Talk about some of the rotten things you did as a kid

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

A buddy and I found a large vanity mirror that was being thrown away. It was a very sunny summer day, and we found that we could reflect the sun’s rays and redirect them for what seemed like a mile away. We saw the mailman walking toward us about half a block away. We focused the sunbeam on him, temporarily blinding him and causing him to trip and fall forward causing the contents of his mailbag to scatter. Man, he was pissed. He came running after us but we ducked in between some houses and he never did catch us.

If you’re reading this Mr. Mailman, sorry about that.
mmm

2

When I was growing up, the man that lived on the opposite corner of my block was a few fries short of a happy meal (I’ll call him Arthur). He was tormented by a bunch of neighborhood kids and decided that I was one of them. He came down to my house and complained to my dad, who gave me the 3rd Degree over it. This happened a half dozen times or so until Arthur came down and beat on the door one day and yelled at my dad about how I had led a group of kids that had just broken a window in his house. The problem with that was I was in the middle of a chess game with my dad, so I had your basic iron-clad alibi.

I got so pissed off about it that I joined in on the harassment, and boy, did I do an outstanding job. Looking back on it now, I’m embarrassed by it, but back then I felt perfectly justified in doing so.

3

It’s too embarrassing. I’ll just say that I was a dumb stupid kid, and to this day I have no idea why I said that very rude and thoughtless thing out of the blue to a complete stranger.

To the young blond woman whom I insulted in Texas in 1978, I’m very sorry. I was an idiot.

4

Aw, c’mon Scarlett. You have to at least give us a clue.
mmm

5

I once took the life sized cardboard cutout of a race driver that my dad used to advertise engine oil from his garage upstairs to out apartment and put in in our kitchen in the middle of the night. My mom got up, went to the kitchen to get a snack or a drink, saw it in the dark and thought a strange man was in the kitchen. She ended up wetting herself. Another time I convince her that WWIII had started and she paniced and called her mother.

6

Oh all right, but I’m gonna spoiler it. I still cringe when I think about it. What the hell was I thinking?

[spoiler]We were on vacation in a campground in Texas. I was sitting alone at the picnic table at our site (can’t recall where everyone else was) when said young woman (I’m guessing in her late teens) came walking past. She had a very irregular unsteady gait, which was most probably caused by some disability. But I in my infinite wisdom and sensitivity called out to her something along the lines that she must be drunk or something. :smack: :frowning:

She quite understandably said something angry back, I think along the lines of she couldn’t help it, none of my business, what do I know about anything. I vaguely remember being kind of stunned, probably as it hit me what an asinine thing I had just said. I was not normally a rude little beeyotch, actually quite shy. What the hell??

Ugh, I wish I could go back and bitch-slap myself into next week. And then apologize profusely to that young lady.[/spoiler]

On a lighter note, I once poured some OJ into a glass of milk and put it back into the fridge. Not even thinking of trying to pull a prank or anything, but just for the hell of it. My mom drank it. Or tried to. Boy, was she mad. Nobody confessed.

7

Okay, now I gotta hear that one.

FTR, I grabbed and shook another kid. He, yes he, cried.

8

I’ll have to check into statutes of limitations before I say anything.

9

My brother and I were hellions. We did many many bad things. One thing we did was get a length of garden hose, about 4 feet long. Then you stick a marble in the end you’re holding and whip the hose forward, sending the marble out like a bullet. We’d stand on the deck of our apartment and shoot cars with it, smashing their windows, terrifying the drivers I’m sure. Then we’d duck down and peek at them through the little holes in the wood on the deck.

We did really horrible things which I feel quite guilty about but at the same time we were just acting out all the violence and abuse we were living with.

10

Once every blue moon, I’d grab two or three raw eggs from the refrigerator, walk out into the alley behind my house, and throw them as far as I could in a random direction (other than back at my house).

11

Okay, here’s one I think I can safely tell. There was an overpass right behind our house. Once in high school, my parents were out of town, so some buddies came over. We ended up going up onto the overpass after dark, egged some cars as they came under and high-tailed it back to my backyard, from where, by looking through knotholes in the fence, we could see the angry drivers return, park and stare up at the overpass. So after a while we drove to a convenience store, and on the way back we happened to notice one of the cars we egged in a driveway. The owner was washing it. So we made a point of returning in the wee hours and egging it again, and thoroughly.

12

I must be evil because I find that really funny.

One time a friend and I were walking around in the middle of the night with eggs and came across a yard that had one of those giant dishes that people used to have. We chucked the eggs at it and it made such a funny noise that my friend laughed till she peed her pants.

13

I’ve been debating posting this, but I think I’ll go ahead and put it out there. Mind you, it was 15+ years ago.

I’ve got a couple, but I’ll give you the best one…and it’s a twofer. When I was a kid I had a police scanner, a police scanner that I set up to pick up the cordless phones in the neighborhood. I used to spend my nights listening in on all the calls within 4 or 5 houses in each direction. Mostly harmless stuff.
Around that time, there was a scandal, if you want to call it that, in my city. Some kids had broken into the middle school and stolen a couple of computers and a laptop. I really hadn’t given it much thought until my scanner picked up the kid (one grade below me) across the street one night talking about it. Turns out it wasn’t him, but his group of friends that did it. They decided to ditch all the desktops (later confirmed on the news) but they kept the laptop. The funny thing was, I was the only one who new where it was all the time. They kept passing it around, leaving it at each others house without telling their friends, finding it in their room and dumping it back at one of their other friends houses. I think they wanted to keep it for themselves but no one wanted to get caught with it, but for all the trouble they went through they probably should have just thrown it away.

The other part of the story. One night, I picked up my next door neighbor talking to her boyfriend. Just some mushy highschool “I love you/I love you more” crap. Anyways, I was wandering around in my house with my scanner on and decided to point my laser pointer into her (attic) bedroom window. She freaked the fuck out, started screaming, terrified that someone was pointing a gun into her room. Trying to figure out if she should call the cops. It was a good hour before she calmed down and based on what I heard over the next few calls (to him and other people), it was about a week before she even went into her room again.
I was terrified that I was going to get in trouble also.
Looking back at it, all I would have gotten in trouble for is pointing the laser pointer into her room for a second, it’s not that they would have known I heard her phone call.

Oh, and one time when someone was pulled over in front of my house, I pointed the laser pointer on the person’s license plate. I don’t know if it had anything to do with that or not, but the cop pulled him out of his car and searched his trunk before he let him go.
Also, my friends and I once threw a smoke bomb, one of those mammoth ones that blow thick smoke for a few minutes into a wedding party. We were down by the lake hiding out in the foresty area away from the walkway. An area where we would normally go and hide to play with fireworks or sneak cigarettes. I lit the smoke bomb and lobbed it over to the walkway. I didn’t know anyone was over there, and when we stood up to see the smoke we saw that it landed right in the middle of a wedding party that had walked down to the lake to take pictures. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen that many formally dressed people and a pro photog run like they were under attack…and it’s a long up hill run back up to the top. But that was an accident so it doesn’t really count.

14

I can’t say, there are certain things for which there is no statute of limitations.

15

My cousin and I murdered a bunch of snails for no particular reason. We just decided we hated them and dropped big rocks from a hight onto them.

I still feel like an asshole about it, despite having eaten escargot about 100 times since then. Weird.

16

I tore back the carpet in my closet and cut a hole in the floor so I would have a place to store beer. I screwed metal plates around the cutout so it would drop back into the floor. I could then roll the carpet back and use a screwdriver to push the carpet back under the molding.

At one time I had 6 cases of beer stored under the floor, with the way our rooms lined up my parents were literally sleeping on top of the beer. I would have to tie a rope to the first case so I could use it to slide the beer to within reach of the hole.

When my sister moved out and I moved to the room in the basement my parents tore up the carpet and found the hole. “Luckily” the night before they tore up the carpet the beer disappeared and was replaced with keepsakes from my childhood.

17

At the start of the 1980s, the eminently sensible expectation that a dog owner was obligated to pick up any piles their dog left during its walk was still an exotic thought, and you never had to go far between the enormous turds laying about.

For a couple of autumns, some of my friends and I amused ourselves by blowing these piles up with firecrackers, which is a fine occupation for a boy in and of itself. However, I regret to say that our aim in was to time our little explosions and their consequent showers of finely-dispersed dogshit in such a way as was considerably inconvenient for passersby. Little bastards.

18

A woman in our neighbourhood hated the local kids. Street hockey was a popular pastime for many of us on our quiet residential street, and she hated us playing it. Often she would come out of her house screaming at us to stop playing, saying it was illegal and calling us such things as “dirty punks.” And many times, she called the police; who, when faced with a bunch of kids playing a simple street hockey game, would simply cruise by, saying “Hi, kids! Who’s winning?”

Much of her wrath was reserved for our friend Greg. He had the misfortune of living next door to her; and if Greg ever did anything around his house that was not a chore of some sort (for example, mowing the lawn), she would be out screaming at him. Even if he walked out his door with a football, say, ready to join us for a game of football in the park; she would come out and scream that he had better not throw that ball anywhere near her house, as if it violated her property, he would never get it back. Us kids naturally wondered if she was crazy; and after witnessing her antics at breaking up our hockey games and the police response, many of our parents also wondered if she was a few cards shy of a full deck.

Anyway. She had constructed a small wall of bricks next to her front walk. They weren’t mortared together; she had simply stacked them. One summer evening, the woman and her husband (who was as nice as she was nasty, but was a businessman who travelled a lot) went out somewhere in their car while we were outside playing. Greg noticed this, and had an idea.

And so, we joined Greg in taking the little wall by the front walk apart, and reconstructing it across the end of the driveway, near the street. To make a long story short, the couple came home after dark, turned into what was normally their driveway, and their car crashed into the wall we had built across the driveway. No damage was done to the car (the wall wasn’t that high), but the shock of hitting something in the dark and then driving over bumps (i.e., the loose bricks) was something else apparently.

Greg was immediately accused by the woman, and had to apologize, but he didn’t rat any of the rest of us out. Good guy.

19

Were you as rotten as Dolly from* the Family Circus*?

20

My Dad was a carpenter and one day spent a few hours neatly patching a hole in the hallway wall. Patched it and mudded it with drywall mud and went to work, planning to sand it later after it had dried.

I discovered that drywall mud was like vertical playdoh, and I could draw on the wall and ‘erase’ it with a wet washcloth. Until I couldn’t quite erase it anymore. No matter how much I scrubbed, it was clearly messed up. So I wrote my sister’s initials in it and walked away. She got her butt busted for it, but I never said a word.