Fractured my skull by walking into a firewall door which was held open by a mechanism for the handicapped.
It’s an art form, I swear.
E.
- When I was about 9 I got this bright idea, why not clip two short pieces of wire and attach them to the end of a light bulb, then plug it directly into a socket. I quickly found out why not.
An impressive shower of sparks spewed from the outlet, as every light in the whole house went out. But no harm done, apart from needing to replace all the fuses.
- When I was in India I had bought in advance a train ticket for Madras. When I got to the station, I searched all through my pockets but the ticket was nowhere to be found and the train was about to leave. Dmn! Where did I drop that stupid ticket?!* So I paid about 450 rupees for another one.
When I got back from that train trip, I unloaded my pockets and under a wad of rupee notes at the bottom of my pocket there was the original ticket. It had been there all along.
I once had one of those page-a-day calendars that ever day would ask you a different Deep and Thoughtful Question. One day the question was “Have you ever done anything you later turned out to regret?”
My response was, “Oh, maybe ONCE OR TWICE. Hell, calendar, I’ve done stuff that wasn’t such a hot idea AT THE TIME, much less later on.”
Oh, a story. Well in keeping with the personal injury motif, some friends and I were walking across a vacant lot that had big irregular pieces of styrofoam on it. We were running around kicking them at each other. (This was at night, by the way.) So I see a piece and run up to it, planning to launch it as far as I can. I slamm my foot into it with everything I’ve got and only then discover that sometimes a chunk of concrete can look a lot like styrofoam.
My foot went completely numb. I didn’t even realize how horribly this had gone wrong until about 10 minutes later, when suddenly the feeling returned with a vengeance.
Driving down Congressional Blvd in Palm Beach county with two other friends (in separate cars) at speeds up to 120mph. Even in 1972 this was not such a bright thing to do.
Scylla, thanks for posting that link. I read that when you posted it originally. I have since remembered the story, but forgotten where I read it.
I laughed just as hard today as I did then.
Thanks
Ahh sounds familiar. I was at my brothers apartment. I was still in high school, he had graduated the year before. We poured about an inch of Everclear into the bottom of a glass coke bottle, and dropped a match in there. It was pretty cool! A flame hovered in the neck of the bottle! Well, we weren’t happy with that… we wanted the Everclear in the bottom of the bottle to burn! How do you get the fire down to the bottom? Well, you take the everclear and pour more into the coke bottle while the flame is going! Well, at least that’s what made sense to us at the time! DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME. Man O Man what a surprise it was when we found out that the flame would move UP into the bottle of everclear, not the other way around! My brother does the smart thing… he throws the bottle of everclear across the room, splashing fire all the way! The curtains caught on fire, the carpet caught on fire, my brothers hand caught on fire… wackiness ensued!
Story number 2 - Wife’s stupid moment.
My wife was in our front yard talking on the portable phone. (This was before cell phones) She had to go to the store, so she just hopped in the car with the portable phone. As she was backing out of the drive way she realized that she was losing reception. Instead of getting off the phone or out of the car, she decides the best thing to do is to maneuver the car so she can get better reception. CRUNCH!!! It seems a tree “that wasn’t there before” seemed to suddenly grown in my front yard… and right behind our car no less! It’s not like she could have hit it dead center with the bumper! Nope, right at the edge of the bumper, it busted out a tail light and continued up the side of the car!
Story number 3 - trusting my wife on April Fools Day.
I made the mistake of telling my wife that I have an irrational fear of spiders crawling on me when I’m asleep. (In Boy Scouts, it was common to see Daddy Long Legs spiders crawling on the inside of your tent ~shiver~)
Anyway, one April Fools Day morning while I was asleep my wife woke me up with her screaming “Oh My God [Enright3] there’s a spider crawling on your face!” So I do what any rational just wakened man would do… I started screaming and slapping my own face, yelling “get it off!, get it off!” Guess what kind of mood I was in when I realize my wife is laying next to me laughing her ass off! I still give her Kudos for that one. Getting me to smack myself around is better than the peanut butter on the toilet seat, or any other joke I’ve played on her over the past 20 years! (19th anniversary was Sep 4th)
E3
Scylla’s thread reference reminded me of a couple more stupid things…
While in high school one winter day, my best friend and I would go out to this old abandoned municipal airport because there was an area on the runway about 50 yards long water would pool up and then freeze. That made a real fun skid pad for my old '66 chevy pickup. I guess we getting a little to close to spring time, because as I was cruising across the ice, I suddenly heard ‘crunch’ as my pickup broke through the ice. Since it’s only about 6 inches deep, I decide that the best thing to do is to jack the pickup, and place wooden slats under the tires. It’s cold as hell outside and my best friend is refusing to help because he doesn’t want to take his hands out of his coat pockets (that’s an important point to note). The only jack I have is a heavy duty jack that every farmer in the world must have. The jack handle alone is about 3 or 4 feet long. As I’m jacking up the back of my pickup, my wet gloves slip off the jack handle and it comes flying up and hits me in the chin leaving a nice gash on my face as I fall to the ground. My super-sensative best friend busts out laughing and slips on the ice. He can’t get his hands out of his pockets in time to break his face-first fall. Ahh what sweet revenge!
Nbr 2
Being the great handyman that I am, I was replacing an electric water well pump at my house. It was an old house and the electric wires weren’t color coded. I wired up the 220 volt pump and went decided to test it out. I primed the pump with water and watched it pump some of the water back out. I had been told that the way to determine if an electric water well was working was to feel the pipe coming out of the ground. Well water is real cold… and if the pipe gets cold then you’re pumping fresh water, otherwise it’s just your primer water that you’re pumping. I grab the pipe only to find that it’s electrically charged! I manage to pull myself off the pipe and collapse in the grass until I can recover. I wired one of the 110 V lead wrong and it was grounding through the pipe into the ground. I got smart though… My wife tested it next time.
E3
There was one time I was heading home from a late night pub crawl in Adams Morgan and found a tire lying on the sidewalk. Feeling puckishly playful, I figure I’ll roll the thing along with my hand for a bit.
It didn’t occur to me that the tire may have been abandoned because it had rolled through small, sharp bits of glass and been shredded to ribbons, which is what said bits of glass embedded in the tire immediately did to my hand.
So now I have about a half-mile to home with my hand bleeding profusely and nothing to staunch the flow with. Fortunately there wasn’t any more damage than that.
In the yard I took a step back right onto the upward facing blade of a hoe which flew up and hit me in the back of the head. I felt like I was in a stupid cartoon, dammit.
Riding my GL1200 late at night through a 45 MPH curve at about 80 mph. Although I did get a nice helicopter ride afterwards, but being comatose for 3 days isn’t as much fun as it sounds, and don’t get me started on the tube up the pecker. OUCH! But my mind is still sharp as a tack, knock on wood…who is it?
After a night out with cousins and friends, and not having any money left, I walked to my place in Carnoustie from the “Ascot” pub in Dundee.(In Scotland). A 10 to 15 mile walk.
Remember…drunk…middle of the night…and not knowing where I was going…(I knew my cottage was…“That way.”)
Talk about stiff legs the next morning…
I posted to the TMI thread several times.
But the stupidest thing I ever did was light a rocket indoors.
No, there’s no euphemism there. I quite literally lit a rocket indoors.
I didn’t happen to have shoes on at the time.
You’re not alone, punha. Perry Farrell puts you in good company.
When I was a kid in Detroit we had a great ways to have fun in the snow. Cars would continually compress snow till it became really smooth ice. We could start running in the snow jump into the grooves of the tire marks and slide down the street. This worked really well if you had those rubber type moon boots. The second way to do this was with card board. Much like a sled till it became to wet.
Here comes Mr. Creative in the person of stuffinb. You see the problem was momentum, pretty soon you ran out and the slide stopped. So I had the great idea to carry a piece of cardboard while I was sliding, then when I began to stop, I’d throw the cardboard down jump on that and continue my slide. It’s brilliant!
Off I go and I get a good slide, I begin to slow. I throw down the card board. I make the jump. The cardboard picks up momentum. Upwards. I see the sky, I land on my head. I continue sliding, amid tons of laughter. My slide terminates partially under a parked car.
I was in a hurry at a convenience store one day, I jump into my car
and begin closing the door before I have fully gotten my head into the car.
Wham!
Let me tell you, there is nothing quite so painfully humiliating as slamming the
car door on your head in front of a bunch of people.
You want stupid? You got it.
#1 - In my teenage years I worked in a fast food establishment. I was directed to replace a soda syrup canister. The key to replacing the syrup canisters is FIRST connect the syrup, THEN connect the gas - or maybe it’s the other way 'round, I still don’t have that straight. Anyhow, whichever it is, I did it the other way. Mountain Dew Syrup shot out of the container up to the ceiling, into pretty much every orifice of my body, and all over the floor. And I wasn’t yet driving. And it was February. So I got to walk home in the snow dripping with fluorescent yellow sticky stuff.
#2 - The cord fell out of my electric mixer and into my cake batter. Note: NOT out of the wall. Not wishing to waste chocolate cake batter, I promptly licked the chocolate off the cord contact. My daughter claims my hair stood straight up for several seconds.
I have lots more, sad to say.
Good stories!
This is admittedly a replay, from I need a tag on my shirt: My name is beatle, if found please call…
Well this little misadventure concluded about 20 minutes ago.
I decided to go out to dinner but, as usual, couldn’t decide between the only 3 restaurants I could think of out of the ~400 within four square miles of here. So, hey, the car needs gas, I’ll just drive up and take care of that while I ponder my options (and maybe see something else).
So I get to the Chevron station, hop out and punch the card in, open the gas tank and set the thing to pumping. Since I’ve got a few minutes I go inside to get some cigarettes and, after waiting in line and having the clerk (language barrier) finally give me what I want, I walk out, hop in the car and leave, still undecided about dinner. I cruise up one of the local thoroughfares for about a mile and a half…
So picture this: four door grey sedan with apprentice old fart at the wheel, merrily driving up the road, trailing twenty feet of gas pump hose!
ACK! I pull into a side street and remove it (my gas cap is still there!), pausing only briefly to kick myself, and put it in the trunk and wheel around and race back to the gas station, fully expecting to see fire trucks hosing the place down and madly calculating how I’m going to pay for this!
I pull up to the light - things appear calm at the station. I pull in and park and go inside. Nobody’s even noticed (more on that in a second)! The clerk is busy and doesn’t at all understand what I’m trying to tell her. Finally she understands that I want her to come outside really badly. She understands it has something to do with pump 6, and heads that way while I quickly grab the hose from my trunk. I catch up to her and show her the hose and she grasps it all, just as I’m treated to something that helps me feel just a wee bit better about it all. Standing at pump 6 is a woman who has put her card in the machine and has already punched the “Press To Start” button and is wondering what to do next.
There ain’t no hose, lady! I am not alone. There’re thousands of us! COMING TO YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD SOON!!!
I tried to jump over a shopping cart while jogging through Gainesville (I was 18 and somewhat stupid). I almost cleared the bottom layer. The guy with whom I was running (and a passing motorist) laughed loudly for a very long time. I hope I didn’t cause an accident. The ankle broke, and I almost learned my lesson.
[hijack]Hey Maximum Override I’m 15 miles outside Dundee towards the Perth side[/hijack]
You set out to walk from Dundee to Carnoustie? :eek: