For the purposes of this thread, I’m not interested in accidents or near-accidents; I’m interested in things that people chose to do for one reason or another. Maybe you didn’t realize how scary something would be until you started doing it. Or perhaps you felt that you didn’t have a good alternative.
For me, one thing in particular stands out. When I worked at Burger King, one of my jobs was to filter/change the oil in the fryers. I was filtering the oil one day, and the pump in the machine gave out.
The fryers run at (quoting from memory) approximately 340 degrees F. Now the oil had cooled off somewhat, but it was still way more than hot enough to cause burns. My manager and I lifted the machine and poured the oil back into the fryer.
The machine had a few gallons in it, so it was pretty heavy. And there weren’t handles or any naturally-good places to grip. One small slip by either of us. . . .
I always thought this took some major balls. I have a friend who moved here from the UK. He told me he had $200 in his pocket when he walked of the plane. And like you, he had no place to stay and no job lined up either.
I wanted to see the view from the top of St. Peter’s and began the climb. At one point, narrow circular stairs, only a rope hanging from who knows where for support, looking down onto the inner dome, I renewed my faith in God because I surely had no faith in my ability to keep going, and I couldn’t turn around.
The view was great but I have no memory at all of climbing back down.
A fairly extensive list to choose from, I’ll pick one:
Leaving Plymouth Ho! on a 39 foot double ended gaff rigged Colin Archer with a tiller heading for Maderia and then the West Indies. I’d never been on a sailing boat before in my life. I met the three male crew the day before we departed and off we went, there was a girl too and I’d met her once before. A fine breeze picked up as we left the bay - the boat heeled over and I thought WTF have I got into.
Also, diving into a waterfall. You could dive from various positions, ranging from probably 6 feet to maybe 20 at the top, but you had to climb up slippery rocks to get to the top, and then you had to spring out in order to avoid the rocks. Actually it was great diving since you went into a bunch of froth so a bellyflop wouldn’t even hurt…So this guy tells me he’s never seen a girl dive from the top, so of course I had to do it. This was scary at the time, but it’s even scarier in retrospect.
When I was in college in the '70s me and 3 other guys were having a night of recreational fun. Ok, it was LSD.
There was a huge tree in the park across from the dorm that had a blown out top, with four or five large branches going out in a radial pattern at the top of the tree. This platform was at least 60 feet, maybe 80 feet off the ground. Hey, it’s Oregon the trees are big here. And there were climbable branches spaced all up the trunk of the tree making it an attractive nuisance.
So right before dawn, after this first and last trip of mine that was accompanied by God knows how many beers, we climbed to all the way to the top and watched the sun come up. I knew it was stupid, but I could not remain on the ground if the other guys were going up, because I was the rural country boy in the group. Perhaps I had bragged too much about my tree climbing ability. Probably.
This now, many years later, makes me believe in the multi-universe theory. I am sure I must have fallen out of that tree a million times, in a million universes, and I only survive in this one.
I work for a fire alarm company. I took a service call for a false alarm that would not clear at a small elementary school that had been converted into a day care. It turned out to be a smoke detector on the ceiling in the gym.
I went back to our shop for a ladder and back to the job. I set a rather shaky fourteen foot wooden step ladder on four five gallon buckets. I took another bucket up the ladder and set it carefully on the top of the ladder. I climbed onto this bucket and was just able to reach the defective detector. I changed the detector and got back down safely.
When I was a kid, my family went fishing on the Black Water river near Inchbae in the Highlands. Not far from our spot was an old wooden bridge over a small waterfall. It had no handrail (save for one thin wire on either side), some of the slats were broken and others were missing completely. I thought it would be a cool to run across the bridge, like I was Indiana Jones in the Temple of Doom.
I had made it about half way when I slipped and landed on my stomach. The bridge bounced up and down and the wood beneath me creaked. I found myself staring down through the slats at the long drop to the water and rocks below. I closed my eyes, clung to the sides of the bridge, and screamed like a banshee.
My mother heard my panicked cries and sprinted to find out what was causing her child to emit such an unholy noise (in her haste, she fell knee-deep into a bog). When she found me, she was probably wondering how one child could continually make such bad decisions, but tried to coax me back to her. The bridge was swaying and tipping a little from side to side and I was too afraid to move. Eventually, with much encouragement, I inched my way back to safety. Crying all the while. Just like my hero, Indy.
That was the end of fishing for the day. My mam was pissed off because she was covered in mud up to her knees and my brother was pissed off because I’d ruined his day out fishing… again (on a previous occasion, I’d done a forward roll on the banks of a different river, landed in the water, and had to be fished out by my long-suffering mother).
So ended my brief but glorious time as a daring archaeologist.
Jumped out of an airplane.
Twice. (Same plane, a few hours apart)
I have a fear of heights, so it was pretty hard to do. But a ton of fun.
Getting an MRI. I’m also claustrophobic. The last MRI I had get get, I was smart enough to ask my doctor if I could go for an open MRI. Sadly, he said no. I almost didn’t make it through.
When I was 17, I left home and wound up in NYC. $17 in my pocket, no job, no skills. Slept at the Y every other night (to take a shower), the other nights on park benches. Stayed in NYC for 25 years.
People don’t realize that you’re climbing WITHIN the walls of the dome. And it goes up from being relatively vertical to relatively horizontal. And there’s no place to turn around.
And like you, I have no memory of climbing back down.
I rode my motorcycle alone from Miami thru Texas and Mexico all the way to Panama City Panama. In Costa Rica along the coastal road at that time there was a bridge across a river that was two ramps about 36" wide and far enuff apart for each side to support a tire of a car or truck. It was raining and it was all wet. No guard rails of any kind and a hundred miles to go around as far as I was concerned. I sat and looked at it for a while and a truck came from the other direction and drove across it, so I decided I could. He had dropped a big clod of dirt from between his duel wheels as he crossed, so I took the other lane. Not that long, but scary anyway.
With this sort of thing, I figure you are going to figure it out, or you’ll end up dead in a ditch. You probably aren’t going to end up dead in a ditch, so you will probably make it one way or the other.
Skydiving and cutting down a 40+ foot pine tree between two houses with only some tips from the internet as a guide. I had to take off the limbs going up and then sections of trunk coming down. (The secret is rigging lines to the part you are going to cut and only doing maybe 4-5 feet at a time)
Dumb things like accidentally reinventing smokeless gun powder would need an entire page to relate.
