What little things have you done that are just stupid?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I once lent my van to a friend for the weekend. I was inexplicably given the wee rotor from a blender as some sort of collateral. Life is odd so I did not question this. I kept this for many years and moved it from house to house as some sort of totem.
When confronted with a damaged coffee ginder, probably six years later, and nothing but unground beans, I proceeded to disassemble the grinder in desparation. I recalled my rotor totem and employed it in the repair. Everrything worked well when reassembled but it would not remain intact. Aha!, I thought without quotation marks, this would be an opportune time for a locking washer. Locking washers, also known as split washers, have a split in them that has been forced apart in such a manner that they will create a loicking pressure when screwed down.
Well, I added one. With much pomp and circumstance I engaged the grinder. It buzzed with glory. It turned with passion. It screwed that little washer tight with all its force and locked the whole spinning mechanism down and ceased all revolutionary progress forever. I left for Dunkin’ Donuts.

Anyone else have a similar stupid misjudgement?

2

Don’t feel too bad about it. I once bought coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts too.

3

One time I burnt my hand on the toaster trying to look inside. And then I burnt myself within a week ironing.

4

Living through life I have had more than my share of dumb moments, but the one that springs to mind would be the rather dumb chain of decisions that let me to think that putting instant hand sanitizer on my manly bits would be a good thing.

I still sweat a little bit at the sight of a purell ad.

5

There are days I count myself lucky I’m still alive.

Shortly after moving in to our new (old) house, I was puttering around the garage, which I had declared was to be my workshop. (It has become my wife’s storage bin, and I can’t even get in the door these days. Sigh.) There on the wall was an outline, a rectangle taller than it was wide, with four very prominent screw-marks at the corners. Leading up to it from below was a steel pipe, with capped wires coming out of the end; leading down to it from above was another, with a similar set of capped wires coming out the end.

I was puzzled. Tracing the upper set, I soon discovered that the only logical place they could lead was the security light above the garage; which, now that I thought about it, hadn’t ever been on when I was around. Those sneaky bastards! I already knew they’d taken every working light bulb out of the house when they left. This must be the control box for the security light – or the location for it, rather.

It occurred to me that this would be easy to replace. Just wire in a new box and presto! security light workee. I went to the hardware store, located a cheap one that the guy there said would work with what I described as having, and returned bearing my purchase. Being the smart, cautious sort I am, I of course went immediately to the basement and turned off the power to the house (my wife enjoyed this part).

Now, before I continue, I should point out that I do not have an attached garage. It is a separate building from the house itself. With me so far?

Okay then. I returned to the garage and went inside, walking right past the big metal box with the knife switch marked ‘high voltage’, pulled up a stool, and began installing the control box. The upper wires were easy enough – maybe ten minutes of fiddling. Then I removed the caps on the lower wires and tsked thoughtfully. They were a mess, and needed to be re-twisted if I was going to get them around the lugs. I reached for the pliers, got a firm grip on the wire, and… nothing.

When I came to, the pliers were nowhere to be found, I’d wet myself, and the old-style fuse panel still had smoke drifting out of it.

The fuse panel I’d ignored at least three times as I wandered around; probably more, in truth.

Stooopid.

6

Once, when cooking dinner, I ran my finger along the edge of a knife to see if it was sharp.

Of course, I just explained it to the ER doctor as a kitchen accident. He shook his head as if to say “When will people learn? Kitchens kill!”

7

I must say that I have learned to thoroughly scrub my hands in the interim between harvesting and processing the jalapenos and employing the facilities.

8

So, you never got your van back, or didn’t return the collateral?

9

If he got his van back, he could have used it to drive over the coffee beans.

10

In a gorge, I put my hands on the bottom of an overhanging ~ 2’*2’*2’ piece of rock and imitated an ironman lifting it at the suggestion of my brother. It them came loose on me and I barely escaped being squashed.

On the return trip, the rock wall it was on looked unstable, so at my insistence we stood across the creek from it and I threw a decent-sized pebble at it. I am not kidding when I say the entire rock face fell down, or at least the front 1 foot of it (~ 100 ft wide by 30 ft high). We were enveloped in dust for a minute or so when the dust cloud reached us.

So I came close to killing myself, and slightly less close to killing my entire hiking party.

11

I got the van back but it did not survive the ensuing years until the coffee incident.

I’m not sure why I did not return the rotor. Perhaps it was because I knew it had some future purpose…

12

My first week of employment at Arby’s - we ran out of little cardboard dishes to heat up portions of chicken and such for certain sandwiches. My improvised, brilliant solution? Use one of the sandwich wrappers! The…tinfoil sandwich wrappers. In the microwave.

Much crazy sparking and flame ensued.

Another time (and this is really shameful), when my boyfriend at the time and I were just getting into Good Beer - you know, beer that often has sediment at the bottom of the bottle? I peered suspiciously into the bottle, saw crud at the bottom and began to vigourously shake it to mix it up. BF looked at me, looked to our mutual friend and said “Take that away from her please.” :smack:

13

:smack:

I’ve done this before. I was a bit… sweaty down there, and needed to cool off. Alcohol dries fast, it’d cool me off for sure! Um, no, way, that shit BURNS!!!

14

My wife is pretty good about takin out the kitchen trash. I say ‘takin’ rather than ‘taking’ because, like that spelling, she doesn’t quite finish the job. What she does is she takes it through the house and leaves it in the laundry room next to the garage door where I usually discover it the next morning.

So this morning, I step into the laundry room and catch a whiff of something amiss. Seeing a medium sized trash bag sitting there, my early morning brain wonders if that could be where the odor is originating. I take the bag, stick my nose right in the little opening and take a much bigger than is prudent sniff.

That wasn’t bright.

15

My favorite little stupidity is the time the grip on my putter wore out. The butt end of the grip wore down and was hanging by a flap; sort of like a trap door.

I worried and fretted and stewed about how I was going to repair it and what sort of adhesive would be best.

This went on for a couple weeks and then as I was laying on the davenport watching TV the answer came to me in a flash.

TAKE THE DAMN THING TO THE PRO AND HAVE HIM PUT ON A NEW GRIP.

16

Amatuers. In my younger days I somehow ended up with a case of crabs. I tried a couple OTC items designed for other uses in that are but they did not get rid of those little buggers. The morning of the day I had a doctor’s appointment, I was refilling my Zippo lighter. Hmm, I wonder. I got a cotton ball, soaked it in lighter fluid and gave the boys a good dobbing. It started to sting. It started to burn. Oh my Mother of Mary Jesus did it burn. I ended up with a 2nd degree chemical burn on the sack. The doc gave me a prescription for some burn ointment and suggested the crabs likely did not survive the lighter fluid. They didn’t.

17

I vote racer72 as Thread Winner. Indeed, I have nothing that compares.

18

I was in Hackers Club at my high school, which was run by the IT administrator who would later be fired for selling weed to students–the principal was a Vietnam war protestor and loved the guy for his “rebel spirit”, but he turned out to be a little too rebellious. Anyway, I was 14, I was a freshman, and I was practically ejaculating in my pants over the fact that I could do things of dubious legality with computers and computer equipment in a school-sanctioned environment. (One week, our assignment was to go into the common computer area and disrupt the other students’ learning experience as much as possible without breaking a school rule, breaking the law or using Denial of Service attacks. That was a fun one.)

But I digress. This particular week, we were instructed to hack a whole box of CueCats to render them incapable of spying on their users. What are CueCats, you ask? Well, the appropriate word is “were”: CueCats were a short-lived disaster in New Economy marketing. They were little barcode scanners in a somewhat catlike shape that you could pick up for free at Radio Shack, and then you could scan specially-made barcodes printed in magazine ads, which would take you directly to the website advertised…and send that URL and as much other information as it could get its hands on to some central location, where your information could be sold to other advertisers. This was before “spyware” was a household word, and the idea that advertisers would want to compromise and sell users’ personal information was virtually unknown to everyone outside of the file-sharing world. (Which was relatively small, back then. Those were the glory days of Napster and Scour, they were.) For those who don’t remember seeing these barcodes, they were mostly in Parade, the little newsprint magazine that comes in the middle of your local Sunday paper.

Well, we at Hackers Club didn’t like it one bit, so we decided to open the things up and physically remove the board with the spy firmware on it. Our trusty admin, Doug, put a web page with information on how to conduct the surgery on the projector and then turned off all of the lights in the room, so that the only light was coming from the projector and one lone CRT at the front of the classroom.

I was a bit of an outcast, even by Hackers Club standards, so I was completely overlooked in the process of appropriating screwdrivers. I wandered around frustratedly looking for a screwdriver, with a fully-intact CueCat in hand while the rest of the club was halfway through the operation. A screwdriver finally caught my eye. Aha! But why was its handle resting inside a holder? Ah, no matter, thought I; I could only make matters worse by looking a gift screwdriver in the mouth. So I grabbed the screwdriver by the metal end between my index and middle fingers and pulled it out of its holster, looking all cool. In fact, everyone sitting at that table stared at me with their gaping maws hanging down, blown away by my coolness.

Then I dropped the screwdriver and ran screaming at the top of my lungs. Turned out my screwdriver was a hot soldering iron.

19

I’ve done about a billion dumb things. Just since lunch time today I ate some food too quickly and got grease stains on my shirt. I filled out some forms, made a mistake, used white-out, let the white-out dry, then mailed them in w/o filling in the correct info. I forgot to call someone and met a new business contact and acted too laid back and silly. If I tried I could probably identify a few more.

20

Is this a competition?

btw…carnivorousplant fixed the tag for ya…

tsfr