When I was five, I picked up the cup that my Dad left on the bathroom counter, to see what he kept in it (I was too small for my head to reach the countertop).
It had my Dad’s false teeth in it.
I was so scared at seeing a cup full of teeth that I dropped it on the floor, & broke the dentures.
Dad gave me a paddling that day, I can tell you!
My most recent, and most annoying incident was one fateful morning where, as I was putting in my contact lenses, noticed a black speck on one of them. As I scraped this off, I heard a small crack.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” I thought.
Yup, I somehow managed to scrape that speck off in just the right way to crack my contact lens in half. And later that day, I was slated to take a test for a job I was applying for a job I was applying for. Also, the prescription on my glasses was ~3 years out of date. Hilarity ensued.
And this one isn’t mine, but the person to whom it belongs doesn’t visit the SDMB, so I’m probably safe in telling it…
One night some friends and I are out at Tony Roma’s. We had one of those little candle-lantern type things at our table (basically a lantern, but almost mini in scale). For whatever reason, one of my friends decides he wants to see what’s on the bottom of the thing. So he turns it upside down to look…and the glass top of the thing falls off and breaks into a few hundred pieces. :eek:
I don’t want to talk about how I ruined my car either.
does (accidentally) setting a toaster on fire count?
I haven’t broken many things; the worst was a bagpipe chanter (the part with the finger holes). I’d taken lessons and had just gotten my very own first set of pipes. I was twisting the chanter to remove it from the bag, and was holding it too low – the torque just snapped it. I was heartbroken; never felt the same way about playing again.
The most recent was a wee fighter from Rockemen. Now, they look cheesy and fragile, but actually, they’re not. They’re made to be disassembled and reassembled many times and are really quite durable.
In the hands of mere mortals, that is.
My husband just gaped at me. “I’ve never seen anyone break one before.”
Now, he managed to shatter an opened bottle of red wine against the stove. Result: Two shards of glass lodged in feet, one in finger, red splashed all over the place (well, that wall needed scrubbin’ anyhow) and a distinct yeasty odor throughout the house.
I’ve managed to break several boxspring mattresses. Every once in a while I get the idea that it would be amusing to fling myself on the bed from across the room, and crrraaaaack! :smack:
I broke my in-laws sink too, on the second or third time I met them. Turned the faucet knob a little too far with a little too much force and it came undone. They had to go outside and turn the water off; I wanted to just sink in the ground and disappear.
At Trader Joe’s, I pulled out a container of milk from the case and it fell to the floor. Milk everywhere. They were cool about it and refused to accept my offer of money.
Just yesterday, I broke a window in my classroom while trying to kill a yellowjacket with a textbook.Hey! Me too! That’s a lesson you only have to learn once.
My…my…my…
[holding back tears]
mini-Ipod.
Don’t try shuffling while peeing!
I broke my mom’s cake plate lid when I was eight or nine. I didn’t pull it out far enough from the overhanging shelf when getting a donut.
I broke a glass dish when I was a freshman in high school, not realizing that putting the hot dish in the cold sink would crack it.
both my little fingers
neither one bends correctly as a result
Soccer ball. Huge (8’x10’ at least) Plate glass storm window. You get the picture.
I also broke a 5-gallon glass jar that was partially full of change. The hippie who owned it was cashing in the change at a coinstar machine. I was working at that store and hit the jar with a line of carts that I was bringing in. The guy was cool about it but after he was gone the manager pointed out one of the pieces of glass where it said “1872.” Man, I could have gotten that jar for free from the guy after he was done with his change and sold it for a couple hundred bucks. Oops.
Once I was emptying the dishwasher, and managed to shatter a glass mixing bowl on the marble countertop which overhangs the infernal machines (it and I have issues, shall we say). My mother, attracted by my loud cursing, just stood there and said,
“You know, that was an heirloom.”
Well geez, mom, thanks for making me feel sooo much better.
We have a greenhouse type thing that replaced our old porch. Part of this involved covering the window wells into the basement with extra-super-strong glass. Well, I managed to break one of those (just a few weeks after they were installed, no less) by leaping onto the antique loveseat that was sitting on it. My concentrated weight on the little peg-leg cracked it with a startlingly loud crack. My parents just kind of looked at me in their “Oh, there goes our clumsy daughter breaking something again” look as I slunk sheepishly away into my room.
My birthday cake.
I was turning nine (I think) and we were all staying up at our cottage on Lake Joseph in Muskoka, so the only way to get a good birthday cake was to get into our motorboat and drive over the bay to the docks at the northern end of the lake.
They had an ice cream parlour there between the fishing-bait shop and the convenience store, and the people there built us a gorgeous, smooth, perfectly cool, chocolate-frosted cake. It had roses and swirls and my name in big letters on it. It was a mouthwatering thing of beauty.
I held it on my lap as we drove back, cutting an arc of rainbow spray through the bay as the waves splashed against the hull. We pulled up to our boathouse in the back and I was ready to jump out, still clutching the box…
…when a wave tipped the boat just gently to one side, I tripped, and the cake went tumbling, over and over–in slow motion, like you see in the cartoons–to land with a ‘splat’ on the dock. All in pieces.
sniff 
Did you still eat it? C’mon…you can tell us. 
I sat around waiting for days, hoping the very expensive digital camera I dropped in the pool would still work once it dried off. It did! Hurrah! So scratch digital camera off my list.
I still managed to screw up my car though.
Not necessarily. Many glass companies print the original patent dates and such, along with some kind of logo, on their larger or more elaborate jars. I’ve got two large Mason jars (one of which has a five gallon capacity) that have “1858” in large block numbers on the sides. The five gallon jar was manufactured in the early 1980s; the smaller one was manufactured around 2003.
When I was five or six, I broke a porcelain collector’s doll that had been sent to me as a birthday gift by an aunt I had never met. It was basically a miniature stand-up version of the traditional porcelain “baby doll.” I wasn’t familiar with these though, since I only played with Barbie dolls. I thought this doll was some kind of fancy Barbie, so I happily pulled it out of the box…and its little arm came off.
I just broke my blue glass dragon.
It was on the same shelf as my CDs and I knocked it off while getting out a CD. Its head and both wings broke off. sobs
Hearts. Everywhere.
Oh, wait. Heart (singular), and it was mine… :smack:
Lissa, do you think that maybe Incident One was the result of the curator doing to you what you did to him in Incident Two?