I’m sure this thread has been done a million times. But if I don’t see it on the first page, it’s fair game! 
What would you say is the stupidest thing you’ve ever done?
Yesterday I did the laundry and I failed to notice there was a pen in one of the pockets. When I took my whites out of the drier, they had stylish dalmation spots all over them.
{Adds “Always check pockets before doing laundry” to “Things I’ve Learned In College” list}
THAT is the stupidest thing you have ever done?
I have done many stupid things, including narrowly avoiding setting the kitchen on fire by completely forgetting about the chicken i had been grilling, and attempting to put out a candle with my bare hands (OUCH!)
And i imagine that there are a lot of people who will regard those as irrelevant compared to what they have done 
Well, it’s a tie between dropping out of college for the chance of taking more abuse from my son’s father…
and
being suspended upside down, and drunk, from my 2nd story roof – leaving my drunken husband to hold me by my shoestrings while I cleaned the gutters.
Taking my aunts word that the paper bag of burnable stuff only had tissues in it (she forgot she put the areosol can in there, I found it while sifting the fire).
Spilling a pot of hot coffee down my diaper (third degree burns in unpleasent places) (thank the gods I don’t remember that).
Riding a bike with no brakes. Down hill. Not knowing there were no brakes. Stopping self by crashing into a building, then rolling down some stairs.
Taking my first driving lesson downhill on a cliff-edged road, panicking, mistaking the gas for the brake.
Edging closer to the Bay of San Francisco, stumbling and nearly falling down that cliff.
Ignoring the “buzzing” feel when I turned the garage light on and off (the lightswitch housing was cracked and I was getting minorly electrocuted).
Helping in a massive house cleaning and move in, following someone’s attack on a bathroom with amoinia after they’d doused the place in bleach.
Climbing down from high places with things in my hands (I was quite young and suffered the first of many adventure concussions).
Grabbing a burning pillow with my hand, on the spot it was burning/melting.
Blocking a heavy (padded) weapon thrust with my bare hand without proper planning (broke a finger).
Playing a game with another friend, see who is faster: the person smashing two rocks together or the person with their hand resting between the rocks. (broke a finger).
Putting my hand in my back pocket (broke another finger).
Riding a horse that I’d not cinched the saddle on tightly enough (ever ridden under a horse?). Luckily I fell off into a bramble bush.
Tickling the whithers on a horse by putting my feet too far back (first time on a horse, I was five, it was a long trail ride). I was bucked off and kicked on my way down.
Ruining my credit rating.
A friend and I climbed a 300 foot telephone relay tower. The tower is an open metal latticework, with a triangular cross-section and a ladder running up the inside. We climbed up the ladder to the top, where microwaves probably were cooking us.
Then, just to show how stupid I was, I climbed down the outside of the tower.
Put my laptop on the roof of my car while loading up for the drive back to my college, then driving off. It managed to hang on until I got to I-90, but, ultimately, did not survive (though the hard drive was salvaged by my fiance and a friend’s dad).
That was pretty stupid. Me, not them.
Turned on the gas in a large old range. Talked to someone for a bit. Bent down to light oven in first compartment. Couldn’t light it. Talked to someone else for a bit. Tried to light first compartment again. Couldn’t light it. Tried to light all the gas burners on top. Talked to someone else again, ate a sandwich. Finally bent down and opened second compartment. Hearing gas, tried to light it. The compartment had been filling with gas ever since I first turned the handle.
WHOOOOMPH. I was lucky to escape with a seriously-singed beard, hair and eyebrows. There were two little boys of five and two in the room at the time. This could have been a lot, lot worse, and is but one of the stupidest things I have ever done.
I had my first driving lesson when I was 12.
I murdered a tree.
It was probably the time that I was ticketed for:[ul][li]Going 75 in a 35mph zone, on the Seawall in Galveston, Houston’s biggest tourist trap, in the middle of tourist season;[/li][li]Racing (yep, in the middle of town);[/li][li]Unsafe changing of lanes (no hand signal while racing in the middle of tourist traffic), with[/li][li]No mufflers;[/li][li]No insurance (this alone was the dumbest thing I have ever done), and[/li][li]No motorcycle endorsement on my license (which I did have, but what did it matter at this point.)[/ul]For what it’s worth, my parents showed up while they were running my license.[/li]
A distant second would be the time that I jumped off a 50-foot cliff into a sinkhole/pond one week after my doctor said I no longer needed crutches. Yes, alcohol was involved.
Back when I was in high school, my dad used to stop at the door when leaving the house and tell me “Don’t do anything stupid.” My friends and I cured him of that habit in a month.
Age 7, I think. After hearing for years that I was not to bring food into the t.v. room, I had gotten used to the idea that there wouldn’t be any food in the t.v. room (parents don’t make rules they don’t follow, right?). One day, we put on Robin Hood (the disney version. a classic in its own right 
), and I left the room to do something or other, during which time my mother came into the room with a bowl of steaming hot soup. She sets it down on the couch, which was where I was sitting, a moment earlier. I come back into the room, distracted by bright colors and the lyrical mastery of whoever it was that did the voice of the rooster in that movie (“oo-da-lalee! oooooo-da-la-lee!”), and sit down right on that bowl of soup, thus introducing myself to second-degree scalding burns. I jumped straight up into the air and shrieked like a little girl, I’m told. I spent the next little while in the bathtub, attempting to cool myself down, dealing with a large blister on butt, and getting laughed at by all of my immediate family.
To this day, I’m not sure how I managed to miss the fact that there was a large bowl of soup on the couch, and sitting in it remains one of the dumbest things I’ve done, thus far.
Wow, there are just sooooo many to choose from…
But I guess it would be this: I was driving while intoxicated (only one part of my stupidity) and I came across a railroad crossing with the red lights flashing. I looked to my left and saw no train coming, so I gunned it (the other part of my stupidity.) The train was coming from the right. It narrowly missed me.
I’m glad I gained wisdom with age and no longer drive while intoxicated.
In my new book Stupid Things I Did While Driving (Sadly I think I could write a book) I write about more than one near death experience. Thankfully, I can walk everywhere I need to now.
Oh man, I have lots of these stories, but I recently superglued my eyelid shut. :smack:
Let’s Play 20 Questions:
Were you building a model?
Was it an airplane?
Was it a remote controlled trainer?
Were you in the basement?
Did you fall down the stairs trying to get out of the basement while blinded?
Are you ME?
.
What gives? I try to post to this thread and I get an error message:
“Insufficient bandwidth on the WorldWideWeb”
“But I’ll always regret that Rwandan thing.”-- Bill Clinton
Well financially it has to be when I decided to quit my rather well paying job to go back to school to take physics. Forget the fact that I hadn’t taken it in 6 years, I could handle it right? Well two weeks into the school year I knew I was in way over my head. 12 months rent, a series of grades in the low to mid 50’s, and a years tuition later I managed to kill about 17 thousand dollars and a good deal of self esteem. Oh, i almost forgot, school was the cause of a whole bunch of arguments that eventually caused me and my girlfriend to break up.
I decided to ride a shopping cart down a hill which resulted in the breaking of my wrist.
I jumped off of a 50 foot antenna tower onto a trampoline. Trust me on this one, from that height the trampoline does little to no good.
When I was in grade 11 I should have asked this girl out and didn’t. This one had any number of consequences I don’t feel like getting into.
I’m forgetting something…I’ll think of it later.
Probably not. Right after it happened I just thought to myself, “Wow, this has gotta be the stupidest thing I’ve done in my life” and I thought it was good material for an IMHO thread…
Now that I think of it, I’ve probably done dumber things than ruining all my clothes. (Well, they’re not ruined, I’m sure there’s something that’ll get ink out, and I don’t even mind if my socks have dalmation spots on them. ;)) Among other things, one candidate for Stupidest Thing I’ve Ever Done would be that I was completely oblivious last year when a girl wanted me to ask her to prom. sigh.
I did a lot of crazy stunts as a kid, too. I’m surprised I didn’t break any bones with all the spectacular crashes I had on my bike/skateboard/rollerblades/freight dolly. (Yes, I crashed riding a dolly that was set up sideways so it could roll around like a little cart. The bump at the end of my incredibly steep driveway didn’t like the wheels, and my face didn’t like the pavement.)
The stupidest thing I ever did was try to get through airport security at Boise International airport with a metal pipe (the kind for smoking pot) in my pocket (I forgot it was there) and no ID (I wasn’t boarding a plane) while accompanying my mother, to see my sister to her plane.
THAT was embarrassing. OH MY GOD! My mom had to drive home to get my ID so they didn’t throw me in county jail for the rest of the weekend, because without ID they were not going to just let me go, and since it was a Saturday, I would have had to stay in jail until Monday morning when a judge could see me. Yikes! So then I get marched through the airport in handcuffs (because everyone knows that pot smokers are violent criminals, especially when they are with their moms) to the security office, where they handcuffed me to a chair while I waited for my mom to get back. My sister had to hug me good bye with my hands HANDCUFFED behind my back, in front of millions (well, a hundred maybe) of very curious people, all wondering what exactly I did to warrant this kind of treatment. I remember thinking “why didn’t I just throw the damn thing away, rather than trying to be all nonchalant about it?” DUH!
Beat that. I dare you.
“Catching air” in the family’s Chevelle at age 17… there was a hill on a road that I drove all the time (on the way to the liquor store in the next county…) - it was one of those hills that you’d sort of lose your stomach on at about 50 mph… I hit it at 110 and put the car in the air. It was nighttime, so I still remember seeing all the sparks in my rearview mirror after we landed.
As I said, this was on the way TO the liquor store… sober… the regularly scheduled stupid drunk driving came later, on the way home.