# Talk about some of the rotten things you did as a kid **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [April 26, 2011, 2:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/talk-about-some-of-the-rotten-things-you-did-as-a-kid/579731 "2011-04-26T02:45:22Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![FoieGrasIsEvil](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/foiegrasisevil/32/16638_2.png) [@FoieGrasIsEvil](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FoieGrasIsEvil)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2011, 2:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/talk-about-some-of-the-rotten-things-you-did-as-a-kid/579731/61 "2011-04-28T02:28:09Z")
> [@markm](#): > > Hmmm… > Cat Food Cereal: I was about 12 and my kid brother about 6 and we were home alone for some reason. He kept whining for me to fix him a bowl of cereal. I kept telling him to get it himself. He threatened to tell mom and dad I wouldn’t let him eat if I didn’t fix it. So, I went in the kitchen, got the biggest bowl I could find, filled it with cat food, sprinkled on some sugar, and poured the milk. At first, he tried to say it was cat food. I lied and said it was a new cereal. He took a couple of bites and refused to eat it. I threatened to tell mom and dad he was wasting food if he didn’t eat it. I made him eat every bite. > > Same Brother, New Hostility: (this brother and I really did not get along. And not in a ‘they’re brothers, of course they fight’ way. In a ‘knock down, drag out, I will feast upon your soul’ way) Anyway, I’d gotten a BB pistol for my birthday or something. One Summer day, I was out shooting bugs with it. Bees, horseflies, butterflies… anything that would land long enough for me to aim at. My brother caught me doing this and was going to go tell mom and dad (he thought I was shooting flowers and butterflies only). I told him if he told, I’d shoot him. He started toward the house, so PING! I shot him. He then yelled he’d tell on me for that, so I shot him again (it wasn’t strong enough to break skin). He wound up telling mom and dad and I lost my gun for some time. > > Temporary Lane Marker Word Play: On a couple of nights when we were out boosting road signs, we came across freshly resurfaced roads with the little plastic temporary center lane markers. We would collect these then go to a good hill in the road and spell out obscenities so that someone approaching the hill would be greeted by it. > > Drunk Balloons: Friends and I got a three man slingshot. One that required a person at each end, then a person to pull back and fire. It would shoot about 300 yards. One friend lived right in town, just down the street from city hall and a bar. So we’d hide behind the hedgerow at the edge of his yard and wait for drunks to come out of the bar, then we’d start launching balloons at them. They, being drunk, thought we were on the roof and so would look up at the roof yelling for us to come down as we lobbed more balloons on them and their vehicles (denting vehicles and breaking at least one window). When the ruckus became loud enough, the police would come out of city hall to also be bombarded. They would then get in their cruisers and drive up and down the streets looking for us, but never find us because as soon as they started for their vehicles, we stashed the evidence and ran in the house. > > Leave No Seat Armed: A group of us would go to the movies, not so much to watch the movies, but just to be the kind of kids that I would want to throttle if I ran into them at the movies now. One summer, we made it our mission to remove every armrest from every seat in the (at the time, now bigger) triplex. It took some doing, as they would replace some almost as fast as we popped them. Eventually, though, we had them all, plus the soap dispensers from the bathroom (which were opened then tossed into top-down convertibles in the parking lot). That fall, the theater was renovated and expanded. None of the seating had removable armrests. > > Fast Food Vandalism: McDonald’s and other fast food joints used to all have disposable salt and pepper shakers on the tables, instead of the little packets at the condiments station. We would take pennies or nickels, stand them on end, then get them spinning really fast. Then, we’d take the salt or pepper shaker and slam it down on the spinning coin, driving it up through the bottom. The next person to use it (or the poor burger jockey cleaning tables) would lift the shaker to get a pile of salt or pepper all over the place. Other times, we’d take the shakers with us as we left and chuck them down the street to watch the trail of salt or pepper. > Also, the swivel chairs at McDonald’s used to not be fastened down (don’t know if they are now or not). They would just lift up off the base. Many’s the time we walked out of McD’s with the chairs from one of the tables. > > These were some of the worst. I won’t go into detail on the homemade stink bombs set off in the halls at school, squirting pipettes of hydrochloric acid on the backs of people’s necks, rotten meat shoved into someone’s locker just before Christmas break, obscenities on restaurants’ marquees, and the various other typical asshole kid/teenager things we did. Man, and all I did was squeeze a nugget of poo into my little brother’s ice cream. You, on the other hand, have fucking issues! 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Siam\_Sam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/d78d45/32.png) [@Siam\_Sam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Siam_Sam)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2011, 3:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/talk-about-some-of-the-rotten-things-you-did-as-a-kid/579731/62 "2011-04-28T03:53:29Z")
Ah yes, and there was the Dairy Queen that had one of those signs underneath the main logo in the parking lot where you put up the letters. Once when it advertised “Country Basket $1.99” or however much it was, we took down some of the letters in the first word and moved what was left together to where it read: “Cunt Basket.” This was late Saturday night / early Sunday morning. The sign stayed that way until well into the next afternoon before anyone changed it. They did a big church crowd for Sunday lunch, too. ---
**Author:** ![Dung\_Beetle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dung_beetle/32/7945_2.png) [@Dung\_Beetle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dung_Beetle)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2011, 12:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/talk-about-some-of-the-rotten-things-you-did-as-a-kid/579731/63 "2011-04-28T12:47:45Z")
> [@Simplicio](#): > > Heh. We used to play a game to see how much of the school bus we could disassemble and toss out the window on the way to school without the busdriver noticing. At first we’d just detach the seat belts and seat cusions and toss them out, but as competition heated up, people started bringing tools with them so we could disassemble entire seats and lighting fixtures into small enough pieces to get out the window. We used to shoot marbles at the bus driver and use pocket mirrors to beam light in his eyes. We also rubbed Vaseline on the inside of most of the bus windows and secreted stinky bits of lunch in the crevices of the seats. But never did we think to actually take the bus apart! I realize I’m using the word “we” in my posts…that includes my brother and sometimes my stepbrother and sister. I’m still too ashamed to fess up to things I did on my own! The worst thing the four of us did together was to steal a golf cart from the driveway of the trailer park manager. We went joyriding through the park, including people’s yards, and then broke the windshield in an attempt to hide the cart behind a dumpster. Right about this time, we saw the cart’s owner approaching in his car, so we decided to try and outrun him in the golf cart, which we had discovered went faster in reverse… Picture four petrified brats backing up a golf cart at about fifteen miles an hour, then bumping into a fence, jumping out and fleeing for home on foot. Busted doesn’t begin to describe it. ---
**Author:** ![Colophon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f05b48/32.png) [@Colophon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colophon)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2011, 1:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/talk-about-some-of-the-rotten-things-you-did-as-a-kid/579731/64 "2011-04-28T13:33:21Z")
Thanks to Google Street View, I can present evidence. See [these marks](http://i56.tinypic.com/259vpyc.jpg) on the wall of this house? That was me and my best friend throwing eggs at the wall in about 1991. Those people really need to paint their house more frequently. For a short while we also thought it would be great entertainment to lob empty glass milk bottles as high as we could onto people’s roofs late at night. It made a great noise. Only one time did we almost get caught, but managed the old “hide, then walk back nonchalantly in the opposite direction” routine, and amazingly it worked. We also had catapults, and used to hide in bushes at the side of the main road through town and fire stones at passing cars. Boys are horrible, aren’t they? ---
**Author:** ![markm](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9de053/32.png) [@markm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/markm)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2011, 2:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/talk-about-some-of-the-rotten-things-you-did-as-a-kid/579731/65 "2011-04-28T14:28:08Z")
[QUOTE= FoieGrasIsEvil] Man, and all I did was squeeze a nugget of poo into my little brother’s ice cream. You, on the other hand, have fucking issues! [/quote] LOL, not really. My friends and I were the good kids in school. Top of our class, teachers liked us, didn’t drink or smoke, blah blah blah. It was just a rural area with little to occupy kids’ time, and idle hands really are the devil’s play things. That and we had an odd fascination with lobbing stuff into convertibles. For some reason, we really didn’t like them. Oh, another, much tamer, thing we’d do. At Wal-Mart or grocery stores, we’d sneak an odd, semi-embarrassing (at least in our minds), item into people’s carts. Just one single item per cart, so it wasn’t obvious. Old woman walked away from her cart to get something? In goes a package of condoms. Young woman does the same? Tube of Preparation H in her cart. Some guy not paying attention? Travel-size box of tampons… @Siam Sam: Our local greasy spoon was called D-Best. We changed their marquee sign to say D Best Fuck In Town That was talked about for some time. ---
**Author:** ![wbeaty](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/439d5e/32.png) [@wbeaty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wbeaty)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2011, 3:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/talk-about-some-of-the-rotten-things-you-did-as-a-kid/579731/66 "2011-04-29T03:22:02Z")
Our gang of neighborhood kids had a “war” with another kid-group from down at the bottom of the hill. We were throwing rocks, but they’d come prepared with home-made bows and fire arrows. After non-lethal shenanigans, one of the opponent group finally said “we make peace now” and jammed a burning spear into a big shock of swordgrass. Which immediately caught, turning into a flaming pillar. The whole abandoned field behind our houses went up. Some neighbor called the fire dept., and they stopped it after it burned a couple hundred ft of the field. Yes we got caught. But it was those other kids who did it! When _we_ played with matches and gasoline, we didn’t do it next to acres of dry grass. Out behind the houses on our street was The Mud Ditch, a drainage ditch with a trickle of water. We decided to build a dam by stealing small bucketfuls of cement powder from stacked bags at the construction site a block away. After a few days of this, workers suddenly covered the pile of cement bags with loose circle of chicken wire (easily removed.) I think they must have decided that birds? rats? were tearing small holes in the bags and stealing powder. Our dam didn’t really work; the hardened concrete could be crumbled by hand. We didn’t know that a proper concrete mixture requires sand. Oh, now I remember one. Living on Guam was fun. None of us was supposed to play with anything found out in the jungle. WWII land mines, etc. But one of the group found a small metal hump sticking out of the dirt, and we dug it up. It was a stack of American WWII army helmets, very rusty but still solid. Underneath was a very rotted leather satchel. The only recognizable content was a collection of little glass tubes. Each one full of white powder. We found that when you threw a tube against the road, it went “bang.” That was entertainment for a few minutes. Looking back now, I’d have to guess that it was a medic’s kit with vacuum-sealed morphine ampules! ---
**Author:** ![KRC](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/45deac/32.png) [@KRC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KRC)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2011, 4:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/talk-about-some-of-the-rotten-things-you-did-as-a-kid/579731/67 "2011-04-29T04:46:26Z")
Other than trying to strangle my younger siblings, beat them up, throw them into the creek, or pants them in a place where they could be seen for miles around, I was pretty well behaved. There was an incident involving a cake. My sister was baking it and she lost control of the pan to the point where it landed in the cats’ feeding area. I heard her cries of distress and helped put the cake together again. I think we picked a few hairs off but in the end I just told my sister to use lots of frosting on the broken cake that had hair and catfood on it. We wound up serving it to my father and my brother who scarfed it up, and I wrote in my diary “Cakegate was a success.” ---
**Author:** ![Find\_Friends](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/c37758/32.png) [@Find\_Friends](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Find_Friends)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2011, 3:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/talk-about-some-of-the-rotten-things-you-did-as-a-kid/579731/68 "2011-04-29T15:30:24Z")
> [@pkbites](#): > > …and made out all sorts of “progress reports” about kids i didn’t like, and mailed them to their parents. _“i’m concerned about receiving compositions from your daughter about her sexual adventures”_ and _“i know it is assumed normal for boys this age, but i cannot condone him masturbating in the locker room anymore”_ were among the comments by the “teachers”. :d > > all this was in the late 70’s so any statute of limitations has expired. Shall i continue? _ **please do!** _ ---
**Author:** ![campp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/c5a1d2/32.png) [@campp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/campp)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2011, 3:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/talk-about-some-of-the-rotten-things-you-did-as-a-kid/579731/69 "2011-04-29T15:33:49Z")
In the 1970s there was a long downhill flume that carried canal water. To participate, one had to cruise around and steal some kid’s big wheel. Take that out to the flumes and ride like the wind. If you didn’t steal one, there were usually a couple of ratty ones laying around there. ---
**Author:** ![Soliloquy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/b5ac83/32.png) [@Soliloquy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Soliloquy)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2011, 3:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/talk-about-some-of-the-rotten-things-you-did-as-a-kid/579731/70 "2011-04-29T15:43:04Z")
I was mad at my little brother one day when I was pretty young. I drew an intentionally ugly picture of him and showed it to him with a sneering, snotty “This is YOU!” He scribbled all over it. I started crying and told our mother that I drew him a special picture and he scribbled all over it. (I was a master at crying on command.) He got in SO much trouble! ---
**Author:** ![Muffin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/muffin/32/4341_2.png) [@Muffin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Muffin)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2011, 4:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/talk-about-some-of-the-rotten-things-you-did-as-a-kid/579731/71 "2011-04-29T16:25:43Z")
[As posted previously:](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=13140037&postcount=45) when I was a little kid, I fed my grandfather cat kibble for breakfast each day for a week, telling him that it was breakfast cereal. It didn’t do him any harm. In fact, when I told him what he had been eating, he was able to chase me for a long time around and around the house, swinging a plastic toy lawn mower at me, threatening “I’m going to tanniazzle your backside!” ---
**Author:** ![TokyoBayer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tokyobayer/32/13989_2.png) [@TokyoBayer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TokyoBayer)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2011, 4:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/talk-about-some-of-the-rotten-things-you-did-as-a-kid/579731/72 "2011-04-29T16:44:53Z")
In high school, the “leader” of our group didn’t like one of the guys, so he started a campaign of sending in post cards requesting information and putting in this guy’s name. (Damn, there’s something which is completely gone these days.) My dad worked with computers (in “data processing” as it was known) and would have hundreds of these things, so off they went with Brad’s name and address on them. At first it was just the requests for info, but some of the guys took it too far, and sent in magazine subscriptions and other orders, and with all the requests, completely overwhelming his family’s mail. His mother called a lot of the parents (including mine) and subsequently we stopped. Sort of the analog version of spam. Sorry Brad. ---
**Author:** ![Cyberhwk](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/7993a0/32.png) [@Cyberhwk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cyberhwk)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2011, 5:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/talk-about-some-of-the-rotten-things-you-did-as-a-kid/579731/73 "2011-04-29T17:00:16Z")
I played 3rd base in Little League. I had a grounder and threw home right as the kid running from 2nd to 3rd ran in front of me and I hit him with the baseball. In reality…it was quite intentional. This was the same year I walked off in the middle of the game because I was pissed at my coach. ---
**Author:** ![lieu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/c2a13f/32.png) [@lieu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lieu)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2011, 5:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/talk-about-some-of-the-rotten-things-you-did-as-a-kid/579731/74 "2011-04-29T17:28:55Z")
I’d completely forgotton about this until reading the thread. When I was in about 7th grade, someone I was friends with knew about some “haunted” house that sounded pretty intriguing. So about 8 of us rode our bikes over to a neighborhood and there was a once nice house that seemed to have been neglected. There’s a way in through a window so we climb inside and lord a mercy, the place had been TRASHED inside. There’s crap everywhere, a smashed TV set, torn stuff, debris and junk everywhere, a real mess. Obviously kids had been coming into and wrecking the place for a long time. I can’t remember what we did, it had to be something, but then we left and went home. The next day at school one of the guys started bragging about it and all of a sudden we get called into the principal’s office. Then the police get notified and then my parents get this phone call from a man and suddenly I’m in deep shit. Turns out the place had been owned by some wealthy guy who’d been murdered, killed by three of his financial advisors that conspired against him. The man that called my folks had been the guy’s caretaker, his assistant, and he truly was devoted to the old guy. So much so in fact that he’d made it his life’s mission to expose the three murderers. He came to my house, sat with us and told us of how the three had buried his employer and poured lime on his body to help hide the crime. The man said he’d ruined each of them, I think one committed suicide, another was reduced to working in a gas station and maybe the third had spent some time in jail, I forget. So anyway he’s really a neat man and I admired him so much for his loyalty. What he did was have all 8 of us come to my house and meet with him so he could tell them the story too and then we all had to work and raise $200 to pay for some of the damages. We hadn’t done $200 worth of damage but no matter, I think it was fair and taught everyone a lesson. I was grounded for a month, mowed yards to pay my share and for a little while at least had a really good friend in an older, wise and admirable gentleman. Anyone would be fortunate to have had in their lives such a devoted employee. ---
**Author:** ![WhyNot](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/c77e96/32.png) [@WhyNot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WhyNot)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2011, 5:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/talk-about-some-of-the-rotten-things-you-did-as-a-kid/579731/75 "2011-04-29T17:36:25Z")
> [@Chefguy](#): > > Boys can be such assholes. Oh, so can girls… We menstrual product-ed a tree once. Took pads and tampons and a red marker to make them looked “used” and wallpapered the trunk with pads and hung the tampons from the branches by their strings like demented Christmas ornaments. I don’t even know whose tree it was; it wasn’t like someone specifically pissed us off. We just thought it was funny. :rolleyes: ---
**Author:** ![\_mostly\_Harmless](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/_/9d8465/32.png) [@\_mostly\_Harmless](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/_mostly_Harmless)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2011, 6:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/talk-about-some-of-the-rotten-things-you-did-as-a-kid/579731/76 "2011-04-29T18:43:42Z")
Once in junior high a girl asked me if I liked her new haircut. I did and I actually had a bit of a crush on her as well. But I was shy so when she asked me I was so nervous that I just started laughing. The look of rejection on her face is something I will never forget. I feel terrible about that. ---
**Author:** ![FrigidLizard](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/3bc359/32.png) [@FrigidLizard](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FrigidLizard)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2011, 10:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/talk-about-some-of-the-rotten-things-you-did-as-a-kid/579731/77 "2011-04-29T22:24:47Z")
Here’s my entry for the “seeing how far I could fling stuff” category: I used to whack the small stones in my driveway with a badminton raquet, generally in the direction of a small wooded area edging a park. God only knows what I hit in the park/woods with those little projectiles, and I definitely fell short on occasion and hit my neighbor’s roof and yard. It was years later that I realized what a careless little shit I had been. ---
**Author:** ![chappachula](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/d2c977/32.png) [@chappachula](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/chappachula)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2011, 1:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/talk-about-some-of-the-rotten-things-you-did-as-a-kid/579731/78 "2011-04-30T13:33:02Z")
> [@the lone cashew](#): > > I hid a perfectly good sprig of broccoli next to my plate, swore that I had eaten it. ye gods…such an evil person… you win the thread! ---
**Author:** ![pkbites](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pkbites/32/204_2.png) [@pkbites](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pkbites)\ **Post date:** [May 2, 2011, 5:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/talk-about-some-of-the-rotten-things-you-did-as-a-kid/579731/79 "2011-05-02T05:18:37Z")
> [@Trans Fat Og](#): > > _ **please do!** _ Alright. As a teen (again, mid-70’s) I worked at a drug [store](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/131/318945568_771653cffe.jpg) that was in the same building as a [grocery](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/26/59412317_907507a1f0.jpg) store. The same company owned both. The grocery store fired my friend because a customer came in and complained he was rude to her and used foul language. My friend had no idea what the hell they were talking about when he was called into the managers office. A long time later he found out it was the Aunt of a girl he broke up with. Anyway, the store was having a drawing for $75 shopping sprees, which was a good chunk of grocery money back then. They just had a box on a table where people would drop in their entry form. For a week at the end of my shift when I returned some of the grocery stores carts that people had brought into our store, I’d reach into that box and grab some of the entry forms. Then my friend and I would take turns calling the people on the entries and tell them they won the drawing and to come to the store on Saturday at noon for the presentation. That Saturday almost 100 people showed up demanding the prize they “won”. It got pretty intense. The Sheriffs department had to be called. ---
**Author:** ![FordTaurusSHO94](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/f07891/32.png) [@FordTaurusSHO94](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FordTaurusSHO94)\ **Post date:** [May 2, 2011, 5:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/talk-about-some-of-the-rotten-things-you-did-as-a-kid/579731/80 "2011-05-02T05:52:29Z")
> [@robert\_columbia](#): > > We have finally found a solution to the energy crisis. Where should we mail the Nobel Prize? To me, I guess. Are you really going to argue with a 9 year old’s perception of distance, Buzz Killington? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/talk-about-some-of-the-rotten-things-you-did-as-a-kid/579731.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/talk-about-some-of-the-rotten-things-you-did-as-a-kid/579731.md?page=5)