Here at work we have a blue permanent marker for writing on backup cds. it is our most important pen. One day I came to work to find that it had gone missing. I spent a good 20 minutes looking for it, even searchin in rooms it is never likely to go in. After I had finished searching my colleague told me that he had looked everywhere the previous night and hadn’t found it.
A few days later, having subconsciously thought of more places to look, I spent another 5 minutes looking. Didn’t find it.
Yet more days pass. I go to our most commonly used drawer to get some sheets which we use as a checklist. I lift the pile of sheets slightly - there is the pen, in quite full view!
Back in high school a girl in my Chem class was heating some sort of solution and had idiotically placed a stopper in the end of the tube, after being instructed not to. The stopper blasted out of the tube like a bullet, followed by some boiling chemicals. It was like something out of a cartoon watching it ricochet around the room.
Later in the class she grabbed a rack of hot tubes and placed them in the sink to wash them. A couple of them survived, but I’m pretty sure about a dozen of them exploded. It was not her day.
Here’s my stupid story. I think I’ve posted this in another thread before , but oh well.
One day, my mom made a nice apple pie. Homemade crust and everything, the whole works. So when it was done, Mom took it out of the oven and sat it down on top of the oven. On one of the burners, to be precise. Well a little later I decided I wanted to make some tea. So I filled the kettle and placed it on the back burner. And stupid me accidentally turned on the burner with the pie sitting on it, and leave the room. Glass pan explodes, pie explodes. Sadly, the pie could not be saved.
Well, instead of the glass exploding I’ve had ICE explode on me.
It only happened once, but while coming in from doing some hot summer chore (mowing the lawn, most likely) I fixed myself a glass of water. The water out of the tap was warm, so I dropped a couple of ice cubes in it - and when the first ice cube hit - POW! The ice cube exploded and I jumped back like I had been electrocuted. It’s never happened to me since - sure, the ice will crack when put in water, but only once have I had it explode!
Back before I started high school I took summer school and one of my teachers worked as a part time nurse in the hospital and he had a story about this guy who came in one night wearing his bath robe.
Teach told the guy to “take a seat and fill out the paperwork.” The guy responds “I can’t.” After some discussion he heard the following story…
The wife had done some house cleaning today and cleaned the toilet thoroughly, but apparently the meal she cooked didn’t settle with the Mister, so he was stuck on the john for a while with the runs.
Now the guy was a smoker and was smoking on the john, passing the time I guess, in any case, he finished his cig and threw it in the pot, and BAM!
The combination of the crap, the cleaning crap, and the cigarette exploded, burning his posterior with second or third degree burns…
Maybe not stupid directly but it’s a damn stupid way to get 2nd or 3rd degree burns, not to mention to get the burns on your ass…
My ex boyfriend, being the incredible genius that he was, decided to get his butt warm by sticking it in a furnace at a house show. After being informed that his pant were going up in flames, he took them off, put the fire out, and stayed (in his boxers) till the show was over. He got 2nd degree burns on his butt and legs. We broke up 3 days later.
A girl in my chem. Lab the other day, didn’t read the directions and, decided to boil Hydrochloric Acid. The acid bubbled up and Shot out of the tube all over her and her lab partner. Genius.
Many years ago (I was about 8-10) I was making popcorn, and decided I wanted butter on it. The easiest way to do this is melt butter in the microwave. Unfortunately, this has the annoying effect of causing butter to splatter all over the microwave. There’s got to be a way to prevent that, I thought. My eyes lit immediately on the napkin holder. A minute or so later the cup goes into the microwave with a napkin taped over it.
After only a few seconds, I notice light coming out of the microwave. “Self, doesn’t the light in the microwave not work anymore?” I think. So I look inside to see the napkin on the cup burning merrily inside the microwave. This is bad. I turned the microwave off as I desperately try to think of a way to make the fire go out. Luckily, it went out by itself. The microwave was fine, and so was the cup, but I needed to melt more butter. Sigh.
I am, usually, a morning person. Most of the time I don’t really need a cup of tea to wake up in the morning, but it’s part of my routine, so I have one. Some mornings, however, I need that cup of tea more than I know.
It was a routine weekday morning. I stumbled downstairs, not fully awake, put the kettle on and the TV on to check the morning news, got out a cup and saucer and whatever it was I needed for the other half of breakfast. I remember vaguely noticing that the canister containing tea bags wasn’t quite where it usually was, but that didn’t bother me. Then, as the kettle started to boil, I reached out to get a teabag, directly over the steam coming from the kettle! I finished waking up immediately.
After I stuck my arm under some cold water, I called up my boss’s voice mail and said I’d just scalded myself and would be, “a bit late.” I managed to find a pharmacy that was open, and found out that the short term remedy was to stick some OTC burn cream on it and bandage it, so long as I saw a doctor later in the day. As a result, I got into work on time with a second-degree scald that was pretty much square and over an inch in diameter, and a rather impressive bandage. My boss was vaguely amused about how I could say I would be, “a bit late” and still turn up a couple minutes early, despite a bit of an injury. Just one thing confuses me about this. When I saw the doctor that afternoon, he gave me a prescription for 6 50 gram tubs of burn cream! I know the size because, even though this happened nearly 4 years ago, I still have 4 1/2 of them. Just how often does he think I do this kind of thing?
This actually reminds me of something I used to do when I was very young, that was also very stupid.
I had to have been about 8-10. At the time I went to a lot of movies and I absolutely loved movie theatre popcorn.
The problem was I could never get the butter right when I was at home.
So one day my parents ask me to make popcorn, which I gladly do. As soon as they had a handful of the popcorn their eyes darted to me and I knew something was wrong.
They asked, “What did you put on this popcorn?”, I said “the butter that’s in the cabinet”.
“But there is no butter in the cabinet”.
So I went into the kitchen, grabbed the “butter” from the cabinet and came back to show them.
I remember that my dad once put a hot plate in the cold sink and it shattered. I was 5 or 6 at the time and found it amusing, since I thought that grownups never messed things up.
When I was 11 or 12, I went to heat up some leftover pizza in the microwave. This pizza was in a cardboard box with some foil on it, and when I turned on the microwave, I saw sparks flying. I immediately opened the door and saw burn marks on the side. My mom wasn’t too pleased, and now every time I go to heat something up I see the black spots and feel stupid. Oh well.
I had the light bulb explosion happen several years ago when I positioned a cage containing a couple Peach Face Lovebirds above a lamp. One day they splashed cold water out of their dish onto the bulb and–KAPOW!
I also managed to burn myself with toilet bowl cleaner. I was moving from one apartment to another in the same complex and thus was carrying items by hand to the new apartment. I didn’t see that the nozzle on the container of bowl cleaner was open and as I carried it I put my fingers on the handle. Luckily it was pointed at my elbow and when I noticed the burning sensation there I was able to figure out what happened and run cold water on my arm for a couple minutes. It was only a minor injury which left no scars.
One possible mishap avoided: when I had a roomate we had a problem with a stopped up kitchen sink. The landlord was slow to fix it so every day we poured lye and drano into it hoping for the best. My roomate’s brother decided to try another method of handling the problem, and shortly after our most recent futile attempt at using some alkali based drain cleaner, he arrived with some nitric acid which he intended to dump down the sink. We stopped him just in time.
Mine was a Pyrex casserole dish. Evidently you can’t cook on the stovetop with Pyrex ovenware. Ever had a fritata? I haven’t. Ever had a fritata all over your kitchen? I have.
Once we had a trash can with several inches of water and some cleaning stuff in it sitting on the porch because it was rank. It was a big 50 gallon can too. My mom gave me something to throw away. I also had the cordless phone in my hand. I saw the trash can, and not not knowing it was in the process of being de-ranked, I had decided it was as good a spot as any to throw the trash in the can. Instead, being absentminded, I tossed the phone in the can and nearly hung up the trash so it could recharge. The phone was taken apart and dried out. It worked fine, but I got a lot of ribbing because I don’t usually let my right hand lose track of what my left hand is doing.
BTW, what are underoos? I’m probably a little to young to remember them.
Underoos was underwear/pajamas that were printes to look like superhero costumes. They were all the rage and they were so cool. Unless of course they burst into flames. Sadly a few kids were burned really bad before they recalled them. They came out later with flame retardant ones but they just didn’t make a good comeback.
