28 years ago. I was 17 years old. I was working on my car, and needed a 1 inch circle cut into a piece of sheet metal.
So… I went down to my dad’s workshop and inserted a 1 inch drill bit into the drill press. I turned on the drill press and held the sheet metal with both hands. I slowly raised the sheet metal up to the spinning drill bit.
Today I sport a beautiful scar in my right hand.
It is indeed an inside joke, when a poster meant to type “panic ensues” but made a typo. It is now used occasionally on the board to either mean “panic”, or generic bad consequences, or occasionally sex.
How odd that I seem to automatically type that, almost without realizing it. :o
Filbert, do you happen to live in Chevy Chase in Bellevue, WA? Because one of my friends that lived there did exactly that same thing some ten or so years ago. Went into neighborhood legend, that one did.
Excellent case of The Dumb-ass.
Many, many moons ago, I was working with a fellow electrician, trying to drill a 1-1/4" hole in the top of a cast aluminum breaker box, mounted on a stanchion. We had a gigantic 1" drill motor to accommodate the bit. People who know tools know that larger horsepower usually means slower rpms and much higher torque. When it became my partner’s turn on the drill, he decided to make the work go faster, so climbed up on the box, wrapped his left leg around one of the large drill handles, grabbed the other (with the trigger) with his right hand, and hunkered his weight down onto the rear handle of the drill. Then he locked the trigger in the on position.
When the bit grabbed, as was inevitable, it threw his 180 pound ass off the stanchion and damn near broke his leg. The drill motor auto-rotated, winding the cord up into the chuck until it shorted out. All in all, a stunning FAIL.
I was in Rome, doing a lot of walking and taking pictures. I got to the Trajan Column, and sat down on one of the benches to rest my sore feet. I took off my day pack and put it on the bench beside me. After a while, I got up and continued on my itinerary. A couple hours later I sat down to rest again and reached back to remove my day pack. It wasn’t there. At first I thought perhaps it was stolen, and somewhat admired the thief for getting it off me without my realizing. Then it occurred to me that I’d left it at the Trajan Column. So I retraced my steps, looking into trash receptacles along the way. Of course it wasn’t there.
In my day pack, among other things, were cash, my glasses, medications, two camera lenses, my favorite calculator, and all the photos I took that morning (the Coloseum, Roman Forum, etc.). All gone. I now had to report this to the local police, shop for a new day pack and re-take all the lost photos. And I had to spend the rest of my trip with no glasses.
Ever since then, whenever I get up from someplace, I always look back and see if I had left anything.
And I still can’t figure out how I didn’t notice I wasn’t wearing the day pack.
Nope, that was a guy in New Zealand- the owner of the backpackers I was staying at.
One time when I was in high school, I was just finishing baking something, and was pulling the oven rack out of the oven so I could reach the pan. I knew, of course, that the oven rack would be hot. And so I only touched it quickly with the tip of one finger. I’m still curious whether the fingerprint that eventually grew back is the same as the original one.
I do stupid things on a daily basis. Just read my previous posts. LOL 
One time I burned myself on a pair of scissors.
My scissors were cold, so I put them right on top of my heater to warm them up. (Why I didn’t want cold scissors, I don’t know.) I left them there and forgot about them for a while, and then saw them. I picked up the scissors and touched them to see how hot they were. Answer: hot enough to burn me.
When I was a teenager, I stopped by the house for a moment to get something in my pickup truck and parked with the driver’s side against the curb, i.e. facing the wrong way. I opened the door and then realized I was directly opposite a neighbor’s driveway. “I should back up twenty feet so I’m not in the way of that driveway,” I thought to myself. I slid back into the seat, not bothering to close the door of the truck since I was only backing up a bit.
Did I mention that back in those days, I tended to back up rather faster than was safe?
How about the fact that there was a line of trees along the curb right there – did I mention that?
I clipped a tree with the open door of my truck and bent that door all the way forward against the front fender. :smack:
My deal with my dad was that he’d pay to fix any car problem except body work, which was on my nickel. I had NO money for a new door, so I had to wire that door shut enough to disengage the dome light and leave it that way for two months, sliding in from the passenger side, until I could scrape up enough money to buy a door from a junkyard.
On the bright side, I discovered that in the rather expensive neighborhood where we were living at the time, someone driving a black truck with one blue door automatically gets the right of way at any intersection. 
points to username
I’ve got a ton of these. I could fill a book with all of my stupid accidents, if I could write better. I’ll pick just a couple for now.
When I was 13, we lived in an old house with natural gas heaters. Our bathroom was attatched to the houe, and you had to cross the back porch to reach it. Due to this, we never left the bathroom heater on at night in order to prevent accidents. My job, since I was usually the first one up was to light the heater. I used wharever was handy. Rolled up paper, twigs, long stick marches, whatever. This heater was a square box with a domed lid. Being a pyro at the time, I would light whatever object I was going to use, lay it on top of the heater, turn the gas on, and wait for the gas to hit the flames. It would create a mini wall of fire inside the heater until the extra gas burned off.
One day I turned on the gas first, then tried to light a piece of paper. Unfortunately my lighter wasn’t working. By the time I got the paper lit, the gas was rising above the top of the heater. I leaned over the heater, started to put the paper on top, and nearly flash fried my face. It was cool looking, but I nearly set myself and the house on fire.
Another time I was bored and laid a key on top of the same heater. After a few minutes the key was glowing red, and for some reason I decided to pick it up. As I reached for the key I knew something was wrong, but my body and mind were ignoring each other. Instant second degree burns and a key shaped hole burned into the floor.