Really stupid things you did that turned out really well

[SpartanDC]

We’ve all done stupid things, but how often do you do something TOTALLY moronic, only to find out that it actually improved your life a LOT? And I’m not talking about one of those things that 10 years later you realized “it was for the best.” I’m talking about instances where the very act itself instantly and directly made things better.

Here’s mine: I was interning in D.C. from February to May of this year. There were about 13 of us in this special program that picked college students and placed them at various publications. All of us hung out quite a bit. Me and one of the girls hit it off and start dating at the end of February. Things get hot ‘n’ heavy very quickly.

Two weeks after we start going out, she decides to end it to prevent a lot of future heartbreak down the road. We still hang out a lot. In fact, any outsider would think we were dating.

I find this odd and rifle off an e-mail to my best friend about the whole situation, in which I say that a lot of people think we’ll hook up again and I’m starting to agree with them.

A couple hours later I get the reply and realize: I hadn’t send the letter to my friend. I had sent it to HER!!! At this point my brain is going through a process it had never experienced. I start shaking uncontrollably, with nothing but nonsense and obscenities coming from my mouth. I open the e-mail…

It turns out she agrees with me. She tells me that she’s still very attracted to me on many levels and isn’t sure what to do anymore. I go over her place to talk about it…

Let’s just say we didn’t do much talking past the first half hour.

And we had a perfect relationship until the end of May. It would have continued if we could have stayed physically together. But a month after separating, she finally ended things. She couldn’t handle me sacrificing my career just to be with her: too much commitment at that point in her life. Totally understandable, and neither of us have any regrets. Dating her was the best experience of my life…

… And it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t done something totally stupid.

[enipla]

I don’t know if this qualifies for this thread but I think about it a lot.

My brother and I decided to re-grade my driveway. No big deal, we have both used heavy equipment and he was currently an equipment operator. I live way, way up in the Colorado Mountains (11,200 ft elev.).

So we go about renting a Caterpillar D4 bulldozer, not big buy dozer standards, but it wasn’t exactly small (20,000 lbs.). Now this is in October and it has started snowing so the ground is getting pretty bad. Usually October is pretty dry.

After a couple days of work, my bro. got the dozer stuck. I mean stuck, in the mountains pine needles can build up and it basically turns into a peat bog. Believe me, when you get something like that stuck the only way to un-stick it is with a substantially bigger piece of equipment. That was not an option. We thought about a semi wrecker but there was no way to get one close enough.

So winter was approaching and I had 20,000 lbs. of iron stuck in the drive. I was starting to hope I could get a real good year long rental rate.

Luckily, I had about 2 cords of wood cut. What we ended up doing was push the dozer blade down and stick a couple logs under the front of the tracks. Then push the ripper down to raise the back and add more wood. In this way we slowly raised the dozer out of the mud, but not before we pushed about a cord of wood under it straight into the mud. This, by far was the longest, toughest, most worrisome 10 hours of my life.

The drive turned out great.