Stupidest thing you ever did to yourself

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m not very experienced in the kitchen, but once in my bachelor days I tried making hamburgers or something that built up a lot of hot grease in the pan. Just after I turned the burner off, I figured it would be a good idea to drain the grease while it was hot. Of course I didn’t want to pour it down the drain, and I didn’t have any empty coffee cans available. Hmm, could I pour it into some kind of large cup . . . but I don’t want to ruin any of my good coffee mugs . . . hey! I’ve got a pack of large styrofoam cups, let’s pour it in one of those!

So I was standing in the middle of the kitchen with a styrofoam cup on one hand and a skillet full of grease in the other. And then I begin to pour . . .

They say you learn something new every day. In this instance, I learned that styrofoam melts immediately upon contact with hot grease.

That hurt.

2

Warm vinegarette dressing, with some fruit in it.

Fair enough.

Warm the oil. Ok…so into the skillet it goes to “warm”. And I read the instructions, blah, figure it’s warm enough (a bit bubbly now) and…

…dump cold balsamic vinegar into the warm (read, really very hot) oil.

Oil and vinegar, as it turns out, not only don’t mix, but hot oil will forcibly eject cold vinegar in a fine, balsamicy mist over everything. The oil will also mist and flee the skillet and land on the marble tile floor. Shiny marble tile floor, slick and clean.

Desperate to get away from the fine mist of vinegar smelling oil that was burning my skin and eyes, I toke a step on the afforementioned marble tile floor, which was now sprizted in a light coating of oil.

Did you ever see those cartoons where the cartoon guy slips on ice or something, legs akimbo, each going in a direction opposite the other, or sliding back into the other, generally ending with the cartoon guy trussed up by their own leg in some sort of knot or spiral pattern?

That wasn’t me only because I have bones in my legs, but I did discover it’s perfectly possible to have your legs go in totally independent directions without your express permission.

So while this was going on (the minor fall, and the major lift) I was, of course, on my way to the floor. I realised I was going to smack my head on something, and was determined this would not be the handle of the skillet, which was still misting oil and vinegar everywhere, because I now knew that the oil was not “warm”, it was DAMN HOT and I did not want that landing on my head.

In my newfound zeal to have that not happen, I whacked my head on the drawer handles on the way down. Handles, as in more than one. Thunk thunk thunk, is how it went.

Now, I’m on the floor, the skillet is still sizzling like mad, my skin is taking on a dappled red color from the falling vineragted oil, I’m on the floor, my head hurts madly…

…and I discover that the floor is so slippery I now cannot stand up. I belly surfed over to the doorway (after agonizing hours - possibly minutes, maybe a few seconds of flopping about like a landed fish, swearing and muttering and yelping occiasionally as vinegarated mist hit previously unseared areas of flesh). I used the doorframe to pull myself upright, grabbed hold of the counter, slid to the stove using the counter as a place to both lean and pull myself along, shut off the burner, and just stood there, swearing, my chest heaving like I’d run a marathon.

That, I thin, is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done to myself. Total damage? Minor first degree burns in a stippled pattern, hair that smelled like salad for days, ruined clothes, brusies, and the need to scrub my floor about 10 times to get all the oil off the tiles, and the first five or six times had to be done on hands and knees, so that I didn’t fall.

Yeah, it was massively dumb.

3

Sticking to the cooking theme, not quite in the same class as Gleena, at least in terms of damage, but my “stupidest thing” was when I was a teenager. Can’t remember why but my slightly older sister and I were in charge of roasting a chicken. Fine, no problem there, both of us could cook, nothing complicated about roast chicken. Pop it in the oven until cooked, just make sure you keep it basted or it will dry out.

So time to baste the bird arrives and sister and I open the oven and decide to baste in situ - why risk lifting it out? Suck up fat in a turkey baster and squirt over bird. Nothing simpler! Unfortunately, back then, we had a gas oven, the type with an open flame at the back and I missed the chicken with the stream of fat from the baster. Fat went straight into the open flame, result a five foot sheet of flame that curled up round the top of the oven and out into the kitchen. Sister and I had been bending down looking at the bird and even now, 40+ years later, I can remeber seeing the flame front heading towards us :eek:

Fortunately we both jumped back from the oven - young, fit, and with quick reactions in those days -and the only damage was slightly reddened faces and dented pride.

4

Once I needed a little gasoline for my bike, so I got a styrofoam cup and … well it turned out a lot like Koxinga’s story.

5

I snorted cayenne pepper once when I was young because some old hippie convinced me that it would clear out my head cold. It was the single most painful experience of my life - it felt like it was burning paths through my head and all I could do was run around in circles crying. I ended up in the bathtub, holding my head upside down under the faucet trying to run water up my nose. My friends couldn’t stop laughing and they still bring it up 28 years later and laugh some more.

ETA: I just noticed the thread about the blocked nose. Maybe I should offer some advice :smiley:

6

Did it work? :smiley:

7

I was at a cut party and was just learning how to smoke.

I didn’t have a match or a lighter so I decided to show how cool I was by using the gas stove.

Afro puff went afro-poof.

8

Yeah, but I think it took the lining of my sinuses with it so that the cold had nothing to hang on to. I smelled it for days afterwards and my eyes teared every time I thought about it for at least a week.

9

I forgot that I had wine glasses in the sink and put a heavy pan in the soapy water. I reached in the sink for the scrubby and felt a sharp sting, almost like a needle prick. I pulled my hand out and looked at my red hand stupidly for a moment while blood is flowing at an alarming rate down my wrist. I then remember the wine glasses…duh.

It’s amazing how much blood can flow from ones pinkie, I probably should have got stitches but I’m stubborn that way. I still have a nice scar from it though.

Wine glasses and heavy metal objects don’t mix well. Lesson learned.

10

A classmate of mine and I painstakingly built a scale model of an airport out of styrofoam. for some class assignment in the 7th grade. It even had Pleixglass windows. Damn detailed and fancy for a pair of 13-year-olds. When it was time to paint it, we carefully covered the windows with tape, so they wouldn’t get paint them… and then we discovered that spray paint dissolves styrofoam! :frowning:

Not the stupidest thing I’ve done to myself, but since we were talking about styrofoam disasters, I thought I’d chime in.

11

This one was pretty well up there on the list.

12

I… I think I may faint.

13

It’s a wonder we survive childhood. My stories are nothing major in the way of injuries, but these were some of my moments of not thinking about what I was doing:

[ul]
[li]I took a 10-speed bicycle off of a ramp at the bottom of a hill, crashed and chipped my front tooth as a result.[/li][li]I poured some gasoline on a pile of leaves and lit it ablaze. I had set the gasoline can too close to the fire. The contents did not explode but the residual gasoline spillage on the top of the metal can caught fire. Fearing an explosion, I threw some loose dirt atop the gas can and extinguished the flame. I then immediately picked up the metal can, forgetting that it just been subjected to a hot flame, thereby burning my hand in the process.[/li][li]I had moved my bed to another part of my bedroom. Later that night, having forgotten that I had moved the bed, I ran into my dark bedroom and jumped towards where my bed used to be, only to land on my Lego town that had taken occupancy of the corner where the bed once was.[/li][/ul]

14

I have superglued my little finger to my nose, set fire to the hair around my left nostril by trying to eat a piece of candy that was on fire, and rolled a tricycle resulting in bleeding wounds all over my arms, legs, back and shoulders. Take your pick.

15

Y’know how you can test a battery for juice by putting it in your mouth and touching the terminal to your tongue? If it has current, it’ll ionize some of the saliva and you’ll taste the salt. Well, I decided to see what would happen if I did it with two AA batteries in series. First of all, it was pretty damn difficult to fit them both in there, but I managed. I tried it a few times to see if I would taste more salt. In the back of my mind, I noticed that the air conditioner was going on and off. I then realized – I thought the AC was toggling because the lights in the room were flickering, as they do when the AC goes on and the electrical load on the apartment increases. But then I realized that there weren’t any lights on in the room – it was sunlight. And it wasn’t flickering because god was turning his AC on and off. Rather, each time I touched my tongue to the batteries, I – just for a millisecond – went blind.

So, uh, yeah. Don’t do that.

–Cliffy

16

I laughed. Also, call me biased but I can picture any one of several guy friends trying that (especially in college), but I can’t imagine any woman of my acquaintance ever in my life doing likewise.

17

Good God, I doubt there is enough bandwidth to accompany all my stupid stunts. One of the brightest was being in a hurry to get some instruments sterilized (I worked as an eye bank tech, taking eyes/corneas out of dead people) it was like 3 AM, I’d done a bunch of cases in a row, out of instruments and want to go home and try to sleep before my pager goes off again. I open the autoclave door, before depressurizing all the way, and stick my hand into about 500 degrees of steam. REALLY painful and try sleeping with your hand immersed in a bowl of cold water.

When I was a kid, about 12, my mother asked me to hard boil some eggs. She said, “Put them in the pot of water on high for 20 minutes, no, put them on med high for 30 minutes” but I heard that I was supposed to do both… 20 minutes on high and then 30 minutes on med high. I waited for the 20 minute part to be over, turned them down to med high and then figured I had 30 minutes to run to the 7-11 and get some candy or something. Apparently I head wrong. I came home to a stench like I never experienced, before or since, and black eggs crackling in the dry pot.

18

While living in my first solo apartment, I decided to clean my teeny little bathroom. So I attacked the shower with one of those pump-spray bathroom cleaners. Maybe Lysol or something like that. I decided to let that sit and soak before scrubbing it down, so I moved on to the toilet, and poured in a good amount clorox bleach (or maybe it was a bleach-based toilet cleaner). Again, let sit until shiny goodness occurs, lid open.

Moving on, I dumped a bunch of Drano crystals into the slow drain of my sink and suddenly everything went very spinny and I almost passed out.

I don’t know exactly what I breathed in, but that combination of three very strong, toxic cleaners in one small bathroom was probably not intended by the manufacturers.

More recently, I was waiting for a train at a less-familiar subway platform. I leaned waaaayyyy out to see if the train was coming. Just as I started to move back, I felt a POP of wind at the back of my head as the train screamed into the station from behind me. I might not have been leaning over as much as I thought I was, but I felt like it missed me by inches. It still scares me when I think about it.

19

Let’s just say that after hand crushing dried hot peppers into a batch of chili, one should wash their hands thoroughly with a good soap before using the restroom. :eek:

Cut part of the tip of my thumb off with a filet knife while in a wilderness area. Ouch.

Probably the biggest; Married a stark raving maniac and sold my house to move into hers.

Took some jobs that I shouldn’t have. I’m learning pretty slowly that if I get to the point of quitting the old job and I’m having severe “this is the wrong move” gut reactions, it doesn’t matter how good things look on paper, there’s actually something wrong with the move that will bite me in the ass somewhere down the line.

20

Nothing to add here, just wanted to point out the interesting username/post combo. :slight_smile: