What incredibly stupid thing have you done when someone told you not to do it and exactly what would happen if you did do it?
I’ll start:
I was with a church group at the very beginning of the Missouri River (I think it was in Minnesota). There’s a bridge you can walk over, and the chaperones warned us not to go wading in the stream, because we might get wet. Needless to say, I went wading, trying to cross the tiny stream so I could say that I had actually walked across the Missouri River. Of course, I slipped on the rocks and completely doused myself a good one. The only good thing I got out of this experience was a t-shirt that said something about having been to the beginning of the river. I was so embarrassed–the whole church group got a good laugh out of my stupidity.
So what have you done that someone said, “I told you so!” when it didn’t work out as planned?
I used to work as an electrician. My sister and her husband complained about a flickering fluoresent ligth fixture, when I said I can fix it. I got my tools out of the trunk of my car, and stood on a step stool to reach the fixture, figuring it was just a bad ballast. (I also had spares in the car, did a lot of calls about faulty fixtures which turn out to just be bad ballasts.) My brother-in-law offered to shut off the power, I said no, I work on these things live all the time, it’s perfectly harmless I said, as long as you don’t touch the live wire and aren’t grounded. My sister insisted and I again said no, that I could’ve changed out the ballast by now if not for all this arguing.
Well, I snipped the wires, and was about to put a cap on the live wire, to keep it from touching anything, when the black wire slipped from my fingers. The wire fell against the corner of my wire-rimmed glasses. I’d been bit by 120 volts before, and it’s usually just a nuisance you hardly feel (once you get used to it), but 120V is an entirely different experience as it shoots through your head, traveling across the frames of your glasses.
I fell off the step stool, my sister is looking at me, shaking her head at me (I know she wanted to say I told you so!), my brother-in-law is laughing his ass off. My sister, looking down at me me, very calmly asks, “Do you want me to turn the power off NOW?”
My friends and I were driving around back in high school (when we were too young to do anything fun). We pulled up next to this car of hot guys, and my friend Gladys yells, “Moon them, Sarah!” Since I am not shy about my nether regions and I come from a long line of mooners, I assume the position. Just then Tina yells “DON’T DO IT! SARAH, SIT DOWN!!” but of course I just went ahead and mooned them. Turned out there was a cop behind us who saw everything! We got pulled over and reprimanded for it, but it was mostly embarrassing. They also called my parents, but my stepdad just laughed his ass off and congratulated me…he used to moon a lot in his heyday as well.
Next time someone yells, “Don’t show em your ass, Sarah!” I will listen.
Went out with the guy everyone said not to get anywhere near. On the grounds that maybe everything they said was just gossip and he deserved a chance. Ha.
When I was about 7 I was playing with the lighter in the car. My dad told me not to, that I would get burned, etc. He got out of the car to do something and of course I pushed the lighter in and then stuck my thumb in it. Man that was hard to hide when it hurt so bad.
Also, the one that almost everyone tries at some point. Putting my tongue on something metal during a cold winter. Nothing like having all the skin ripped off.
Um, Snark, you meant to say Mississippi River, right? It’s about 3 1/2 hours north of where I live and is definitely worth having a look at. When you’re done falling into the stream you can stop in Bemidji and have your picture taken with Babe and his Blue Ox.
Either that or you went to visit the Missouri headwaters in Montana. Yeah, I know, the “M” states all sound the same
As to the actual subject of this post - It’s usually the little voices in my head saying “Don’t DO that” that I ignore…
Bratman007-
HA HA HA! I laugh. ha ha.
I was working on an electrical crew at a university over the summer. A flourescent light was out in a bureaucratic office room with about a 20 foot ceiling. As someone on the floor was telling me to hold the light tube he was handing me very carefully, I nodded, “yuh-huh” and climbed back to the top, where I promptly let it slip. Of course it fell the 15+ feet and spectacularly exploded into very very tiny pieces, and it took the rest of the day to find all the bits and vacuum them up.
That is why I laugh.
That’s nothing, we would save all the flourescents we replaced to take them back to the shop and send them in for recycling. You should see and hear what happens when an entire box of 30+ 6 ft long fluorescents gets dropped. It’s louder than a gunshot and causes the end of the box to blow open, shooting out shards of broken bulb like a cannon.
