Holy Crap. I’m glad I wasn’t stupid enough to actually do this. I was disassembling my SKS, using a cartridge to remove the trigger assembly. BTW, this is a perfectly safe and factory suggested method. I was sitting down, and was having trouble getting the proper leverage to depress the little button fully with the nose of the bullet. The following exchange went through my mind:
Me: Damn, can’t seem to press hard enough on this.
Voice on Right Shoulder: Use the back of a magazine to give the back of the cartridge a whack!
Voice on Left Shoulder: No, you fool!
VoRS: What?
VoLS: Idiot! It’s a live cartridge! If you hit it like that, it will explode in your face!
VoRS: Whoa.
Me: Dude, he’s right! What the hell were you thinking!?
So, what have you done recently that almost made you a Darwin Award winner?
Yesterday, I was installing some track lighting on my future sister-in-law’s bureau. I had to cut the cord to install the switch. The instructions were wrong and had me putting the switch on backwards. I unplugged the cord, took off the switch. Then, my high school physics class came flooding back to me and I suddenly realized what the problem was. I plugged the unit back in and then attempted to attach the switch again. Just before I pierced the (live) cord, my 6 year old nephew pointed out that I had just plugged the thing in. I’m doubtful that I would have fried myself but I’m pretty sure completing the circuit would have given me a nasty jolt. But, I’m not an electrician and this was actually my first attempt at installing any form of lighting so I really don’t know what would have happened. I’m just glad the kid was watching over me.
Why, in the name of the soiled trousers of Argus, is using a LIVE cartridge to do anything save controlled firing, considered a “perfectly safe and factory suggested method”??
Many older military firearms are designed to be field stripped using a cartridge, since that is the only tool that you can be pretty certain a soldier in the field would have. For instance, the 1911-model pistols can be field stripped using only a cartridge and its own internal parts as tools.
I was attaching a plug to the end of an extension cord, the other end of which was already hard wired to the electrical panel. It was a 220 amp circuit. I go about my business, stripping the wire, wrapping the bare wire around the screws on the plug, finish up, walk back to flip on the breaker, when I realize I had never turned it off. Holy flippin’ manhole covers, Batman. I was working on a live 220 amp wire. That would have lit me up like a Christmas tree.
Really 220 amps, or do you mean 220 volts? (A nitpick, since 220 volts over a 13 amp circuit will still do the needful quite satisfactorily.)
Years ago, I was on a 2-lane dual carriageway behind someone who took ages overtaking at 65mph someone who was going about 64.75mph. So I eased my motorbike into the 18" wide stretch of blacktop between the second lane and the central refuge, which had a nice deep drainage ditch between it and the barrier, and zipped past. One tiny little bump in the not-for-vehicular-use tarmac, with zero room to go in either direction, and I’d have been chutney. :eek:
Back many, many years ago, I worked doing mason tending (grunt construction work). I often was the first guy at the job site. One day I arrived early after it had rained considerably the night before. They had left wires running for the power cement saws, and one of them was lying in a puddle below some scaffolding and making that sort of sizzling electric sound. It was still early, who knows what I’d been up to the night before, but my pea sized brain said, “Gee, that’s dangerous, I should move that”. So, while standing in a couple of inches of water, I reached down to grab a live wire. Swoosh, my arm whipped around and up over my head in a perfect Moe imitation and then BAM, right into the scaffolding above. Broke the bone along the bottom of my hand that runs up to your pinky, but luckily I was electrocuted. I think my insulated boots may have saved me.
(If you’re ever in the above situation please shut down the power before removing the cord! - :smack: )
In the same vein as the OP, I once was showing my new .45 to a friend. I practiced good gun handling techniques: I pointed the pistol in a safe direction, cleared the chamber, dropped the magazine, and handed him the pistol butt first. He looked at me for a second, then racked the slide, ejecting the cartridge I had just chambered by doing things out of order. Felt like a right Burke, I did.
It wasn’t yesterday and I have permanently retired the Darwin Award with this one.
Some years ago I was on my way home from my son’s in Crestline. While driving on a back road I had to take a leak. I pulled of onto a little wide area beside the road and stopped. My truck’s hand brake cable had broken at the time but the ground seemed level so I left the truck out of gear and left the engine running.
Just as I finished my chore I noticed the truck start to roll. I ran to the driver’s side door but by the time I got there it was going too fast for me, with my arthritis, to get in. I ran alongside holding the steering wheel and trying to get in until I fell and was dragged a little way. I finally gave up, gave the steering wheel a turn to the right and dropped off. The truck ran up on the embankment of a small cut in the road and turned over on its side. I was scraped, clothing torn and bruised.
A car came along and the guy phone for help on his cell. Highway patrol, fire truck and ambulance came from Hesperia and checked me out, finding I was OK. A wrecker righted my truck and I drove it on home. I went to the Urgent Care Center where they treated all of my wounds.
Later on I stopped in the same place just to prove that I could take a leak by the side of the road without wrecking my car and winding up in the hospital.
You guys are a bunck of pickers when it comes to stupidity.
This thread makes me feel a little better about myself, thanks.
I recently moved. At my old house, my soon-to-be ex had wired the electric dryer directly to the breaker box. :eek: After I moved, I bopped out to Lowe’s and bought a new dryer cord; the 3 pronged one, just because that was the one I was most familiar with. Home again with my new cord, I suddenly think “Gee, maybe I should see if this plug fits into the outlet provided before I go to all the trouble of connecting the cord to the dryer”. See there, I’m quick witted. I simply inserted the plug into the outlet, not noticing the nifty metal prongs touching each other on the other end. I was a bit startled by all the sparks and smoke, not to mention the jolt. Thank Og for breakers, eh?
In related news, my sister’s SO (my nephews’ father, God help them) decided to splice 2 sets of Christmas lights together, using only his teeth! …guess he forgot they were plugged in. Must have been quite a tingle.
Gabe’s story reminds me of a story from my father’s childhood. He was about 13 years old and the family had recently moved. They were doing some spring cleaning in the house and garage, and Dad found a box of bullets that had apparently been left behind by the previous owners. Dad has a very curious mind, in a 13-year-old boy kind of a way. “Would this bullet explode,” he wonders, “if I hit it with a hammer?” He quickly assembles the necessary materials to study hammer-bullet interactions in back of the house, where his parents won’t see him. A moment later, the results are conclusive: bullets will explode when hit on the head with a hammer, and you’d better make up a story to tell your mom when you come running in with your hand all torn up. According to Dad, he was watching a neighbor burn trash, and something in the trash pile exploded and he was hit by the flak.
This story was made even more amusing some 30-odd years later, when I was about 13 years old myself and Dad took my brother and I on a tri-generational trip with Grandma and Grandpa. The bullet-hammer story was a childhood favorite of mine, in the way that kids love to see their parents goof up. When the topic of conversation turned to youthful misbehavior, I cheerily told my grandparents, “Remember when Dad was a kid and hit a bullet with a hammer?”
“WHAT?” cried Grandma. :eek:
Apparently Dad had never come clean with his folks. Looking very red in the face, he told them the truth about “the time he got hit in the hand by something from the neighbor’s trash pile.”
Maybe not Almost-Darwin-worthy, but I had a recent big idiot moment with my whole family in the car.
We were at an intersection. This is really the worst intersection I’ve had the misfortune of experiencing in a long time. It was a T intersection, except the top part of the T was curved so it was more like a blunt arrowhead. In addition, the road I was on was sunken, so I couldn’t see hardly 50 feet in either direction. And in addition to THAT, it was a high speed curve on a hill with the downhill traffic coming from the right. There were flashing lights uphill and downhill from the intersection but they didn’t slow people down much. And of course a left hand turn was what I needed to do.
After commenting on how unbelievably awful this intersection is and thinking I ought to just make a right and turn around, I start to ease out to see if I could see any further down the road. No dice due to the curve and the banks on either side of me. There wasn’t much traffic. So I went for it and just as I was pulling out a car came howling down the hill honking away. I had to stop and let the car go by, then punched it to complete my turn and get up to speed while a minivan came barreling down. God Damn!!
Those few seconds that I stopped while the first car passed anything coming up the road would not have seen me until it was too late. I don’t know what I would have done. I was out there like a sitting duck. I still lay awake thinking about it. Nothing happened but it gives me the heebie-jeebies big time. I should have just made a right and turned around in a safe place.
