Flat-out stupidest thing you've ever done

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

Wow, so very many to choose from. In my younger days I was basically a juvenile delinquent, so I had lots of chances to fuck up.

I burned a nearly completed house under construction down when I was about 8. My friends and I were throwing lit rolls of toilet paper at each other. I thought it would be cool to set a “trap” in a pile debris. I soaked a roll in paint thinner and poured a paint thinner trail to another room. No one fell into the trap, so I lit it anyway. We DID try to put it out before we ran away, but weren’t successful. In the same town my brother and I managed to start a field fire that burned for a week, thanks to a bunch of lighter fluid and the idea that flamethrowers were fun.

I punched a hornet’s nest on a bet. I got paid, but it really wasn’t worth the five bucks. It seems that I made roughly 18 cents per sting.

My brother and I took my dad’s guns into the back yard to shoot. Didn’t occur to us that we had neghbors behind us; naturally they called the police, thinking someone was trying to kill them. When the police arrived we tried to convince them that we were shooting cap guns off. (This was pre-day-glo orange capguns) The officer asked to see the cap guns, so I took one from a drawer and pointed it at him, only to realize that he and his partner had drawn down on me and were screaming at me to drop it. It’s a wonder they didn’t cap me. IIRC the brand name of the cap gun was actually “Realistic.”

My friends and I used to hold BB-gun wars in the woods. The only safety requirement was sunglasses. Somehow none of us wound up blind.

When I was 14 I read a story about people who got a thrill from breaking into homes where people were sleeping. I tried it, and was emptying a change jar in the kitchen when the light came on and a man with a shotgun was there. I bolted out the way I came in (unlocked kitchen door) and decided that I was done with that particular thrill.

When I was 9 my brother and I constructed coffee can charity tins and went around collecting money for some local charity. We made about $50 and were caught only because my brother said something to our Mom about being “loaded”. Though not dangerous, this was by far the most embarrassing, since my mom made us go back to every house, apologize, and return the money.

Almost as embarrassing was the time my brother and I were caught drunk in church. Made worse by the fact that it was the wine for communion we were drinking. That was my last day as an altar boy. Other children might have been forgiven, but I’d already pushed my luck too many times. There’s somthing about tuening on the microphone and rapping Run DMC on the altar that really, really displeases your average Catholic priest.

I tried to pick up a rattlesnake by the tail, and was stopped only by my dad coming around the corner of the house and catching me.

Spent one night driving around with a paper bag full of bottle rockets, a bunch of beer, and a friend. We’d drive along and shoot the rockets out the windows at cows, cars, or people, all the while laughing uproariously at our subtle wit. As we’re whipping down a country road at about 70 miles an hour a spark fell into the paper bag, and the car filled with smoke and fire. My friend slammed on the brakes and barely made it to the side of the road while I’m screaming bloody murder as bottle rickets go off around my feet. We jumped out of the car, took cover and waited for the inevitable explosion, which didn’t come. When we went back to the car the passenger seat was basically gone, nothing but charred foam and springs. Explaining that it was my idea to his mom was not one of the high points in my life.

Take your pick.

42

I saw Welby as the last poster to this thread and thought, “Oh, man, this should be good”. I was not disappointed.

43

By a huge margin, my first marriage.

44

Jeez welby, that was beautiful.

Seeing as how past accomplishments are too numerous, I’ll just go back to last night. My wife was reading my daughter a bedtime story upstairs and I kissed them both goodnight and came back downstairs to watch TV. A commercial was on that had some guy immitating the Chewbacca noise, that high pitched nasally “Neeeeeeeaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh” with a gutteral roll attached. Having had several glasses of wine, I too thought it would be appropriate to immitate the call. So I sat on the couch and for the next several minutes belted out about thirty attempts to sound like Chewbacca. Thing is you can’t do them soft… you really have to put some force behind them. So I’m sippin wine, and going “Niiiiiiiiiiiiaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh”, “Naaaaarrrrrrrrraaaaaaaahhhhhhhh” and “Neeeeeeeuuuuuuugggggghhhhhhhh” when I see movement on the stairs. I look up at my wife leaning against the bannister, long blonde hair cascading over and her absolutely racked with laughter to the point where she can’t even talk. She stumbles over to me, tears of laughter streaming down her face and says “I thought a bird got in the house. What in the hell are you doing?” I was like “Well, I’m trying to immitate Chewbacca.” She just leaned over, gave me a big hug and went back upstairs to giggle herself to sleep.

45

Thank god for tolerant women.
:smiley:

46

Gee, thanks Shibb, and Lieu. I’ve gotta admit, my wife’s caught me doing the smae thing Lieu, though she just gave me an odd look and avoided me for a while.

There’s something so great about the Chewbacca sounds. Makes me want to change my real name to Grannnnh.

So, what’s your name?
Grannnh!
Ooookay then.

47

I think we have a WINNAH!

48

My best freind and I both drove 280Zs about 10 years back. My best freind wrecked his drag racing and offered to sell me his rims. I agreed and he brought them over still with the inflated tires attached. At the time, my Mom and I owned a duplex, and our tenants who lived downstairs were these real ghetto girls. They had continuous traffic in and out so I didn’t want to leave them in the yard. I decided to lug them up the long backsteps to the laundry room.

The next day I decide to go ahead and put them on my car. I remembered how heavy they were and thought I could save some time and effort by rolling them down the stairs. So I had my brother stand at the top while I was “catching” them at the bottom. Well the first one went off without a hitch. But the second one started bouncing about half way down. I had just enough time to think maybe I shouldn’t try to catch it when it slammed into my chest and forehead. My T-Shit had a tire tread and I skinned most of my forehead.

49

Somehow I don’t feel like this is an honor. . .

50

Well, I’m gonna play along, even though we already have a winner.
This was actually just a few short months ago:
The door to my gas tank sticks. I generally leave it a bit open, but occasionally go to a “Full Serve” gas station, and they usually take great pains to jam it shut unless I tell them otherwise.
One day I left work during the break between 2 trainings and did some errands. I also noticed that I needed gas, so I stopped at a self-serve station, and tried to get the door to the tank open. Nothing was working (sometimes I can hit in in just the right spot, Fonzie-style, and it’ll pop open). I should also mention that I was 8 1/2 months pregnant and not at my most patient.
So what did I do? I took the only key to my car , jammed it in the door, and tried to pry it open. Then I watched, horrified, as the only key to my car snapped in 2.
And I don’t mean that it was the only key I had. I mean it was the only key anyone had to my car. No spare keys in the junk drawer at home or anything.
I had to wait almost 4 hours for AAA that night, but that part isn’t so much about my stupidity. Never made it to the second training, by the way.
I will say, though, that I did learn that most people are frightened by a hugely pregnant woman who is hysterically crying.

51

I had exactly the same thought.

Welby, please collect your trophy at the pick-up window.

52

When I saw that you’d posted I thought you might be able to give him a run for his money. :wink:

53

Why didn’t you untie the rope from the boat?

54

When I was about 10 or 11, some friends of mine and I decided it might be a fun, festive Christmastime activity to chuck snowballs at cars on the interstate. :rolleyes:

So, I and a group of about 8 friends went over to another friend’s home whose backyard overlooked said interstate, and we began doing just that. Occasionally we’d see a snowball burst over the roof of a car, and we’d go huhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuh. :rolleyes:

Trust me, this is the epitome of comedy for a pre-teen boy.

Well, this lasts for something like 45 minutes. I have discovered by this point that I am a terrible shot with a snowball. To this point, I have thrown literally dozens of them, and no direct hits at all. I am, in fact, the only boy that has hit nothing.

The group of us are preparing to leave (probably to do something equally destructive and careless) when I muster up this enormous ice-filled snowball, quite literally the size of an adult hand. On the way out, I chuck this huge iceball down onto the interstate…

…which immediately impacts on the windshield of a car. The driver loses his shit, skids to a stop on the shoulder. SKREEEEEETCH.

An angry man jumps out of the car. He’s wearing one of those wide-brimmed hats. “You kids freeze! Sheriff’s Department! Stay right there!” :eek: :eek: :eek:
I swear to you that you have never seen a faster group of 10 year-olds in your entire life. We would have outrun Carl Lewis on a pair of Wile E. Coyote rocketskates that day.

We never got caught.

Come to think of it, I have never shared this story with anyone before.

55

I’ll give it a shot, but he set the bar pretty high.

When I was eleven or twelve my brother and I were down by the creek trying to sink plastic model ships by shooting them with BB guns and throwing firecrackers at them. It was taking far too long because you have to shoot a plastic ship about a hundred times with a BB gun to sink it, and the firecrackers kept bouncing off and going out in the water.

We decided to fix this. We cracked open the models and stuffed firecrackers, plastic bags full of gasoline and wooden matchheads inside. After a dozen shots or so we got some very satisfying whoosh bangbangbang activity accompanied by very nice lakes of fire floating down the creek. It was way cool. Unfortunately, we quickly ran out of ship models. Fortunately, we had dozens of airplane models.

We also had soda straws and fishing line, and the plan was to attach sections of straw to the planes and feed through the fishing line and hang it up at an angle so the matchhead-firecracker-and-gasoline-filled airplane models would “fly.” We also augmented our arsenal with a .22 and some half-filled paint cans to plink at when we were done with the models. (I know. Now.)

Then we had a brainstorm. Even our small minds could wrap themselves around the idea that we probably weren’t supposed to be doing this, so we decided to do it somewhere where no one could see us. After some consideration we hit upon the perfect location:

An old abandoned barn.

We managed to get out alive, and didn’t even get singed too badly. We also managed to get way the hell out of there before the police and fire department showed up, so it could have been worse. For us, I mean. The guy who owned the barn was pretty much screwed either way.

56

When I was in high school I loved building and flying those model rockets. You know, the ones you build, shoot up in the air and hope the parachute opens? Yeah, so one day I decided that it would be a fun idea to start putting things in the body (tube) instead of a parachute. First up was marbles, didn’t really do much but the landing didn’t destroy the rocket, so we went to Plan B. Gunpowder. In my head it should have shoot up in the air and exploded like a firework. Instead the nose was so heavy that it got high enough off the ground to clear the launcher’s rod, and leveled off and rocketed off into our neighborhood. It shot off between two houses and after we lost sight of it I heard a metallic “bang” (I assume the rocket hitting someones car/truck/aluminum siding) then shortly a louder “BANG” (the gunpowder igniting) and smoke. A lot of smoke. We grabbed our shit and ran away. We never went to assess the damage or retrieve the rocket. Not that there would have been much left anyway. I refuse to think what would have happened if it didn’t get off the launcher, with us a few feet away.

57

Ex, you sure we didn’t know each other as kids? We’re both pretty, um, creative.

58

I ain’t got nothing on some of you folks, but…

-The stupidest thing I’ve done as an adult was go out with my most recent exgirlfriend. But that’s not very interesting.

-The stupidest thing I did as a child was get involved in a long rockfight. See, it’s like a snowball fight, except with rocks. What could go wrong?

59

It sure seems possible, doesn’t it. How’s the platypus launcher coming along?

I don’t know, Maxx. Estes rockets? Check. Non standard cargo? Check. Replace “marbles” with “frogs” and “launching outside” with “testing in the basement” and you could be my brother. You remember that one rocket called the X-Ray that had that clear plastic payload section? He filled the clear plastic bit with some of Grandpa’s black powder and drilled out the plug that went into the body of the rocket to accept a short length of cannon fuse, thinking that the deployment charge from the engine would light the fuse and produce a nice bang up in the air somewhere.

Because he and I are the fruit of the same pair of loins his brain kicked in late, and only halfway. He had so much tape on the cargo section he wasn’t sure that the deployment charge would separate the nose from the body properly, and decided to test his rig. So he yanked the fuse out, assembled the rocket, wrapped the body in a towel for some reason (I guess he figured the cardboard body alone wouldn’t hold up to what he did next, another “brain half on” moment), and clamped the whole thing into my Dad’s bench vise. In the basement. Where my Mom had just finished doing a huge load of laundry. All I can think to say in his defense is that I believe he thought the fuse was necessary to ignite the black powder.

Anyway, he set the thing off in the vise. Thankfully, he hadn’t packed the powder in and the plastic and tape didn’t hold enough pressure to generate a boom, but what happened was bad enough. I heard him yelling and flailing around and ran downstairs just in time to help him stomp out several small fires, one of which was on his head. The entire basement was filled with that nasty, stinky, clings-to-everything-and-rots-whatever-it-touches blackpowder smoke.

He had an interesting discussion with Dad later that day.

60

Unfortunately, it’s a long story that would require multiple posts in a separate thread.