Stupid Things We Did As Kids

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

OH my, the list of stupid stuff would stretch the servers to capacity. My brother and I were, suffice to say, idiots.

On evening we decided to get “even” with the old man who lived up the street. I can’t recall what we were getting even for, but it must have been important, because we decided to blow up his mailbox. It was wooden, and we stuffed it full of M-80 firecrackers, bottle rockets, and sundry other explosives, liberally doused the works with gasoline, and lit a match. I was about 6 feet away (I’d started to run) when it went up, my brother was right next to it, and got a bottle rocket to the face and various minor burns. I got a few splinters. We did manage to make it home without being caught by the police.

Another time my brother and I found my dad’s gun and decided to shoot it off in the back yard. We fired four or five shots each, then went and put it away. Naturally, the police showed up. Being your regular teen geniuses we told them that it was a cap gun.

The officers asked to see the cap gun, so I went into my room and got one that I had. Recall that cap guns were not always bright orange. In fact, I beleive the brand name of the gun was “Realistic” and it looked dead-on like a .45 automatic. I walked out of my room and faced two officers with drawn guns shouting at me to drop the cap gun. I nearly crapped in my pants. This, of course, did the trick for me, and I confessed everything that my brother did with the gun, including firing all ten shots. I was just watching, officer, I SWEAR.

And the other stuff, oooh wee. Spray painting cows, messing with parkers, messing with policemen, the toilet papering expiditions alone are worthy of a book…

42

I was an angel. It was my brother who was the devil.

The only stupid thing I really did wasn’t even dangerous. We were on vacation in Hilton Head when I was nine, staying in a hotel on the 20th floor, and my best friend, my brother and I decided to hang over the outside railing and spit on people’s heads. A visit from a hotel employee stopped that very fast, and we were confined to our room for the rest of the night. My parents were not happy.

And my brother was the bad one. When he was three, my mother went to get him up from his nap. He wasn’t in his room. She noticed the window open, ran to it, and discovered my brother, happily sitting out on the roof watching the cars go by.

When I went off to college and he was fifteen, I wasn’t allowed to take my car for freshman year. I had a bright yellow Geo Storm - very easily recognizable. So recognizable that when my brother decided to go for an unlicensed joy ride down one of the busiest main streets in our county, my uncle spotted him, called my parents and asked “So when did Adam get his license?”. No idea how he learned to drive stick shift without lessons. He didn’t get his license for a good year after he was allowed by law.

And he used to light hairspray on fire in the sink to see how big of a flame he could get. It was fun watching him explain to our parents one night why he didn’t have any eyebrows.

God, he really did do all of the bad things. I was a serious goody-goody.

Ava

43

When I was about 9 or 10 and my brother about 12 or 13 we were home alone after school one day (my dad worked from home but wasn’t around that day for some reason). We got to wondering what was on the inside of a penny. So, we got a penny, gripped it in a pair of needlenose pliers, and held it over the stove (gas) to heat it up. After a bit, we set it down on the edge of the steel sink, and hit it with a hammer.

At which point my brother learned two things:

  1. Pennies are made of a thin jacket of copper around a nickel center.
    2)Molten nickel makes a nasty burn when it hits the skin of your younger sister.

To this day, though, I have NEVER told on my brother, he thought he was going to be in the deepiest shit imaginable but I didn’t hold it against him. I mean, I wanted to know what was inside a penny too. He did like to torment me but this incident was clearly an accident. We treated the burn with a little bacitracin and a band-aid… no worries.

44

My brother, my sister, and I all have done pretty stupid things, but I think I personally took the title.
When I was about 14 I lived alone with my Mom in a house out in the country. We had a consistent problem with our neighbors dog coming over and destroying pretty much anything it could find in our yard. We owned a single-shot .410 shotgun, and so we got some birdshot shells to use on this dog as a last resort.
Well, one day when I was alone I see him roaming around, so I load the gun and go out after him. I’m no white hunter, so I never get a shot off, and come back inside. A little while later, I decide to practice dry-firing. Can you see it coming? Of course, I had forgotten the gun was loaded. It was a full-choke shotgun, and at close range, even a .410 has quite a punch. It blew a three-inch hole clean through the wall of our house, missing the phone hanging there by two inches.
I covered up the hole on the inside with tape and moved a calender over a bit, and pretended everything was normal for almost a week. Finally, guilt got the better of me, and I came clean. Instead of yelling, my mother cried. She was that upset.

And just inc case you wondered, she missed the hole on the outside because it was in the back of the house, where she rarely went.

My sister once had a firecracker go off in her hand, and my brother once left a truck in neutral so it rolled down a hill, but I think my story is better.

45

After high school one day, I was sticking around for a ball game or something and a few of us were hanging out in my Lit teacher’s class. He was pretty cool.

Anyway, the cover for the light switch was broken off, exposing all the metal and wires behind it. We dared each other to touch it but no one would. I got a great idea. Using what I’d learned in science class about resistance and electricity and whatnot, I took a large paper clip, stuck it out about half way sandwiched between two rubber erasers, and taped the clip/eraser to the end of a wooden yard stick.

Carefully I reached the clip toward the metal when ZAP! Sparks flew everywhere and I fell on the ground laughing my friggin’ head off. When I loked to see what kind of damage had been done to the clip, I couldn’t find it at the end of the stick. I looked at the light switch, and the clip had been FUSED TO THE METAL!

What the hell kinda school did I go to where high voltage is exposed for all to enjoy???

46

I sure hope no young and impressionable people are reading these stories and getting ideas! shudder

47

Ah youth…

A typical boring summer afternoon, and I am playing with fire. I had the bright idea of spraying a lighted match with a can of Lysol. After almost igniting the curtains, I took my little experiment outside. Dang, but that makes an impressive firestream.

I was giving my little sister a ride on my grandfathers riding lawnmower. I was about 8, she was 6. I decided it would be a good idea to ride over the rope that our swing was on. This was a simple notched out board on a rope type thing. I swear I thought we could clear it easily. Nope! The rope caught on the front end of the lawn mower, lifting it up off the ground, dumping my little sister. I didn’t even have the presence of mind to stop, I was doing my “Hi Ho Silver” impression when luckily the rope broke.

48

Ah youth…

A typical boring summer afternoon, and I am playing with fire. I had the bright idea of spraying a lighted match with a can of Lysol. After almost igniting the curtains, I took my little experiment outside. Dang, but that makes an impressive firestream.

I was giving my little sister a ride on my grandfathers riding lawnmower. I was about 8, she was 6. I decided it would be a good idea to ride over the rope that our swing was on. This was a simple notched out board on a rope type thing. I swear I thought we could clear it easily. Nope! The rope caught on the front end of the lawn mower, lifting it up off the ground, dumping my little sister. I didn’t even have the presence of mind to stop, I was doing my “Hi Ho Silver” impression when luckily the rope broke.

49

Man… and I was all excited about having kids in the next few years. Now I’m not so sure. :slight_smile:

Nothing that outrageous, but here are a few of mine:
About 6 years old, wanting a grilled cheese sandwich while mom was on the phone. I had not freaking clue how to make one. So I took a slice of cheese, unwrapped it halfway, and held it over the gas stove burner. Mom caught me before anything too terrible happened.

In high school, some friends and I made a sort of hobby out of lighting toys on fire and filming them. My favorite example:
http://home.att.net/~r.e.laufer/santa.jpg

Santa was stuffed with fireworks and doused in gasoline, you see. Every now and then the fireworks would explode in 3 foot plumes of fire. A wonder to behold.

50

We used to jump off a 2nd story roof onto a tree (maybe a fir tree? tall, skinny, kinda christmas tree like) and let the tree bend all the way down to the ground where we would hop off and the tree would sproing back up for the next passenger. Age 10 til 18.

But the biggest was age 15. Built a mortar weapon by lighting a fire in a 55 gallon drum and putting a 8 ft. pipe in it. Aerosol cans dropped into the pipe would shoot back out about 5 seconds after they hit the fire in the drum.

Never got caught for either stunt.

51

Well, I can recall two incidents, but they’re pretty tame by comparison with the rest of you!

When I was five my mom took me to a department store about a mile and a half from our house to go shopping. Needless to say, I was sooooo boooorrred! Then I saw this hat. It was floppy, with a wide brim and lots of glitter and swirly colors to decorate it and I wanted it so much. But my mom, evil bitch that she was, said no. Well, I thought, I’d show her! I was sick of shopping, so I was going home–and I did, I walked all the way home. So I get home and my auntie is there as I walk in and after a minute she says, “is your mom getting bags out of the car?” “No, I got sick of shopping so I came home.” I don’t really remember much after that, but I’ve been told I got the worst beating of my life that day.

When I was about 10, I liked to climb trees. The problem was that I lived in the city so the only trees in my backyard were directly behind a chain link fence that wrapped around the yard–but I climbed them anyway (idiot that I was.) I learned my lesson one day when I was climbing with the boy who lived down the street. We were trying to see who could climb higher when I suddenly discovered it wasn’t going to be me. I fell straight down and caught my non-existent left breast on the spoke at the top of the chain link fence. It tore right through my kevlar/polyester, butt ugly Catholic school girl jumper and white blouse and almost tore my nipple completely off. It didn’t feel so bad at the moment, but when I went in to get a bandaid I realized it must be bad because I’d never seen my mother go such an interesting shade of gray before. I spent that night at the hospital getting stiched back together and all that mattered to me at the time was the fact that I was missing The Great Pumpkin on t.v.

52

A few more anecdotes I forgot before:

My friend’s backyard has a trench going through, about 50 feet behind the back of his house, which drains excessive pondwater to a neighboring resevoir when it rains a lot. While it didn’t fill up that much, when it was full we had quite a bit of a blast. Especially considering that there were a few trees in the middle of the trench that we had constructed a tree house (a bunch of pieces of wood nailed together, then nailed to the trees) in. Even though the water occasionally brought sticks along with it, and was no more than two or three feet deep, we used to jump out of the tree house (about 4 or 5 feet above ground) and into the water. I’m surprised we never crippled ourselves.

A friend of another friend had an older sister who had moved out and left her old bike at home. With nothing else to do, the three of us took the bike and went to a particularly steep, hilly, rough, and rocky area. I’ve got to admit, there are few things more spectacular than watching a pristine pink bike go bouncing down a ledge, falling twenty feet, and losing a tire on the edge of a giant rock. It was poetry in motion, and we managed to spend all day beating the living hell out of this poor bike.

Finally, the day draws to a close. We drag the twisted heap of aluminum and rubber back to the kid’s house, open the garage door, and --surprise!–his sister’s bike is still there.

Turns out we destroyed the visiting neighbor girl’s bike instead. Boy, did he ever get it from his mom. Tee hee.

One final anecdote: There’s a pond about 100 feet or so away in my back yard. It’s the same pond mentioned in the first story. Anyway, there was apparently a bad wind storm a while back, and a couple of trees had fallen out into the pond. Being something of a shallow pond (no more than 3 feet deep), they stayed mostly above water. We used to go out on them all the time and just dangle our feet in the water and talk and throw stale bread at the ducks. Anyway, one summer we pull our feet out of the water and decide to get a closer look at what’s actually swimming around down there. A bunch of skinny, dying leeches at the bottom (they never even came close to us, so that’s nice), a bunch of slimey junk, some small box turtles, a lost garter snake (nothing poisonous or dangerous), the odd minnow or two… you know standard pond fare.
Sometime during the summer we’re told by a neighbor that there’s a snapping turtle nest over by the dam that keeps the pond from draining (when it rains, the dam floods, thus filling the trench in my friend’s yard). We went over and looked, but didn’t find anything. We figure it died over the winter, and that was that. We go back out onto one of the trees (a neighbor kid is with us at this point), and we see a few ripples in the water. What’s this? Suddenly, the neighbor loses his footing and one foot goes in the water and misses kicking a giant (at least 70 pounds, the shell was about a foot and a half in diameter)snapping turtle directly in the face. We all jump, shriek, and dash back to my house faster than is probably humanly possible. After we regained our composure, we affectionately named the turtle Snappy and decided that it’s probably not a good idea to continue sticking our feet into the water.

Oh, the stories of that pond… we used to go and play a slightly modified version of football in winter out on there. Since, you know, there’s a lot of ice, tackling is hard. We also realized that falling on the ice really hurt, so we would get a running start, slide on our knees, and go flying into each other. I am so amazed I haven’t broken a bone yet… I must be one of the only kids (15 counts, right?) in town left.

53

We were about 18 or so at the time, so probably not exactly kids, or at least not chronologically. A friend had amassed something of a collection of junk cars, what teenage boy can pass up a $50.00 car, even if it doesn’t run especially if you live on a private dead end dirt road with lots of land.
Well it came to the point that he had to get rid of some of them, so we decided to part a few of them out. After stripping two of them we were left with the problem of how to dispose of the contents of the fuel tanks, several gallons of very stale gas. So one of us had the bright idea of just dumping it out in the road beyond the house where no one ever goes and just letting it evaporate in the summer sun.
This we did, but the rate of evaporation seemed a bit slow for our liking. One of our friends present at this gathering, one who to this day is still referred to as (last name)-you idiot! decided to accelerate the rate of evaporation by tossing a match in the puddle. I must mention that the end of this road was about half a mile from a naval air station.
Well, the resulting fireball looked much like a napalm strike! Fortunately it had been a very rainy summer and there was little flammable vegetation around, and the fire was completely out in a mater of minutes.
About half an hour we herd the sound of walkie-talkies in the woods, and 2 firemen emerged, having made there way across from the town road at the far end of the property. They mentioned that a Marine Corps helicopter had reported a fireball and smoke from somewhere around here, and were wondering if we knew or had seen anything, we assured them that we hadn’t, and after much looking around they returned from whence they came.
We still laugh about this one nearly 30 years later.

54

Beating? You want to talk about getting a Beating for doing something stupid ? Try three for one incident! A cousin of mine came in third in a pagent and was explaning how she got to wave to the crowd while riding on a Parade Float. She and her very Cute friends thought they could look cool “waving to the common Masses” while riding on the hood of my car. Since I thought it would be cool to have these very pretty girls on my car I said ok. Here we are crusing down a GRAVEL road when I see my friend. Without thinking I Speed up to show off, then the screaming of the girls brought me back to reality. I immediately hit the brakes and the girls go sliding off the hood of the car and get all scraped up from Road rash on the gravel road. Got a beating from my dad for being stupid, my Aunt for endangering her daughter and one from one of the girls brothers because doing so prevented her dad from shooting me. First and last time I ever thought about thanking someone for kicking my ass.

Joe

55

My sister attempted to microwave a Wendy’s meal in the microwave once. Those of you who go to Wendy’s often probably know that the burgers are wrapped in tinfoil. And the food comes in paper bags.

I walked out into the living room to discover flames and thick, black smoke pouring from the microwave while my mom ranted and raved and my sister cried.

56

OK this thread is still alive so I’ll add a couple more antics from when I was older.

When I was around 10 I was in charge of our family’s fireworks display believe it or not…every 4th of July I set up everything(They were illegal back then but I was very resourseful and got things most kids just DREAM of playing with)…anyway THAT story is for another time.

This one is about a gross of bottle rockets… a lazy afternoon…and a friend who shall remain nameless and how those three things ought not to go together.

There was a work crew building a road and we took those bottle rockets and an old unworking BB gun up into the woods near where they were working…we took turns shooting those bottle rockets at them. One would light the bottle rocket the other would aim…we were far enough away and high up so by the time the rocket reached them it would explode a couple feet over their heads.

Man was this cool they were running around like the end of the world…I learned swear words I would use the rest of my life that day.

BTW The cops never caught us.

While I’m in a confessing mood I had another trick I liked to do to substitute teachers.

I would take a paperclip and wind it around the plug-in to the movie projector…when the teacher would plug it in the lights would go out for the entire school…not to mention the loud crack of electricity that would flash inches from the teacher scaring the heck out of her.

Hmmmmmm…good days…good days

57

I was about sixteen, hanging out at a friend’s house. It was near the end of the school year, and he was nursing a grudge against his alarm clock. Seems it had the temerity to wake him up, every day, without fail, for a whole year, and he wanted to see it die a definitive and spectacular death. He got his wish.

That afternoon, we played Beat the Clock.

It was a wind-up clock, red, with bells on top and a yellow smiley for a face. We spent a while doing the usual; kicking it around the driveway, throwing it against a wall, and swinging it on a rope, making sure the end point of its trajectory was always something solid, and prefereably pointy. But we got bored of that eventually, and wanted to do something more spectacular. And as luck would have it, we had a few ingredients on hand. A tube of airplane glue. A whole jar of shotgun shell primers. And a lighter.

(For those of you who don’t reload your own shells, primers are the little explosives that the firing pin hits that ignite the rest of the gunpowder in the shell. They make a pretty good bang.)

Well, what else could we do? We opened the clock up enough to stuff it full of primers and then douse the whole thing with airplane glue. Then we lit it, and went off a ways down his driveway to sit on a wall and watch. Not too far, of course. We wanted to see everything.

Well, it was pretty boring at first. Just a blue flame, licking over the slowly charring surface of the clock. We hung out and talked for a bit, not paying much attention.

Then, like that first popcorn kernel popping, the first primer went off. The clock jumped about three feet in the air, then clanged to the ground. We laughed, congratulated each other, patted each other on the back. The second one went off, and the same thing happened; funny, funny stuff.

Then the third one went off, the clock did its levitation trick, and then the fourth one went off in midair. The clock abruptly changed direction, then clanged to the ground again. I think it was then that we started realizing the horror that we’d created.

Another bang, a second later, and the clock flies upwards again. Suddenly, the clock is no longer a despised inanimate object; it’s a random, flaming ball of high-speed course-changing instant death. We ran, far away, but not so far that we couldn’t watch as the clock leapt madly about his driveway for the next few minutes, a red-hot bundle of insane explosives spewing flaming airplane glue. It was loud; it sounded like hell’s popcorn. And we had no idea where it was going to head next.

After a loud burst of sequential explosions that had the clock convulsing in a spectacularly violent midair display, it settled down a bit, leaping skyward every so often. Eventually, we worked up the courage to go near it again, after it had cooled down considerably. It was a torn, blackened, tortured object, fused inextricably with the asphalt of my friend’s driveway. Rather than let it be seen there, and have to explain how this had happened, we actually dug up the chunk of his driveway that now incorporated his clock with a shovel, and buried the remains in his backyard.

Then we only had to come up with a story to explain a hole in the driveway. Because explaining how an exploded alarm clock had become integrated into the drive would have been much harder.

58

Whoo, nelly! There are ten kids in my family, and six of them are boys. We did about as much dumb stuff as we possibly could. Fourth of July was spent blowing up models of army men stuff that we had built for weeks prior to the holiday, and then we had Roman Candle fights with metal trash can lids as our shields. Holy shit does phosphorous hurt when it strikes your bare leg!

When I was in seventh or eight grade, I was the lucky guy who scored the highest on the newly-required Altar Boy test, so that meant I got to train the up and coming altar boys. (It also meant I got a Padre Junipero Serra Altar Boy award from the bishop, but that’s another story.) The school had done some morality play that included heaven, and the sacristy (the room behind the altar) still contained the butcher-paper covered with cotton clouds that were used as props. I was messing around with the candle-lighting matches and trying to impress the saints-in-training, and I was lighting the cotton on one of the clouds to watch it fizzle, and then I would stamp it out. Pretty cool, huh? The kids thought so, up until the point where the butcher paper caught on fire, and the whole paper/cotton ball/glue cloud was going up, and fast. I was worried more about getting in trouble than my own personal safety, so I grabbed the flaming mess with my bare hand, ran it ten feet to the bathroom, and shoved it in the toilet to douse the flames. We then opened up the back door, turned on a floor box-fan, and aired out the joint. If I had not performed this heroic act after the colossally stupid one, I would have burned down the church.

Did I mention the with my bare hand part? Yeah. I got 2nd degree burns all over my right hand, and the pain was so great and blisters so bad that I had to go to the emergency room that evening. I concocted some harebrained story about some kid lighting paper towels in the bathroom and me grabbing them and shoving them in the toilet, and since my story included the school, the school was contacted. I spent a good two hours in the principal’s office while he tried to pick apart my lie, but I stuck to my guns and never broke down. They knew I was lying, I knew I was lying, and there was nothing they could do about it, because I had sworn the other witnesses to secrecy, sealed with a promise to kill them and their families if they told. (Just kidding about the sealed secrecy. They were scared that they would get in trouble, too.) God bless the fear instilled in Catholic gradeschoolers!

59

I’m glad to see this thread is alive and kicking with hopefully more great stories to come. All the firework stories brought back one of my own that I had blocked from my memory until now I guess. I remember we were about 13-14 years old maybe and someone had gotten hold of some of those great M-80’s. We spent most of the afternoon blowing up various inanimate objects and having a great old time. Well one of the older kids (it’s always the older kids who start the really bad stuff huh) decided we should have a who is toughest contest. Great we had those all the time.

This time was vastly different. The goal of this game was for each of us to hold the M-80 in our hands and let it explode. Whoever held on the longest won and we so intelligently decided that if more than one person held on to it the guy with the least amount of damage to his hand was obviously the toughest. Yep and to think several of us were in the gifted and talented program at school.

Anyway do I remember there were about six of us. Now most of us thought this was a bad idea, but in some sort of testerone driven macho game we all somehow admitted this was a great test. So we all lit our M-80’s and held on. Well smartly 5 of us tossed ours well before they could explode but the kid who started this game held on to his.

Bad decision. It exploded and there was now a bloody mess. Naturally we all hopped on our bikes and pedaled home as if nothing happened. We we’re in the front yard of the older kids house so he ran inside. He missed the next day at school and we were all too afraid to knock on the door to see what happened to him. When we finally saw him again about 3-4 days later turned out he lost a finger. To this day I’m not sure if it was blown to bits or just burned so bad it was unsalvagable. Haven’t seen that guy in about 10 years or so, but I think he was actually ok overall with no permanent disablilty in his hand. Lucky for that.

60

Oh my god-me too! It was my grandfather’s, and my cousins and I were all daring each other to touch it, only we could figure out WHERE the current would come through. Later, I saw the wire on the ground…ouch.
Shera-color me stupid-what would happen when you tried to jump into the bushes? Actually, what DID happen?

One time, me and my friends went swimming in the local creek-we were told about a “swimming hole” by some friends who lived at this house (to be fair, these people were REALLY not all that bright). We came home, and when my folks asked what we did, we told them-figuring it wasn’t a big deal.

Well, my mom called my uncle, because he used to live in that exact same house-to find out if it was safe to swim there.

Not only are there huge sink holes in the creek that could be dangerous, but um, there are, copperheads.