You know, most of these seem to be from guys.
I once touched the tines of an electric plug while I stuck it in the socket. It sure felt weird.
I poured nail polish remover in my eye. Burned like crazy, and we had to call poison control.
Of course, both of those were on accident, but in retrospect, I should have known better.
My freshman year of high school, I was high on drugs, seriously depressed, and lacking in any sort of sense, and one day decided to get away from it all. So I decided to go live as a hermit in the woods. Unfortunately, my plan wasn’t too thought out. I was equipped with a trenchcoat, a broken lighter, some books, and a half-smoked roach. I spent the night shivering in a ditch, on possibly the coldest night Houston had experienced in years. I returned home shortly thereafter, to the great relief of my parents.
A few years ago at a party I plunked down 20 bucks in the communal booze-paying bowl, and proceeded to get absolutely smashed (possibly the most intoxicated I’ve ever been in my life). Somebody had brought jello shots, that I had been consuming at an alarming rate, and I heard somebody mention that there was still a bottle of Everclear on the kitchen counter. So I, in a fit of drunken clarity, decided that being even more wasted would be a good thing. I made my way to the kitchen, found the bottle, opened it, and proceeded to chug away. Now, I’m a large guy, but this potentially would have been enough alcohol to put me down for good. Luckily for me, some joker had replaced the alcohol in the bottle with water, so I merely wound up better hydrated rather than comatose or dead.
Stupidest thing I did as a child - age 5, New Year’s Eve, about 5 til midnight. I shoved my stuffed, pink rocking horse to the top bunk. Then, I played on it. About half an hour later, I came to…on the floor…with a fractured skull…and no recall of how I got there. This New Year’s will be the 19th anniversary of that night. I still get headaches in the spot I fractured and I’m still terrified of bunk beds.
Stupidest thing I did as an adult - age 18, New Year’s Eve, about 10 til midnight (see a pattern here?). I let a “friend” borrow my debit card. See, her grandmother had died and she needed to buy flowers but didn’t get paid until the next day. So, I agreed to let her borrow the money. But, I wasn’t getting off work for another 6 hours. I never questioned why she needed to buy flowers at that time of night. She withdrew the money we agreed on, printed a receipt for me, and then emptied my account. I never thought to check the account to make sure she didn’t do exactly that. A week later, after my car payment, insurance, rent, grocery check, school book payment and random other bills all BOUNCED, I finally checked my account. I also never thought to press charges or even report her. After all, she was my “friend”. Seven long years later, my credit rating is finally up to the low end of fair and I can finally get a credit card again. I still can’t seem to make ends meet because I’m still paying off all the debt that got racked up from all those bounced check and overdraft fees. Did I mention that I almost lost my apartment and my car almost got repo’d? Despite working 3 jobs at one time, I couldn’t catch up.
Why does this surprise you?
Shit, I thought that would have been obvious.
There I was, drunk off my ass and walking (I had already lost my driver’s license to a DUI 15 months earlier) down my town’s main street around 11:00 PM. As I passed my place of employment, a package consolidation and shipping company, it occurred to me that I ought to go in and get caught up on some of my computer work.
Problem was, the place was closed and I had no key. I used to have a key, but the boss had taken it to give to another employee who needed it more than I did. So, the obvious solution was to climb in through a window. You see, when we first moved into that building I had noticed a window that didn’t lock properly, and had pointed it out to my boss, but he never got it fixed. So in I went. Getting through this window involved carefully climbing onto a railing, pushing the window inward, and then sort of leaping for the windowsill. Despite my inebriated condition, I made it without injury.
Did I mention the group of dumbfounded spectators watching me perform this stunt? There was a bar across the street, where a band was going to perform, and the bar’s patrons were using our parking lot. There were a number of these bar patrons just getting out of their cars as I was going through the window.
Once inside, I made it to the back office where my computer was located, and I got to work. I was only inside for a few minutes, though, when the pounding on the front door started. Peeking out, I could see a cop shining a flashlight in through the window.
Oops. It seems one of my spectators had called the police.
“Well,” I thought, “If I’m really quiet, they’ll probably think I’m gone.” Did I mention that I was drunk? So I shut the computer down and just stayed out of sight. That lasted only until I heard a key in the front door and a booming voice yelling, “Come out with your hands up!”
I came out with my hands up. There were six cops pointing their guns at me.
After a quick patdown, I was escorted from the premises. My boss was waiting outside (he had been called to unlock the door). When he saw that it was me, he sighed and told the cop in charge, “I don’t want to press any charges. Just take him home.”
Strangely enough, I didn’t lose my job.
Stupid as my actions were, the story does have a happy ending. Once the cop got me home, my roommate handed me a beer “to calm my nerves.” I finished the beer and said to my roommate, “You know, I think that was enough of that shit.” That was my last drink of alcohol, and now I’ve been sober for 10 years, 5 months.
Getting married.
Makes me kind of wish I was as reckless as some of the other Dopers here instead.
WRS/Thû
Your name isnn’t Fred is it? Because that is exactly the model rocket that we used. If you aren’t Fred, well, lets just say great mind truly do think alike.
When I was a child, I did the same thing. That was when I was young and foolish. (I’m different now- I’m no longer young 
.)
My rockfight ended when I got hit in the head with a brick-sized rock. How did yours end?
I’ve done a few stupid things in my life. Most of them are small ones like-
Waving at the police cars in front of my house when it was under surveillence.(long not so stupid story)
or
Frequent nights spent drunken bike riding.
A big one just came recently during halloween weekend.
I had managed to get into a bar for their annual halloween party. I was well on my way to getting completly out of my head and my friend dragged me on stage for the costume contest. I was going as a republican and my friend was a liberal wacko. Hijinks ensued on stage, lots of yelling and screaming and falling.
Then some guy from chicago started buying us drinks on his company credit card. For the next 4 hours. The band that was playing was absolutly the worst noise I have ever heard. So I spent the next few hours heckling the band, screaming songs for them to play(cover band) and generally being a jerk. The band heckling climaxed with me screaming the words to Dancing With Myself, and how I knew the words I still don’t know. Then I proceeded to pick up one of the monitors on the stage and slam it down, repeatedly. This got me a kick in the face from the bass player. After this I gave up on the band and Chicago guy bought me 3 Jager bombs. Then I decied I needed 3 more. So the score so far is: drinking pitchers of beer for 4 hours then drinking 6 jager bombs plus the drinks I had before the bar, and that other thing I did before the bar. So it’s closing time and the band stops playing, the bar empties out and its just me, my friends and the owner. We talked to him for a while and he continued to buy us all drinks.(one of my friends knew the owner) After falling over the same chair 3 times and breaking several glasses in a row we decieded to leave. Chicago guy had told what hotel he was in so we walked there. Me and two of my friends come staggering into the lobby at 4 in the morning, yelling and smoking. We find his room and no one answers the door. So we think he meant the other hotel around the corner. While walking to the other hotel we pass by my friends work. Then we proceed to take his work van out for a joy ride. The last clear memory at this point is falling into the elevator at the hotel and then knocking on the wrong room. The next thing I know is that I hear a car starting very close to me. I open my eyes and realize that I am under My friends car in his backyard/driveway. While trying to scramble out I managed to hit my head a few times but I made it out. Just in time to see my drinks from the night. Good thing I was outside. I then stood up, looked at my friend, and said “That was fun, we should go back.” Then stumbled home and proceeded to have a very unpleasant next day.
I turn 21 in March.
So that whole night was one big stupid adventure.
Once when I was young and stupid, some friends and I spent the night in an old abandoned house. This was the “cool” hangout for all the high school misfits, you see. The old house was nearly falling down and if you stepped on certain parts of the floorboards your feet would go through the wood. Even on the second floor. My friends and I spent the night in an upstairs room. But that’s not the stupidest part. Since it was early fall, we got cold during the night. So we lit a bunch of candles. Did I mention that the house had once been used as a hay barn and was still half full of old, dusty, highly flammable hay? But that’s still not the stupidest part.
So what’s the stupidest part?
We were smoking. We had no ashtrays and were too lazy to walk to the window so we just chucked the STILL LIT cigarette butts into gaps in the wall and through the hole in the floor. I’m still not sure how we made it out without being burned alive that night. Nothing caught fire and the house is still standing, sort of, to this day, no thanks to our stupidity that night.
Two things (well, really, there are more, but…):
“Hood Riding.” This is where you spread-eagle yourself on your buddy’s car hood, facing into the car. You get a grip best as you can between the hood and the windshield (no fair grabbing the windshield wipers!), and you try to shove your toes into the front grill, the headlights, something. Then the car takes off.
Fast.
Best done in an empty parking lot, so by the third donut-spin, when you come flying off, you land on nice, soft blacktop.
Driving my car, tripping on acid. Actually, not as scary as it sounds, except that I became aware that my car was humming to me. Who knew that a '74 Comet could carry a tune so well! Then the car-seat started tickling me. And then I could barely speak when it came time to talk to the Outstandingly Frightening Disembodied Voice at the McDonald’s drive-thru.
Ah, youth.
A few nights ago. I was completely stone sober, doing my Greek homework, but feeling like I had a twenty-second attention span. I took apart my ballpoint pen - unscrew the little metal bit at the tip, pull out the ink cartridge. Whee. Fun. Hey, I wonder what happens if you heat the ink cartridge over the flame of a candle? The answer is ink gets everywhere and you have to explain a million times the next day why your hand is coated in black ink and you even have spatters of it on your face. :smack:
Every year at my school, there’s an “ark party”. Long story short, people hike up the mountain behind campus as the sun is setting, carrying kegs. They then get very, very, very drunk and stoned. In the dark. On top of a mountain. This was the first college party I’d been to. It was the first time I’d been in a drinking situation where we weren’t all afriad of getting busted by someone. I’m a very tiny person who easily gets wasted on very little. You get drunk a lot faster at a high altitude than lower ones. We were at nearly eight thousand feet.
Apparently, at about midnight, some less-drunk friends of mine decided that yes, I was way past done there, and somehow got me down the moutain. Did I mention that no one brings flashlights? And it was a really, really dark night? I woke up at about noon the next day feeling like utter shit, eyes totally dried out because I’d been wearing my contacts for over 24 hours at that point, etc. Also, my pillow and sheets and, well, me, are coated in blood. I have no memories of anything past, like, ten PM the previous night.
Apparently, I’d more or less fallen part of the way down the trail and sliced my hand open. You can still see a scar, four months later.
I’ve a shameful number of stories like these…
Ah, I forgot another good one - a celebratory action upon finishing our second-to-last-semester of high school. This, too involves ice. And snow. Fresh, as we’d gotten a nasty ‘winter mix’ earlier that day.
We obtained (and how we did so is another story entirely, in which arrests were almost made) a shopping cart. We got some rope. And a friend with a car. We tied the shopping cart to the back of said car, drove around his development, skidded on ice, and really were within inches of killing ourselves but having fun nonetheless.
It was about eleven PM on a Saturday night - thus, darkness.
That was dumb.
Then we decided to see what happened if we replaced the rope with bungee cords.
At first? Not a big difference. Oooh, I know! Let’s have a bunch of people try to hold the shopping cart in place at first, then let it go as the driver keeps going. We were suicidal enough to keep trying until we got it to work.
It made the oddest “snap-bang-fwing!” noise. And as shopping carts notably lack seatbelts, the guy in the cart went flying up over top of the car. I thought my heart stopped. Luck was on our side (sorry, Darwin awards). Remember the recent snowfall? He landed in one of the snowbanks that plows create by the curb, with nothing but a minor cut on his forehead and some bruises.
Fortunately for us, although unfortunately for the quality of the story, we just stopped after a while.
That post back on page one about 15 being the height of stupidity couldn’t be more accurate…
At that age, some friends and I thought that it would be a good idea to go up on one guy’s roof and dive into his pool. The challenge, of course, was to dive into the shallowest part of the pool possible. Because, you know, any pussy could dive into nine feet of water; it took a REAL man to dive into three feet of water.
Oh yeah, and at the time, I was six feet tall, 185 pounds, and the smallest in our group (by as much as six inches). Looking back, I can’t believe that none of us broke our neck.
I recently performed a variation of hood riding. I was just sitting on the hood of a car when it accelerated very quickly. Not trusting my friends driving the car I decied to jump off instead of waiting for them to hit the brakes and I can go flying off. I jumped but I landed sideways and abruptly flipped over onto my face and somehow hitting my head. Good thing I had been drinking or I might not of stumbled away from that one.
NinjaChick, you are hereby elected an honourary guy.
Was in college.
Got a huge glass globe from my hometown city street lights.
Thought it would make a great lamp in my dorm room.
Got myself a large plastic cup, rammed a light fixture up it with a cord and inserted light bulb. Put glass globe over it.
Stood back…light was slightly crooked.
Lifted the glass globe.
While the light bulb was still on, PUT BOTH THUMBS ON THE CONTACTS to straighten the light.
I flew back and landed on the floor from the direct contact of two thumbs to the two contacts of electricity.
I have always been wary of electricity since, and thankful I didn’t do this idiotic trick while in Europe where the higher voltage of electricity would have killed me.
Cool.
I’ve actually been told in all seriousness before that I’m “just one of the guys”. Most of my hobbies have been mostly male-dominated ones, so…It happens.
Ladies and Gentlemen of The Straight Dope Message Board, I present to you now:
Phnord Prephect’s Top Ten Stupid Things He’s Done!
Actually, just the first ten things I could think of, in approximately chronological order…
10: At my fiend’s 8th birthday party… mine too, come to think of it, since we were born 3 days apart. His parents have been building a backyard patio by laying down bricks. Cheap, but not too effective. And they have a big pile of bricks leftover. Obvious answer: BRICKFIGHT! Yep, a bunch of 8-year-old boys (and one girl) in the backyard heaving bricks at one another. This ended when someone heaved a brick at me, which hit me in the back of the head. Nothing serious, bruise on the neck, but this may, perhaps, explain the following items! q;}
9: Maybe 10 or so, and my parents got me my first chemistry set. I decided it would be a really good idea to create a ‘magical strength potion’ by mixing a little bit of everything in the kit, as well as whatever else I could find, into a cup. While I wasn’t dumb enough to actually DRINK it, I did leave it in my closet for several weeks. Fortunately, the creators of said chemistry sets must have children of their own, and there was never anything really dangerous I could have done anyway.
8: Around this time, flying begins to fascinate me. I spend the next couple years developing any number of terribly childish and impractical flying machines, and jumping off of things with or without them in hopes that one will work. None do. Somehow, I never actually break any bones. So far so good!
7: In Texas, snow is a very rare and wonderous thing. One winter we get enough to actually sled on! Having moved down here a few years earlier from a much more northern state, my parents have brought an actual sled with metal runners and a steering bar! I’m the envy of the VERY steep street on which I live, 'cuz the best THEY can do is old trashcan lids or the like to sled on. My parents have recently purchased a videocamera system as well… the old kind, which had a portable VCR attached by a cable to the video camera unit. Well, what else is there to do? I hop on the sled, slap the VCRs strap over my shoulder, power on the camera, and WEEE! down the snowy hill I go. Fast. VERY Fast. This is gonna be some awesome footage! Faster… faster… Did I mention that the road CURVES at one point? Did I mention that there’s a not-quite-frozen CREEK at the bottom of a CLIFF at that particular curve? I wish I’d saved that videotape, no idea where it ended up. No injuries… except to the camera.
6: Slightly older now, a friend with vehicular access increases my ability to injure myself exponentially. He shows me this spot he likes to hang out… a secluded section of woods, through which a railroad line runs… we’ll return to this scene a bit later. q;} Anyway, one night the railroad has left a caboose on the tracks. There’s no choice but to explore it! Inside, I find some strange small red packets with metal straps on them. They’re labeled “Railway Torpedo” and I eventually work out what they’re for… Let’s say a section of track is washed away by flood or something, and there’s no other way to make contact with any other trane that might be approaching. Simply walk a mile or two in either direction, and strap a RailwayTorpedo (I should google this now that I think of it) to the track. When the train runs over it, it explodes, loudly enough that the driver knows something is up and can stop the train. Wow, free explosives! I stuff my pockets full. Several failed experiments over the coming days convince me that there’s nothing I can do to make the contents of these packets explode, or even burn. So there’s only one thing left to do… impact tests. I take one to my friend’s secluded home, place it on a cinderblock, and pick up the sledgehammer. No major injuries, but I was deaf for the rest of the day and my ears are STILL ringing.
5: Early highschool, and they’re tearing up the road in front of it. Part of the construction includes putting in drainage tunnels for the gutters along the road. Apparently these tunnels must be expected to carry a LOT of rain, as I can nearly stand up in them, and I’m not exactly a short person. The allure of a mile-long stretch of tunnel, I think, needn’t be explained to most of those reading this thread. One day, I get a particularly bright idea… firework fight! I’m not adding firework fights (MANY of them over the years) to this list 'cuz, hey, that’s still fun. But a firework fight in a tunnel is even MORE fun… there’s nowhere to go! Missiles bounce in a spectacular fashion as they hurl down this tunnel towards you. What I failed to take into consideration was that they also release huge amounts of smoke… and in a tunnel, that smoke just sorta stays there. No major injuries, but my lungs have never been the same since.
4: Hooray, I have my driver’s license! Look out world! My parents let me borrow their Chevy Suburban, and I of course let my friends try it out. One time in particular, having recently been inspired by the movie TeenWolf, I decide the best possible thing to do would be to let my unlicensed, unpracticed, friend drive while I climb onto the wonderfully spacious upper cargo section of the vehicle and walk around. THEN, I decide that a really funny prank would be to lie down and pop up over the windshield and go BOO! and scare my driving friend. It works, quite well, and he slams the brakes in panic. I slide down the windshield, over the hood of the truck, and land on the pavement. This scares my friend even more, and his foot slips OFF the brakes. Fortunately he manages to put the truck in park, and I’m only about halfway under it. No major injuries, although my arms didn’t work right for a couple days due to landing on them. I tell my parents I fell over the tennis net, and they seem to believe me. q;}
3: And we’re back on the railroad, this time With Alcohol. Happily drunken out of my head, I feel no qualms whatsover about approaching the equally drunken group of teens already there this night. Friendship immediately ensues. Now… this particular spot has the railroad tracks crossing a bridge perhaps 30-40 feet above a creekbed with an indeterminate depth of water in it. The bridge itself has old rusty steel trestles on either side of the track. When we hang out here, it’s fun to once in a while climb out over the water on top of the trestles, and gaze the seemingly miles down and occasionally throw things off. This night, in some bizarre test of manhood, one of the members of the other group and I decide it would be fun to RACE across the trestles, while drunk, in the middle of the night, running top speed. I win, but only by sliding down the far side of mine and banging the crap out of my shin on the concrete at the bottom. I don’t remember much after that. No serious injuries.
2: An old car (the story of which is a Stupid Thing in and of itself) finally dies, and I sell it to a very shady guy with a flatbed towtruck. This idiot decides to, not back the truck up to my car, but to run a winch ACROSS THE STREET and drag my car to his trailer. I see this about the time I see a car approaching, and decide I have to try to stop them. I fail, and they hit the steel cable (totally demolishing the front end of their car) which drags MY car into my Roommate’s car. Then the cable snaps, hits me in the leg, and my roommate gets thrown from her car (she was working on something in the dash, with her door open). Had that cable been TWO inches higher off the ground, it would have gone through the innocent car’s windshield and decapitated the driver and her passenger, and removed both of my legs at the knee. As it stands, all I got out of it was a broken leg, few other broken bones, stitches in my head, and a Mortal Enemy: The towtruck guy, who of course had fake insurance and got out of there as fast as he could.
1: Not necessarily the best story, but the most recent Really Stupid Thing I can think of that I’ve done. This was a couple years ago… I was about 30. I had the following items handy: A 3-foot florescent tube lightbulb, used up. A roll of duct tape. A few cardboard boxes. Some Estes model rocket engines, with igniters. Thus began the brief but surprisingly effective series of experiments in Making Rockets Out Of Stuff One Should Never Make Rockets Of. Amazingly enough, the 3-foot tube worked PERFECTLY. Crappy cardboard fins held on by duct tape, aligned by sight. Engines, also held on by duct tape. And a launching system that was literally nothing but a 20-foot wire and a battery. It flew into the night sky, as all three D-class engines launched it up… and up… and up… and then they went out. It was at about this point that we began wondering if we’d get to see it land and break, or if it would fly out of sight and we’d miss it. So we waited, looking around, and gradually became aware of this growing whistling sound. The 3-foot glass tube, with fins duct-taped to one end, came back to earth about 50 feet away in a neighbor’s yard, and stuck nose-first into the ground without breaking! No injuries at all… but come on, this is still a bad idea all the way around.
Now, to figure out how to make one that lights up…