I have two. Once, when I was about nine and my sister was two, I was in our room reading or doing my homework and she was being the typical pesky younger sibling and getting on my nerves. So finally I took her into the family room and tied her to a chair, then went back to whatever I was doing. My mother found her about ten minutes later and said she had to duck out of the room for a second and stop laughing.
The second time was when I was at my cousin’s. We were bored so we started going around her neighborhood and pulling up all of the flags on the mailboxes. Later on, her mother was going shopping and as we’re driving along, she’s looking at all the mailboxes and of course, we’re sitting there giggling.
“Guys, do you know something about this?” “Um…” “You know it’s illegal to mess around with mailboxes?” “It is?” “Yeah.” “Oh.”
When I was a teenager I got in a huge fight with my mother. I completely lost it and called her a bad bad name and threw a piece of cake at her. She told me to she was going to tell my father to deal with this and slammed out of the room.
His punishment was to tell me not to call my mom that bad bad name any more. The End.
I still have no idea why I didn’t grounded for life for doing that. Maybe he thought I was right??
In 8th grade I was tormented by a nasty little shit named Mike from August through April. I pretty much took it, avoid him, and never responded physically mostly because I was much larger than him and didn’t want to be the bully. One day in April I got tired of him riding me so I beat the tar out of him out by the bike racks. Nobody saw the fight and when it was over I went into the orchestra room as was my custom at the time. When the bell rang I was walking through the cafeteria when Mike approached me and said “The only reason you won the fight was because you’re bigger than me, asshole.” I think he expected the presence of nearby teachers would deter me from punching him the face. It did not. I beat the tar out of him despite knowing I’d get caught.
Now I really can’t claim that my actions were entirely unpunished as I was suspended for the rest of that day and spent the next within the confines of in school suspension (i.e. as close to solitary as you can get in a public school). But when the shop teacher caught us fighting and took us to the assistant principal’s office Mike continued to berate me verbally while I remained silent. When the assistant principal and the dean had their little heart to heart with us Mike continued to berate me verbally. When my mother came to pick me up the assistant principal said “I’m only punishing Odesio because it’s required by policy. Even while they were in my office Mike was constantly antagonizing Odesio but he remained calm the entire time.” The assistant principal was the head disciplinarian for the school so these comments were surprising.
But I wasn’t really worried about a suspension I was more concerned with what Coach would do to me the next day. This was Texas back in 1990 and corporeal punishment was still an option. An option that Coach had certainly used on me for other transgressions throughout the year. The Athletic department came down really hard on student athletes misbehaving in school and getting unsatisfactory behavior marks on your report card, failing grades, and fighting were infractions that would typically be punished with serious exercise, a paddling, and on occasion both. My last period was my Athletics class (replaced P/E for me) and when I got there Coach called me into the office and asked me to explain my behavior. I told him the truth fully expecting to run until I felt sick, be paddled, or both but it didn’t happen. He just said “I’m familiar with Mike. Don’t do it again.” and that was the end of the story.
While I was technically punished with a day of suspension followed by in school suspension I don’t really feel as though I was punished in any meaningful way.
The night before we were supposed to move out of our house, my brother and I were horsing around in the newly-empty master bedroom, skating around on the hardwood floor and deliberately throwing balls around with our eyes closed. Well, the ball hit the big overhead light fixture and knocked it to the floor, shattering it into hundreds of pieces that went absolutely everywhere. The new owners were supposed to arrive in the morning and would see that we’d wrecked the fixture. So, terrified, we both skedaddled and hid.
Of course, my parents heard the tremendous crashing noise and sound of breaking glass from elsewhere in the house and came running. It turned out they were way more freaked out about the amount of broken glass on the floor than the actual fact of what we’d done and were so relieved when they found us and realized we hadn’t gotten cut up that we didn’t get in any trouble at all. I think Mom might have told us to be a little more careful with balls in the house next time, but I honestly don’t remember even getting told off.
Edit: We also didn’t get in major trouble when my mom discovered that we had been climbing out my brother’s bedroom window to play on the roof. We were 6 and 4 at the time. I think she was so horrified and relieved that nothing bad had happened before she found us that all we got was a “Never do that again.”
Not me, but once when my sister was little, she was sitting beside my mother at the table while my mom was baking bread. Apparently, my mother failed to notice that my sister was pouring flour on our cat.
When I was 11 or so I accidentally overflowed our bathroom sink. My dad didn’t do anything - just sent me to the other room while he cleaned up all the water and when the (nasty old) lady downstairs complained about water damage in her ceiling he pretended to not know anything about it.
When I was 10 or so I was outside just messing around and throwing rocks, at nothing in particular. One managed to hit the bottom right corner of the sliding glass door on our house. I watched in horror as cracks quickly radiated upwards in a spiderweb pattern from the impact point and most of that layer of glass fell apart in chunks (it was safety glass obviously.)
I don’t remember getting in trouble for it, but I was definitely worried.
One of my 7th grade teachers was notorious for assigning lengthy essays as punishments… but he never remembered he’d assigned them!
If he caught me goofing off or reading a comic book or ____, he’d ask “What are you doing?” I’d say, “Nothing.” He’d then order me to write a 10 page essay on The Art of Doing Nothing.
I wouldn’t do it, and he’d completely forget to ask for it the next day, so it all worked out fine. Everyone came to realize his “punishments” were never really punishments at all.
A “friend” called 911 from the payphone outside my school. He was caught, and then said that I dared him to do it. I was given four “Saturday schools”.
We were the first family in the street to have a TV (this would be about 1960), and it was no doubt very expensive. My mother’s in the kitchen, presumably doing something noisy as she doesn’t hear this tremendous crash that must have happened … first thing she knows about it is I walk into the kitchen dusting my hands and saying “Picture all gone!”. Yes, I didn’t like what was on TV so I pushed the whole thing over and smashed the tube.
Looks to me like Chessic Sense accidentally made a topic out of something he meant to be just a reply (to this topic), so a mod merged it into this topic.
Back in the day, dad was in the Air Force, and we were living in the Philippine Islands. At the NCO club was a nickel slot machine, and dad would drop a dollar or two in it on occasion. One day, he came home with a 1937 buffalo nickel from the slot machinel, and the buffalo looked as if it had only 3 legs. It’s a well documented error, due to an over polished die at the mint.
He was so happy, and I was about 7 or 8 years old, and there was just a little bit of the hoof in one spot, so I took a sewing needle and started to scratch off the last bit of the leg. No doubt I did it, because I was right in front of dad, mom, and my sister.
I wasn’t punished, but I did get The Look. I think I’d rather have been spanked.
If the nickel was in new condition, it would be worth several thousand dollars. It’s worn,so it’s only worth $600 to $700 to a collector today. Without the scratches, probably $100 more. As it sits, with the story, it’s priceless.
:S