when I pull on the door handle. Odd. I try again, several times. Same result.
So I figure it must be something to do with the fancy phone app. I use it. Hear the appropriate thunk, still no action with the handle. I try using the key and the app in various combinations in case one is overriding the other. I finally give up in disgust, drafting a Sharply Worded Letter in my head to vehicle admin, and trying to work out just how fancy a hotel I can get away with staying in and still get reimbursed for, to quell my techno-rage.
Eventually, I call security in order to be able to prove I am not an idiot in order to justify reimbursement. I can’t be an idiot. I have two fancy titles that are socially accepted heuristic indicators for Smart Guy.
So security arrives. I show him what I am doing, and how the car won’t open.
He watches, then immediately spots the problem. I am trying to open the wrong car. My actual car is immediately next to the one I am trying to open, and the thunks and light flashes are coming from it, but in my righteous certainty that I have the correct car, I did not notice this. Turns out the registration numbers (which I thought I had checked when I first approached the wrong car) are very similar because whole batches of these commuter cars are bought in bulk, so they commonly have sequential numbers.
The security guard did not quite have a good enough poker face to conceal his glee. He was polite and professional, but I caught a glimpse of that primordial joy that comes to those who, notwithstanding having a workaday job, manage to out-clever the Smart Guy.
The humiliation still burns.