A friend dared me to taste a base (koh or something) in my high school physics class. It burned my tongue and left a red spot on it. They sent me to the hospital but luckily my tongue wasn’t seriously damaged. I just had to eat cold food such as ice cream for a few days (almost a reward,eh?). Stupid? I know it was. Even the principal told me (actually he said imbecile).
While drunk I once pissed on a parked police car and got caught by the cops.
Damn right!
Your basic stupid stuff, well, I have a lot of stories, some of which I’ve already posted about in other threads, and no, I have no idea how to do a link.
One of them happened when I was 16 and hiking in the Bighorn Mountains of northern Wyoming with the Girl Scouts. I, being the coordinated person I was, tripped over a rock, missed all of the snow lying around and landed with my right knee squarely on a large rock. Three days out on trail, 10 to go. So, I refused to leave, kept on hiking for the rest of the trip.
Fast forward to several years, several doctors, many, many hospital visits later. I had surgery on that knee, almost lost my knee cap over it, and to this day, still have a limp that gets more pronounced when I’m tired, and that is where my arthritis started at. All because I didn’t want to get proper treatment after original injury.
I’ve been paying for that mistake for 20something years and counting.
As for the stupidest thing I’ve ever regretted doing. Let’s just say it happened in one night in late '78. If I’d only told him…
Bittersweet memories…
You are more than a human being, you are a human becoming.
Og Mandino
That’s my name, not a description. I am neither purple nor a bear. Okay, so I’m purple.<a true Wally original!>
Here are just a couple out of the myriads of things I could tell on myself.
2.Got tired of cleaning out the fireplace by using the the little pan and brush to remove the ashes. So I pulled out the ole handy dandy canister vacuum and went to town. Now there hadn’t been a fire in a day or so and I thought for sure there would be no hot coals.
Boy was I wrong. And of course the air being sucked across those hot coals as they were in the little vacuum bag only made them burn hotter. I still hear about this one every time I do something stupid.
Pretty much ruined that vacuum.
Oh well, most appliances are disposable these days.
Best summed up in a letter I sent to a radio station. Got read out too…
Your calls on dangerous acts carried out as a teenager has made me decide that enough water has passed under the bridge to make my confession. Foolhardy child that I was, I was a teenage bomb maker, and at the top of my powers could construct devices that would have had Osama bin Laden running for cover.
It all started so innocently with long afternoons under my bed ignoring those public safety films about the dangers of playing with matches. It then moved up to “genie-ing” entire boxes of Swan Vestas and chucking them out of the window. Soon there was a whole gang of us diligently scraping the heads of matches and watching with abject terror as they all went up in about a quarter of a second, usually depriving one of our number of their eyebrows.
It would have stayed at this innocent level had my mate Graham not got involved. He was a wizz at science, and filled our heads with ideas of rockets, bombs, and certain combinations of garden chemicals and innocent kitchen ingredients which I won’t go into right now as you’d get into trouble with the broadcasting authorities if I did. He would turn up after school with something he’d knocked up in his shed, we’d pack it full of the “substances”, light the fuse and dive for cover. At the peak of our art we had rockets that could travel a good quarter of a mile, and what the bomb disposal people would call “viable devices” that would leave a sizable crater. It was gratifying to see that some of the innovations we brought about subsequently turned up in the Iraqi Supergun a few years ago. This success, inevitably, was to be our downfall.
Being 14 year old kids, we didn’t have a firing range to test on like the army did. So we used the school field. After one particularly excitable device had veered off course and set fire to a hedge [casualty of war, I’m afraid], we were chased home by a baying hate mob who had witnessed the whole affair from the adjacent youth club. In our confusion, we ran through the wrong hole in the fence into our neighbour’s garden, and it was quite a relief that the little squirt took the rap for the whole affair and not us.
But had we learnt our lesson ? Oh no ! Up the local chalk pits we went the following weekend with a satchel of the things determined to make a noise. Dressing in combat gear didn’t help our cause much : there was this blue flashing light and the plod eventually rumbled our little game of world domination… Being the cowards that we were, we laid the blame squarely on one of our number who had got cold feet and had run off home to watch Saturday Superstore.
Graham is now a well known research scientist, and at least one of our gang has used the experience gained in this little episode to forge a career in Her Majesty’s Armed Forces. I, for my sins, still have the scar tissue on my right hand.
I’ve done quite a few really, really stupid things but I guess the worst would be as follows:
Loaned a cheating girlfriend $6,000. (I didn’t know she was cheating then.)
Asked my most trusted and best friend to keep an eye on my girlfriend – who had been stalked, while I was at work.
(He did more than keep an eye on her and they ran off together and she still owes me $6000 and he owes me $4000.)
Their names are Jill and Richard and they now have about a 7 year old son. If you know them ** don’t trust them! DON’T LOAN THEM MONEY!**
I might have actually gotten the better of the deal because she kinda swelled up like a watermelon and he’s turned into a drunk!
Judy
“Muck should replace ‘suck’. For ‘muck’ is yucky, while ‘suck’ feels very lucky. So, don’t stay stuck on suck, switch to MUCK, today.”
here’s a funny story http://www.geocities.com/BourbonStreet/Delta/9886/Tomato.wav (660Kb)
sailor :
Hrmm…lemme think about this…
(1)Moved out of my families’ home with a GIrlfriend that had 2 kids(not mine, thank GaWd), and brother to a city several hours away, with little money, no job. Finally got a job in retail(AcK!!) that was like 30 miles away that didn’t pay the bills very efficiently.
(2)Only a week after my father passed away, I returned to work, and forwarded an E-mail from a customer to our Tech Support group.
Little did I know that it automatically copied the customer in my forward(no doubt a little act of espionage perpetrated by an ex friend that worked in the same dept). To say the least, with my inflammitory remarks about the end-user(I.E.-“this customer is a pain in the ass”), I was dispatched with haste.
(3)Posted a rather controversial question to a thread and when I didn’t have my username and password handy, I created my own. Suffice it to say, I had not read the T’s and C’s(I’m almost contemplating reading them right now), and the mod and the admin…well, it went bad.
That’s just a sampler of the “stupid things Sam has done” department.
I can’t say that I’ve any stories to top those. But anyway:
In the Army, as a very, very green recruit.
We’d been issued a grand total of 5 blank rounds each - we weren’t allowed near live ammo yet. Still, it was a step upward from the dummy rounds we’d been practicing loading/unloading with for the last week or so.
We were standing in ranks, rifles shouldered, preparing to march back to the barracks. The sergeant had spotted a private who had failed to safe (is that a word ?) his rifle. (We’d been practicing some (very basic) tactics in the terrain). I was completely confident that my rifle was safe, but I wanted to make 100% sure, as I had no real wish to do any more push-ups that day.
When you’re standing in ranks, you cant see your weapon. You don’t want to attract attention (believe me, you don’t!) by fidgeting around to feel the safety switch. You can, however, discreetly move your right hand down to the trigger and feel if it’s blocked, using your thumb. Of course, you need to judge the pressure needed very carefully… As it turned out, my rifle wasn’t safe, either, and my plan about not attracting attention completely fell apart.
My ears were ringing, so I didn’t quite get every detail in the sergeants comments on the episode. I did gather, however, that he wasn’t very happy with me, while I did an inordinate amount of push-ups.
Carrying a stick and yelling “Bang!” for a week was no fun, either…
Norman
Happily making a cake with a mixer. The cord dislodges from the mixer and falls into the cake batter. Fish it out, think “Mmmmm” and proceed to lick the batter off.
You can imagine the rest.
I believe its called getting married.
[url=http://members.aol.com/abbie4ever22/index.html]My home page
I once knocked myself unconscious. I was warming up for a Martial arts competition. One of the stretches was a leg lift (you swing your leg up to touch your shoulder). During this stretch my leg unlocked and my knee went crashing into my face. The next thing I know is that the medic is awaking me. Turns out that was the only injury of the whole tournament.
Once while doing a demo for my martial arts school a “volunteer” was picked from the audience to throw punches at me. It was all part of a skit to do a fighting scenario. The volunteer was actually a friend of mine who had worked the routine with me. He steps up to me and I ask him to throw a full strength punch at me. He obliges and starts throwing the punches. I am blocking and going through the routine. At one point I stop blocking and start to turn to the audience. Unfortunately my friend is full of adrenaline or whatever and does not stop punching (oh yea did I mention he is 6’1 and 300 lbs hitting full force?). Next thing I know I get hit in the side of my nose and hit the ground. I get up and find myself wearing a blood soaked uniform and listening to little children crying.
A few friends and I were sitting together drinking on a Sunday night. We all were waiting at a friend’s apt for a bunch of girls to arrive from a night of clubbing. It was about 2-3 in the morning and we were all significantly sloshed. One of the guys has the idea that we should have some food around for when they arrive. We all mutually decided this is a good idea and head off to a 7 eleven about a mile away. After buying some groceries we start walking through a “shortcut” one of my friends suggest. While taking this shortcut a car slowly start to follow us. Eventually it passes us and drives down the street. The car gets about a block away from us, turns and heads towards us. It gets about 20 ft from us peels out and pulls up to the curb. 3 guys get out and the closest one has some kind of weapon. All three of us start running down the street to escape. As I am running I see a “dead end” sign and can only hope that life doesn’t want to stick its irony to me. So I get to the end of this alley and duck behind a trashcan. Not more than 5 mins later I see the car drive past my street. I figure that I am in the clear and see a chain link fence to jump over. I step on one trashcan, jump on a stone wall, and then vault myself onto the fence (Of course it would have been a good idea to see if the fence was attached to anything…which it wasn’t). As soon as my weight gets over the chain link fence it collapses and I go plummeting 12-15ft towards the ground. Luckily (???) there is a dumpster filled with trash to break my fall. I try to climb out of the Dumpster but it is filled with some kind of grease and I keep falling back in the Dumpster. Eventually I get my way out and start heading back to the friends’ house. When I arrive the girls are waiting outside for us. I reek of garbage, have grease and stains all over my body, and am pretty scraped up. The other guys arrive a few minutes later without as much as a scratch. I think you can guess who didn’t get any loving that night. 
Openfist
The hate I bear thee can afford No better term than this,–thou art a villain.
First of all, I never got to see this thread. I am wiping tears from my eyes. Literally.
When I was 16, my friend Caroline and I decided that we wanted to go to the first Lilith Fair. This concept occured to us the night before the show. We used the magic of ticket master and her mother’s credit card to pay for the tickets. (not the stupid part, she’s spoiled.) We get seats, and the woman tells us they are in row FF.
The next morning we take off for Montreal in my '89 Ford Tempo. We’re late to begin with, and I have to stop and say goodbye to a friend of the family’s 5 year old daugher who had adopted me as her mother-figure for the summer. She hugged me and wouldn’t let go for 10 minutes. It was sweet, but contributed to our late-ness. We drive for an hour until we reach the Canadian boader. Perhaps it was the concert, but the boarder was a mess. Cars backed up everywhere. I smell something odd. At the same moment, Caroline asks me if I smell something. I look out the front windshield and see what I think is smoke rising from the hood of the car. I pop the hood, and a face full of steam reaches me. I then realise that the radiator temperature gauge had been disabled a couple years ago, when the car was my mother’s. Some man in a mini-van leans out of his window and screams “Yep! That’s your radiator.” I almost attacked him.
So we were 2 hours from home, at the boarder, with $80 worth of tickets waiting for us in Montreal, an hour away. With a steaming car. After kicking the car a number of times and screaming obscenties, a young gentleman leans out of his Suburu and asks if we’re going to Lilith Fair. “NOT ANY MORE!” I scream, kicking the car. “Do you want a ride?” he asks, “I LOVE you!” I exclaim, gleefully getting int eh car to move it to the shoulder of the road. Caroline expresses some misgivings about hopping in the car of a strange, frat-lookin’ boy. I tell her she’s being silly.
Well, I get in the trunk of Tony’s Subbie. He is driving with three chicks, so we’re safe. Caroline is about 5 feet, and tiny, so she squeezes in the back with the other two girls.
Tony doesn’t know where he’s going. Tony can’t read a road map. But Tony can pilot a Subbie through tiny Montreal streets at the speed of light better than anyone I have known since.
We arrive at the venue, glad to be alive, and bid farewell to our ride. We then realise: Fantastic. We have NO way of getting home. I start freaking out, panicing that I am going to have to learn French to live in Montreal. Caroline points out that she has her mother’s credit card, we can always take a bus home. I call my dad. He agrees to pick us up.
I never even considered how easily I could have been killed, hitchhiking with strangers, strangers who can’t drive, and easily could have gotten us killed, stranded in a strange city in a not-so-hot neighborhood. The positive? Those row FF seats were 5th row. It was a neato show.
Of course, I also spent 25 continious hours on 41st in Manhatten for tickets to Rent once, but that’s another story.
I’m waiting for my Wally quote.
taking 10 hits of acid, spraying myself with hairspray, and rollerblading off the roof of my friends garage while lit up on fire one 4th of july long ago.
Okay this is a novel but it may be helpful to Ryan’s ego.
The waiter comes around the corner 2 minutes after delivering the cactus juice and says “Where’d it go?”. We tell him and he says he has to see this done. He brings out another one on the house. Skot times me and I down that one is 19 seconds. The waiter freaks and says. “The kitchen staff have to see this.” He then proceeds to bring out another one (in the interim I had to have him bring out a cup of tea to warm my frozen stomach, let me tell you if you think that “brain freeze” is an issue try “stomach freeze” on for size). So the 3rd drink and the kitchen staff are standing in front of me. Skot times it and I get that one down in 21 seconds.
By this time I’m out of my gourd. We finish our meal and head out the door. Now Skot and Jen haven’t been drinking at all. I’m lit up like a supernova. I decide it’ll be funny to drive Jen’s car. Jen and Skot decide that would be funny too (?).
We get in and head down the road. It’s a side road and there are no cars within 300 feet in front or behind me. I take a corner on the rainslick road at 65 MPH. The corner is recommended for 30. The car fishtails and the rear slides into a barrier which throws the car on it’s side. I look over at my best friend Skot. His face is 1 1/2 inches from the pavement separated by a window sliding 50 MPH down the road. At this point things have slowed down and I’m thinking (?) "Hey, if I turn the wheel the car might flip back onto it’s wheels or onto it’s top. I’ve got a 50/50 chance either way. So I turn the wheel. The car drops onto it’s wheels and I drive the get away.
We pull over in a neighborhood and shake for about 2 hours before getting back in the car to drive home. Nobody got hurt. The car was driveable but hideous. I almost killed my two best friends.
Sometimes the universe gives you a second chance. When it does, don’t blow it.
Needless to say I don’t drink and drive ever, amen!
I got the CD and threw up for 30 minutes.
Why on earth did they allow you to drive??
BTW, welcome aboard.
SwimmingRiddles wrote:
Lilith Fair Performers, Attendees Achieve Largest-Ever Synchronized Ovulation: http://www.theonion.com/onion3404/lilithfair.html 
Germany, the Summer of 1970. I’m ten years old.
one of my favourite things to do on a swing at that time was to swing so high the chains went limp at apogee, and then flipping upside down, wrap my legs around the chains and return head first. It was truly a rush!
The very last time I did this, the rubber seat had stretched, without my realizing it, and my face caught the ground at full swing (so to speak). It flipped me out of the swing and laid me out several feet away on the grass, and my face looked like hamburger. It kind of reminded of the old Six Million Dollar Man Show: “She’s breaking up! She’s breaking up!”.
The Doctors were amazed that I didn’t break my neck or any facial bones. As there was nothing to stitch, all they could do was wash the dirt out of the wounds and let it scab over. I was quite a sight, I can assure you! The upside is that by the time Halloween rolled around, my face was a conglomeration of new pink skin, old scab, and yellowed bruises, although the swelling had gone down. I didn’t need a mask!
I also got in trouble at school for hiding in corners and jumping out at girls, causing them to shriek and drop their books! It was great fun!
VB
I’ve performed a complete diagnosis of your car. It’s broken.