As a kid I was practicing my martial arts kicks – not that I’d ever had a single lesson, mid you. I put my foot against the wall and pushed real hard, and flung myself backwards across the room, fell over something and broke my arm. I can’t even imagine now what I thought would happen.
I had forgotten until I read this, but I did exactly the same thing, also with my thumb. It my be a false memory, but I seem to remember a sizzling sound and see smoke.
Went rollerskating last Friday. It had been 13 years or so since I last went. Needless to say, it was a spectacular fail. I think I fell something like 10 times in two hours. Kept on going because I didn’t want to look like a wuss…I mean hey, even though the area below my knees had swelled to be larger than my actual knee caps, I’ll bounce back fairly soon, right? :smack:
Yeah…I have a GIANT rainbow colored bruise on my left leg, at least a foot long, and another gigantic, blue/black bruise on my left arm. The photo progress has been quite interesting. As fun as it is grossing out people by showing them, I’ll be happy when I’m back to feeling normal.
At least it wasn’t an epic fail. For that to be the case, I’m guessing you would have needed to self-amputate something. . . . Wait, you said rollerskating? Not to be a jerk…OK I’m sorta being a jerk, but, how did you fall so many times with skates? I thought you said roller-blades originally. Glad you’re ok though…errr /awkward.
I once jammed a pair of scissors (no plastic handles, 100% tin) into the air exhaust of a computer PSU while it was running in order to block a fan.
In my defense, the tech support guy on the other side of the line did instruct me to do so. He just assumed I wasn’t airheaded enough to prod a *metallic *object inside a live 220V, 300W piece of hardware just because it was the closest thing at hand. Both the tech guy and my supervisor were speechless with disbelief for a good 30 seconds.
I also once crashed my bicycle into a parked car because I was too busy watching the numbers on the speedometer (it was a fancy bike) rise as I was going down a steep hill and wondering how fast I could get this thing to go.
The answer: 41 km/h before sudden deceleration naturally occurs.
When I was 3 or 4 I was helping my mom takes beans from the garden out of their shell. For some unknown reason i put one up each nostril. My mom freaked out and I managed to get one out but the other bean got lodged in my nostril. I went to the ER and the Dr.'s and nurses couldn’t stop laughing. They had to get a mini vacuum and suck it out. If they had not been successful I would have had to have surgery.
When I was sixteen I was driving a car full of people, drunk, and flipped the fucker. Nobody died, but yeah, that was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. I regret majoring in psych as well.
Once when I was a kid I was shooting paper targets with my BB gun. It was a semi-automatic pistol. Anyway, I kept missing the target so I took it down from a tree and set it on the ground. Except I didn’t set it on dirt, I set it on bricks. I stood right over the top of it and fired down at it. It took me a second to figure out what the heck smacked me in the forehead, right between the eyes. Yeah, I was *this *close to literally shooting my eye out with my BB gun at age 11. I wore a hat the rest of the day to hide the mark it left and never told anybody about that because it was so stupid.
About 20 years ago when I lived in Albuquerque, one afternoon my brother and I decided it would be a good idea to do a little amateur cave-dwelling up in the mountains. Armed with flashlights and nothing else, we ventured into a cave with an opening about the size of a single-car garage door.
We went deeper and deeper into the cave, sometimes pulling ourselves along on the cave floor, as we could feel the cave ceiling brush against our backs, holding our breath as the dust kicked up.
Once we got as far as we could go (I’d say about 1/3 mile) without traversing down into vertical caverns, we just sat there sitting on the floor, hunched over a bit because the area was so tight, and commented on our accomplishment. I remember we both turned off our flashlights and in the pitch black my brother kind of chuckled and said, “Man, if our flashlights broke or ran out of batteries, we’d really be screwed.” It was at that time we both realized neither of us had told anyone what we were doing, or where we were going.
We beat a hasty restreat and made it out without incident, but to this day we still talk about how incredibly stupid it was.
Because I’m so clumsy. :smack:
I used to be much better when I was younger! I guess when you focus on not falling so much, it tends to psych you out and make you fall even more. I even told my friend before going that I had the coordination of a retarded flamingo; apparently he thought I was joking or something. It was a fun night, but I’m definitely suffering the injuries now. The legs don’t hurt, but the left elbow hurts like mad, there’s really no way to avoid using it throughout the day. I’ll have to show you some pictures of it. 
In third grade, my dad was soldering in his shop with an old type soldering iron. He turned around; I saw an electric screwdriver and I picked it up. All four fingers of that hand were blistered.
That was just the first time; there were plenty of others. I will say though that I have yet to have to drive myself to the ER.
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opened up the inside of my right thigh with a razor while learning to shave my legs long ago. i wasn’t using today’s hi-tech daisies or venus razors, oh no. it was dear old dad’s double-edged razor-blade thingies - the kind you have to twist closed tightly before using? uh, not so much on the tight, as i found out the hard way. i still have a six-inch long, quarter-inch-wide reminder.
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fumbled a skillet of boiling grease - down the front of both legs. had silver-dollar-sized blisters for days. after i was done screaming.
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fell down the stairs and shattered my right big toe after tripping over a power bar I’d placed on the stairs myself. OW.
(cardinal rule for those who live alone: never ever put something on the stairs you might trip over, fall and break something - hopefully not your neck – in the process.) -
and last but not least (as well as my personal worst), poked a live, 220 line with a screwdriver. an uninsulated screwdriver. woke up on the far side of the room. later. much later.
There were some cattle being temporarily stored in this fenced-in area with a concrete floor covered in hay. I saw them and ran to the fence, planning to jump up on the fence and get a good look. Well I was running a bit to exuberantly (read drunk) and I went over the fence head first and knocked a tooth through my upper lip in a pile of cow dung. I still have the scar.
Oh, I did that too, except it was a live 220 switch that I pressed with my bare finger. Still have the scar. It felt like somebody kicked me in the back as hard as they could. I don’t necessarily chalk it up to my own stupidity because I did not know it was live. But, I guess that’s probably what makes me the stupid one.
As many have pointed out, hot metal looks just like cold metal. My learning experience was exception in that five minutes previous to picking up the BLISTERING hot metal, I had actually poured it as MOLTEN metal into a mold.
It was a sandcasting mold, and I had very carefully opened it up, removed the cast object with tongs and set it aside. Then, talking absentmindedly to my partner, I picked up the piece to admire it. He was able to figure out what happened when I went from normal conversation to dog whistle eeeeeeeeeeeeee frequency and stuck my entire arm in the quenching bucket. He was not impressed with my big brains.
Take note: even though maybe it sounds like a great idea, do not wait until midnight on the night before the homecoming game and then climb into the senior float that is made entirely of tiny pieces of tissue paper stuffed into chicken wire and…light up a joint.
Holy cow that stuff goes up fast!
I think we have a winner.
I knew that it was very, very bad to mix bleach and ammonia. I also knew that something had to work to make my bathtub white again. I was trying to get my deposit back, after all. Landlady would never believe it was that dirty when I moved in, and in fact, it wasn’t.
So I forget which one I used first. It worked somewhat, but not quite well enough. So I went in with the second one. Note: I did not mix them! I just didn’t adequately flush the first one out of the pipes.
I had to leave the house. No one could come in for hours. It was horrible. And I had a cough and weird headache for days.
And the damn bathtub still wasn’t clean.
i had forgotten that cat urine + bleach = A Very Bad Idea too.
and then like a damn fool, i breathed in as i leaned down to wipe out the litter box. then suddenly ***couldn’t ***breathe because there was no breathable atmosphere!!
damn near passing out, having spots before my eyes - and they watered and burned for hours afterward - accompanied by repeated attempts to hork up a lung convinced me to NEVER DO THAT AGAIN. :smack:
I never fully learned how to skate, roller- or ice versions; I would definitely have gotten a bunch of bruises in the process if I were to try it again.
I’m usually a good cook, but when I’m tired is when I start to be dangerous in the kitchen.
The other month, we got a cheap mandoline slicer; after explaining to my husband that you won’t cut anything as long as you use the guard, I proceeded to use it without the guard on a zucchini or something similarly shaped. I get close to the vegetable being short enough to need the guard, and forget to start using it when I slice a big gash into the side of my thumb. Yeah, it bled for quite a while before it gave up, but it wasn’t too serious of an injury.
The only time I nearly caught the house on fire was when we were living in our last house. It’s just me, as Acid Lamp was away on an out-of-town work assignment. I’m exhausted, but insist on cooking anyway. I get out the wok, pour some oil in, put the lid on it, and set it on the stove and turn on the burner. Not thinking about the fact that the oil may heat faster than I do the prep for stir fry (curried meatballs), I go about my business and forget to look at it or shut off the heat after five minutes. I turn around, lift the cover off the wok to be greeted with a giant fireball of doom, which singed my arm hair, put near-permanent smoke marks in the microwave door above the stove, and sent me into a panic. We were out of baking soda, so I grab the wok, open the back door, and set it out on the empty concrete patio to eventually go out. This house was equipped with no less than five smoke alarms, all spaced so closely that if one went off because you burned popcorn, they all started going off and I knew from past experience that I had less than five minutes before the dogs would become so frightened that they’d pee themselves in the house and hide. I’m frantically running around with the broomstick, attempting to jab at each one until it stops beeping so I don’t have even more mess to deal with and somehow I avoided having to deal with dog pee on top of all of it. I sit down on the couch with the dogs, trying to comfort them, as they’re terrified of the smoke alarm sounds, and calm down a little as well. Once we’re all calmed down enough, I go back to making dinner and clean out the wok. It took me about three months of making popcorn in that wok to get all the charred flavor out of it.