Is it bad that my first reaction upon reading this was “Hm - there’s a spare flourescent-light-tube in the supply closet in the hall of my dorm…that would kick ass…”?
Yes. Yes it is. Not only are these things terribly bad for the environment, but you might hit someone. The last one (that was the first) I made ended up flying wildly out of control and landing, presumably, in a nearby residential area.
The next time I try this will be somewhere much, much more secluded. With an environment full of animals which I personally don’t like. q;}
I’ve posted this one around here before, but:
I played quick-draw with an cop in Fairfax, VA.
I would loved to have been there. Better than when the church organist started banging out Beatles tunes on the pipe organ during choir practice (I egged him on). None of us knew the Altar Rosary Society (aka Society of Serious Prune-faces with No Discernable Sense of Humor Ever, minimum age 65) was cleaning the church at the time. Not pretty. :eek:
Did the cop know it was a game?
No.
It was around 2 - 3AM, being that the bars had closed. We (myself & 3 or 4 buddies) decided to walk home.
About half-way there we decided “Screw this, we’re calling a cab!” Cell-phones hadn’t quite reached saturation level at that time (1998?), so none of us had one. We stopped to use the payphone in the strip-mall.
While waiting for the cab to show up, we were doing the usual drunk-fool type stuff. Y’know, wrestling around, jumping up and down, yelling, screaming, etc. Harmless, if obnoxious.
Police officer notices the ruckus and decides to check it out. He pulls in, get’s out of his car, points his flashlight at us and asks…something. “You boys OK?” or “What’re you guys up to?” Something, for the life of me I can’t remember what.
So I leap out in front of him, reach behind my back (into my long black trenchcoat, I might add) and as quickly as possible whip out a rectangular black object (my wallet) and point at the guy firearm-style while yelling at the top of my lungs
NOTHING OFFICER!!! WE’RE DRUNK!!! WANT TO SEE SOME I.D.???
They guy staggred backwards, stammered out that we should move on, and drove away. He didn’t shoot me, he didn’t arrest me, he just drove off. Poor bastard probably went to change his shorts.
My best boneheaded moment was deciding to change an Exacto blade at work, while on the phone, knife held upwards in my left hand, unscrewing the blade with my right hand, right elbow propped on the edge of my desk. Elbow slipped off, right hand went neatly down on the blade up to the hilt. “Gotta go, bye! [click]” I must have hit a small artery, because blood was actually spurting. Sheer luck that I didn’t sever a tendon. It was lunchtime, and only one other person was around. She drove me to the hospital; when I came back that afternoon, there was a crowd of people around my blood-soaked cubicle assuming I was dead, but wondering what happened to the body.
The best part? Once I told the hospital this accident had happened at work, they stopped asking about my insurance and just took my company’s name. Didn’t pay a cent for the visit, the stitches, the tetanus shot, or the antibiotics. Shortly thereafter the company went belly-up but I don’t take ALL the blame for that. 
There has surely been some good ones from the previous posters but I figured I’d add mine anyway.
Years ago I were living with my father, who previously had rented out rooms to police officers who where stationed at the nearby Danish/German border.
I had just finished school and should be looking for a job, instead I spend most of the day and night chatting on IRC.
A few times I chatted with a guy who used the nick “Speedy_DK” and one time I asked him if his nick had anything to do with the drug “speed”. The guy admitted that he was a frequent user of said substance and somehow I stupidly got him to agree on sending me some (at the time I had never touched a drug except coffee and alcohol).
I happily forget everything about it and go for a 14 day vacation on the spanish island Majorca. Returning home from the vacation I find my father waiting for me very angry! In not very pleasant words he accused me of selling drugs and being a heroine addict.
Turns out that while I where baking in the spanish sun, one of the before mentioned room-renting police officers had come to look up his old friend my father, bringing along his dog which was used for detecting narcotics at the border. Lying on our kitchen table is a package with my name on it and no sender, the narcotics dog gets a sniff of it and alerts the officer who opens the package and finds a quantity of an unknown narcotic substance.
Luckely he and my father had agreed that the best course of action would be to flush the dope and let my father deal with me.
I dunno how I ever managed to explain to my father that I was not using drugs and I were certainly not selling them, but it sure wasn’t an easy task and I thank my lucky star that the officer didn’t make an official case of it.
Never ask strangers on the Internet to send you free drugs, they might actually do it.
Having a little trouble with the guidance system. Platypi aren’t all that bright. We’re trying to train them to hit the squirrels, but they seem to go after anything that’s either furry and brown or in a tree. Any ideas? The owner of the chihuahua next door is slighty miffed.
Ah, stomping heads and putting out fires. You got the best of both worlds there! Ex, we’ve GOTTA be realted.
I failed to mention the time I got stoned and went to pick up a girl I’d asked out. I’d vaguely remembered about 3/4 of the way through the joint that she had said something about her dad being a cop. He answered the door, took one look at me, and made me walk home.
Alas, my stupidity, while potentially fatal, really isn’t as gem worthy as other posters here. However, in order to maintain my standing in the order of People Who are Too Smart For Their Own (or Anyone Else’s) Good, I feel I must share a couple of stupid things I have done.
I grew up in one of them Blue states that got a lot of attention, with the recent presidential election. The town I grew up in was mostly a bedroom community of the state capitol, but that was a recent innovation. Prior to that the town had been, like most New England towns, a small mill site. The mill resided in a section of town that used to be rather more upscale than it is, now. It even used to have it’s own post office and post mark: Rocky Bottom. (Between this, and the fact that the kettle pond in town was called Lake Boone, and had docks, I would say I lived between the Boone docks, and rock bottom.) This section of town even had its own name: Gleasondale. (If you can tell me what town I’m talking about, you get a gold star. )
Anyways, Gleasondale was a Lowell, writ small: it had housing for the mill owners, which was so sumptuous that a few years ago, Pepperidge Farms used it for background in one of their commercials. It also had a number of tenement houses for the mill workers. In addition to that, there was an unused rail spur going into the mill, which is where the stupidity comes in. Since this was New England, and since quaint is often considered more important than safe, and ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ is a religion, there was no particular push to do anything about this rail spur. Nor the bridges that ran over the spur. If I recall correctly, not only were there a couple of tremendous old wooden bridges, but there was a bridge with stone abutments going over a major roadway in the area. The rail bridge going over the roadway turned what was a nice, modern two lane highway into a narrow city street. And had eaten more than a few tractor trailers over the years.
My idiocy involves, however, one of the bridges going over the rail spur. This was a rather radically canted wooden frame bridge. When I say it was radically canted, I mean just that: the speed limit on this road dropped to 20 MPH for the bridge, and the only local I know who ever took that bridge at more than 15 MPH was myself. And I only did it once.
I was driving with a friend to a used bookshop, and we were talking while I took the back roads to the bookshop. I had a little brain fart. And forgot the bridge.
Alas the bridge didn’t forget me.
I want to say that I was NOT speeding. For the rest of the route, that is. 25-30 MPH was not only safe, but the legal speed everywhere else but the bridge. Somehow I just forgot the bridge.
Let me ask you: Have any of you ever taken air in a '77 Dodge Aspen wagon? Hanging there, in the air, looking down as the front end of the stationwagon just seems to dip lower and lower and lower, til you feel like you’re pointed straight down at the ground. Certainly you’re not supposed to be able to see the road that close in front of the car while you’re driving it.
Somehow the car held together. But, I thought I’d killed it. And myself. And my friend. He certainly thought so, and refused to let me drive him anywhere ever again.