I got a fancy jewelry box as a gift once, and there was a sticker pasted on the front glass. It was really stuck on good and I wanted to get it off, so thought a razor blade would work well. I didn’t have any straight razors, so thought I would just pop one out of a shaving razor and use that.
Dumb, Stupid, Pain, Blood…Off to the ER for 8 stitches in my thumb!
There are so many stories to pick from.
We had just move to Texas from New England. We bought a house with a huge yard. Huge yards in Texas just mean lots and lots of fire ant mounds! Someone told me the environmentally friendly way to kill fire ants is pour boiling water on the mounds. I got my kettle out and boiled up some water and started watering down the piles. I guess the little monsters don’t stay IN the mound all the time, some patrol around the outside of it, just waiting for some moron to stand too close. I looked down to see my left foot and lower leg covered in fire ants. Boiling water kills them, right?! Yep, I poured boiling water all over my own leg and foot. :smack:
For the record, it did kill the ants. Exfoliated a couple of layers of skin off my leg too!
My cousin and I were playing with sparklers at the annual Tobacco Festival in Tazewell TN way back in the day. We decided it was much more fun to fling them in the air instead of just waving them around. We accidently set fire to the Train Depot. Burned it right down to the ground in the middle of the Miss Tobacco 1965 parade.
We got a reward for being first on the scene and trying to put it out and raising the alarm, good times. Nobody but you ALL know the truth, and my cousin of course.
whoops, left out the part of burning my hands grabbing leaves and stuff and trying to throw it away from the building, Just little burns, I gave up on that quick.
I was riding my bike home when I was 13 or 14. We’d just rediscovered the wonder of fastening bits of cardboard to the little steel rods connecting the fender with the hub. For some reason, mine wasn’t sounding quite as annoying as I’d like it to, so I leant forward over the handlebars to adjust it. Instead I jammed my finger into the spokes, causing my hand to jam against the fork. This, in turn, led to the bike coming to an instant stop by way of turning over and landing me on my (non-helmeted) head.
Incredibly, I suffered no damage to my hand beyond some general soreness, and the crack to the head didn’t hurt much either. No concussion, nothing broken. The turning-the-world-upside-down bit did make me a bit disoriented, though.
I was a bit of a techno-pyro. heh heh
Summer vacation, and nobody but myself at home. I’m at the kitchen sink with a mason jar in each hand. One jar was half-full of tap water. The other was half-full of calcium carbonate. Now I’m not sure what the name of the gas that is created when the two are combined, but it is quite flammable. I was of a mind to collect that gas in one of the jars, and figure out something neat to do with it later. So, pour the calcium carbonate into the water jar and hold the now empty jar tightly over the mixture jar and let the gas rise into it.
I didn’t account for the violent reaction that actually takes place, nor for the secondary heat that is generated by the reaction.
A hot gray paste erupted from between the jars and landed on the insides of both of my arms. Yes, very hot. Within minutes of quickly washing off the “paste”, I had developed large blisters up and down my arms. Oh, about 2 to 3 25¢(US) coins across. My mother had an absolute fit, what with my playing with “dangerous” chemicals. She had me explain to the doctor exactly what chemicals I was using. I did make a point of telling the doc that they weren’t chemical burns, but merely a side-effect of the reaction’s excess heat. Other than that, there was nothing wrong with me. Well, outwardly, that is.
That would have been an excellent username.
Oh ok that makes sense. It went over my head the first time I guess. It’s been a long day
Acetylene. That’s what you get with calcium carbonate and water.
Ooph. I learned that when masturbating one night. Never again.
I bent down slightly to close a very heavy drawer and was using my upper legs to help push it in. I was wearing only a t-shirt and a pair of boxers.
I was unaware that the fly in my boxers was permitting a bit of a gape.
I closed the drawer all right, and my glans besides.
The way I howled and doubled over, my wife thought I had been shot. The blood in my urine disappeared after a few days, and the horrendous welt soon thereafter.
I threw those boxer shorts out.
Let me give you just my two recent ones, since they’re in the same vein. Keep in mind that I am an excellent home cook with more than 30 years experience in the kitchen. I thought I’d already done all the dumb cooking related things I could possibly do.
I was making a frittata a couple of months ago in a nice Circulon skillet with a metal handle. I put it in the oven to finish, tidied up and opened the oven door. Having used this skillet on the stove top a kazilion times, I never thought about the handle being hot. Until I barehanded the bastard as it sat under the broiler. That’ll wake you right up.
A couple weeks ago I make pork chops a la Provence as the main course in a five course dinner party for some friends. They bake in a covered dish. I took them out, uncovered them and set the glass cover aside. About five seconds later I realized I needed more room for the plates and barehanded the knob on top of the cover, which had just come out of a 400 degree oven. How I managed to control myself long enough to set the cover down, rather than just dropping it like every nerve in my body was telling me to do, I’ll never know.
I hollered. My wife asked if I was okay. I responded with, “You know that old adage about how hot glass looks exactly like room temperature glass? I can assure you that it’s absolutely true.”
Don’t you mean Calcium Carbide?
Ooh, I have a fire related stupid thing too. When I did my national service, my platoon was responsible for the officer’s tent. Picture for clarification.
One morning, when packing everything up in a bit of a hurry, I was in the opening, passing things along from inside the tent.
It should be noted that this was in winter, and there was a bit of an informal competition going on, where we tried to get the stoves as hot as possible. My record was a nice orange glow all the way up to the bottom few inches of the chimney.
Back to the pain. I didn’t look to see what the next item was, I just grabbed it, gasped, dropped the stove handle I had grabbed, and ran. Got a good-sized blister on the inside of all fingers. Made driving a lot less fun.
It was my second year of university. I had just moved into a house with three roommates, and we had been there, tops, two weeks. I love to bake, so I decided to christen the oven with a delicious batch of my deservedly-famous double chocolate chip cookies. The kitchen was the wreck you would expect after four people had moved in, but I cleared off enough space and dug my baking things out of a box and went to town.
The mixing part went fine. I mixed and mixed and mixed while the oven heated up. Thinking clearly, I had also dug out my oven thermometer and set it in the oven. “I know built-in thermometers aren’t always accurate,” I thought to myself. “I’ll just put this sucker in here! Dodged THAT bullet!”
I gloated to myself a little.
The time came to pop my first batch of cookies in the oven. My mouth was watering just thinking about them. Delicious, soft chocolate cookies with melted chocolate morsels and a tall, delicious glass of milk…there was a fresh bag of milk in the fridge…I could find a glass…all the wonders of the universe seemed to be amassing before me.
I slid the cookie sheet into the oven. I conveniently knocked the thermometer right off the oven rack and onto the next one. “Damn!” I thought. “Now I can’t monitor the temperature!” A normal person wouldn’t have bothered, and would have let the oven cool down before fishing among the oven racks. I felt that I could not possibly wait. So I took out my oven mitt and a wooden spoon and prepared to get that sucker out of there.
As it turns out, it’s quite difficult to hunt around in a 375-degree oven for any length of time. With the oven door yawing open, it was also difficult to find purchase on the side of the oven. I couldn’t really see what I was doing, so I decided to kneel by the side of the oven and just poke the spoon around there and see if I could knock the thermometer out.
I smelled something burning, yanked the wooden spoon out, and discovered the singe mark I’d put in the lovely Williams-Sonoma wooden spoon my aunt had bought me for Christmas. Damn. I turned it around.
While raking the oven blindly, I didn’t notice that my arm was coming ever close to the side of the oven…closer…closer…oh, so very, very, close…and then I DID notice, VERY SUDDENLY, because I had manged to press the interior of my elbow against the inside of the oven wall.
I screamed absolutely bloody murder and yanked my arm out of there. In retrospect, I was awfully lucky I didn’t bang my arm on anything else in the oven in my mad dash to get it out of there. There was a nice, flat red mark on the interior of my elbow. I frantically ran it under the cold water while trying not to cry from the pain. None of my three roommates were home, so I had the extreme pleasure of looking for the first-aid kit while clutching a damp cloth to my elbow.
This was also when I discovered that it is very nearly impossible to do anything with your right arm without bending your right elbow. That was a joy that persisted for three weeks while my elbow healed. The burn was impressive. Amazingly, it didn’t scar. I’m very glad. I don’t want any permanent reminders of this story.
I stepped out of the shower and told myself, “Be careful, don’t stub your toe on the top of the shower door track. It hurts like a motherfucker.”
I managed to escape the bathroom without stubbing my toe.
I then strode into the living room, where BAM! I stub my third toe on the coffee table leg, splitting my toenail in half.
I guess my Toe-Stubbing Early Warning System needs to be on during all waking hours.
Over the summer, while at my part-time job being a prep/line cook, I was cutting up red bell peppers. Since I have no formal kitchen training, and atrocious knife skills, I slipped and nicked the very end of my ring finger. It took out a chunk of fingernail, which as you all know, hurts like Hell.
A week or so later, I was cooking at home, and again cutting up bell peppers (green this time, if it makes a difference.) i was actually trying to hold my fingers in the correct way (sort of “folded under” themselves with the knuckle being out,) but somehow I STILL managed to slip, only this time I got my index finger…and much, MUCH worse.
This is the result. (kinda gross.)
Those were taken about three hours later, when it finally stopped bleeding.
At first I thought :smack: yes, carbide. But then I checked Wikipedia, and it turns out we’re both right:
"The principal raw materials for acetylene manufacture are calcium carbonate (limestone) and coal. The calcium carbonate is first converted into calcium oxide and the coal into coke, then the two are reacted with each other to form calcium carbide and carbon monoxide:
CaO + 3C → CaC2 + CO
“Calcium carbide (or calcium acetylide) and water are then reacted by any of several methods to produce acetylene and calcium hydroxide. This reaction was discovered by Friedrich Wohler in 1862.
CaC2 + 2H2O → Ca(OH)2 + C2H2”
But the carbonate is turned into carbide, and way back in high school Physics Mr. Buckner was using carbide to set up the (prank) acetylene bombs he left for the Biology class that occupied the classroom after him. (Mr. B had a …droll… sense of humor.)
And if Floppy Joe upthread was mixing carbonate and water, then he was getting something other than acetylene, and I was wrong. 
All of these kitchen stories remind me of something that was hardly stupid on my part, I think, but still obvious in retrospect: once I had badly chapped fingertips (as in cracks in the skin) and I tried peeling an orange with my bare hands. Citric acid stings like a right bastage in those circumstances, I can tell you.
I used my hand to squish down the trash in the can at work without looking. I yanked out my hand to find a long large piece of plastic sheeting embedded in the web of my hand. I pulled it out, and it didn’t bleed much. But did you know that the area between your thumb and forefinger, under the skin, is hollow? the hole was big enough that I could peek in and see like a cavern, with the innards of my hand working, doing their thing.
Joe
