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Journal Em Emalb's Journal: What's the dumbest thing you've ever done? 77

Journal by Em Emalb

Everyone has had those moments of retardedness where they simply just don't think.

Share yours here.

Go AC if you must.

Me? I was about 12 and was trying to remove a screw from a board. The board was on the ground, I was kneeling down. Got it almost completely out with the screw driver, then decided to try and pull it the rest of the way out by hand. It was stuck pretty good. Gave it a good yank and bam, out it came. Nailed my right eye HARD with the back of my fist. Gave myself a black eye and saw stars for a good 10-20 seconds.

Dumbass.

Ok, your turn.

(If you've personally never done anything truly stupid (which I highly doubt) you can use the ever so popular friend of a friend approach)

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What's the dumbest thing you've ever done? More

What's the dumbest thing you've ever done?

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  • I was 17 and pulling out of a Blockbuster video. I was turning right. Looked left to make sure no one was coming and pulled out. Suddenly, there was a guy on my hood. Apparently I was damn near running him over and he jumped on the hood to prevent from getting mangled.

    Well, I was stunned by this and I flipped him off and sped away. As I was driving home, I felt like a HUGE ass and immediately drove back to see if I could find the guy, apologize, and make sure he was ok. I knew he was ok though becaus
    • going to a particular university ...

      ... for a chick. we split about 4 months in
      • Oh, shit, I would've done the same thing back in the day--hormones ruling instead of brains. That's nothing compared to almost KILLING someone and then flipping them off.

        Sheesh. :)
        • heh, well, true

          we got back together a few times over the next 2 years or so. finally got something other than blue balls and moved on

          like everyone says ... if they knew then what they knew now ...

          what's even more retarded is that i rated going to some uni for some chick as being more retarded than almost burning my house down trying to make napalm. god high school was fun haha
          • I think I can match you on that one. I worked my ass off and graduated a year early from college to move out west to be with my boyfriend. Who dumped me three days after I got there.

            In retrospect, it was one of the best things that happened to me (the breakup), but it would have been nice to have had a 4th year of college, I think.

            ....Bethanie....
      • Hey I did that too. Man was I stupid at 18. I actually had Case Western interested in me, and I pick the stupid sucky local U instead to be near gf. GF dumps me right after the first semester starts. Sweet. Then again this is the same gf who was in the car accident with me mentioned elsewhere in this journal.....
        • there must be something about the human male brain at 18 that makes us just, fucking retarded

          i was ready to go to some good engineering schools, but, like you, decided to go to the sucky local U
    • Oh my god, for some reason I find the thought of this so funny!! I can just see you in your car, practically running this guy over, and then realizing it and flipping him off.

      Oh, I can't catch my breath. I have to stop laughing. The people around me are starting to look at me funny. :)

    • I've thought of your story several times today, and each time I start laughing. People are wondering. It is a great story.

      As for me, I'd have to post a story similar to the ones dealing with bicycles. My brother and I were seeing how fast we could get this old Brady Bunch looking bike riding down the street. Well, I was pedaling so hard and fast that my concentration was completely taken up by my feet. I was even staring down at my feet. This meant, of course, that I didn't notice the parked car in

  • When I was about 8 or 9, somewhere in that youngling stage. My family and I were over at a friend's house, getting ready for all of us to go to Chuck E. Cheese for my birthday. I am out front skateboarding on the sidewalk. As usual, my shoes aren't tied, and while I am skating down the sidewalk a loose shoestring gets under a wheel, *BAM*, I get yanked off of the board, plowing face first into the sidewalk, and slide a couple of feet on my face.

    I took nearly all the skin off of my nose, and for some reaso
  • But in the vein that we've got going here, let me tell you that, indeed, girls can get racked up.

    Here's how I know:

    I was about 10 years old, and had been sent to go fetch my brother from playing at the next door neighbor's house. Rather than walk the 25 yards or so, I ride my bike over there. What can I say? I'm 10. And of course, when my brother gets out, he decides he's going to race me home and lock me out of the front door. On foot, he cuts across the yard and makes it in the house before I'm even h
    • I have a similar story, except I don't think it has as much to me being dumb as unlucky. Mom loves cats. She had this cat and it went outside to do it's business and it was raining and a dog started chasing it. So Mom runs out to look for it. Well she's been gone for like 30 minutes so Dad tells me to go look for her and tell her to "leave the damn cat out there, it'll come back tomorrow". So I get on my bike and ride to the neighbor's house. Their driveway is unbelievably steep. And it's raining. S
    • Bicycle injury stories. I got a million of 'em.

      As kids, we liked to build jumps for our bikes. Usually a ramp with a 2 or 3 foot drop on the other side -- at the bottom of a steep hill (pedalling as hard as you can).

      We could travel quite some distance through the air. I know this because we cleared all the obstacles we placed on the other side of the ramp (including people lying on the ground).

      I actually did this for years with no injury. This is the story of the very last time I took my bike over a jump
  • I've done a lot of stupid things, most of them involving personal injury or near misses thereof.

    The most recent dumb thing I did was cut off the tip of my thumb with a bread knife, as chronicled in my journal. That was pretty dumb.

    When I was 7 I thought that my 6 month old niece could sit up on her own on the swing in my back yard. I recall that her head was bleeding after she dove onto the ground. She's 17 now and seems to be okay.

    • The most recent dumb thing I did was cut off the tip of my thumb with a bread knife

      In my case, s/bread knife/paper cutter/. I did that in the high school photo lab while trimming some prints for a presentation.

      That was more carelessness than stupidity, though. For stupidity, we have to go to when I was maybe 8 or 9 and I borrowed a friend's 10-speed to see how fast I could get it going. I got up to a fairly decent speed, and then I jammed on the front brake. I ended up on my back with the bike ups

      • I did this one (paper cutter) in the libary. SHHHK! halfway across my thumbnail. I grabbed it and clamped it before it even really started to bleed, and walked out to the librarian. She wanted to know why I wanted to go to the nurse, so I let go of my thumb. Apparently, she wasn't fond of the site of blood.
      • s/bread knife/paper cutter/

        X-Acto knife here. Cutting paper with metal ruler as a guide. Holding the ruler down firmly with one hand, knife in the other. One finger sticking over the edge of the ruler
    • i was going to mention something else you did, but then decided just to leave this vague reference to it. comedic gold (on your part).
  • Way back when I was in the CCF (school army cadets), the platoon camped up for the night and it got really dark. I was radio guy, and I hadn't done a very good job keeping my night vision. Anyway, I got up from my kit to go piss. We'd dug a latrine in the middle of the camp so I set off that way but somehow walked a complete circle and ended up back at my own kit. I felt a tree, figured that was the right place and pissed all over the radio headsets.

    Jason (sergeant) caught me. Now if it was my own headset
  • So there I was, 1995. Just got my Pentium 90 a few months previous and wanted to get an upgrade solution. Not knowing what was out there I asked the salesman what he thought would be a good idea.

    DOH!

    It functioned and everything, but I never really did like the tape drive that much. I was going to go with an Iomega zip drive, but they charged for their upgraded drivers at the time.

    So about a year ago I bought a new motherboard for my machine because my old one released the demon of blue smoke (don't
  • Oh my. It's like asking "what's your favorite song?" I mean there are just so many choice you immediately want to break it down to categories-- dumbest thing I ever did driving, dumbest relationship move, dumbest physical act, etc.

    But I'll give you a choice one. I had just moved to Chicago and I was absolutely terrified of the whole winter and snow thing. I had never lived in it as an adult. So in the fall I took my car to some shop for it to be tuned up. They said I should get new spark plugs and r
    • Electricity is Darwin's personal assistant. I remember as a kid pulling the cord (not the actual plug like you should, otherwise you can rip the cord out of the plug) on a tv trying to unplug it (it was a long reach) and only pulling the plug out partway. Without thinking I reach all the way back and promptly grab the metal prongs sticking halfway out of the wall socket and get a nice little zap.
      • Heh... important note: the circuit breakers in your house will happily pop above 20 amps for safety reasons.

        This is for the safety of the house.

        Not you.
      • yeah-- I've got a few good electricity ones. That was probably the most potentially dangerous.

        Other classics include: In junior high I came up with a great idea. I decided to build a force-field. I figured when you take 2 magnets and get them so they push apart-- there must be something between them pushing them apart. Well, shoot electricity in the gap and you have a force field.

        I took a plug from an old lamp, stripped the wires on the lamp side and a couple pieces of a magnet that were curve shap
        • Ahh yes experimenting with electricity. I remember taking apart a hairdryer, and then wiring the little DC motor up directly to the AC cord and plugging it in. It flew up off the ground and hopped around for a few seconds before I unplugged it, emitting a shower of sparks that made marks that are probably still visible today. It had an interesting burnt smell too. I am amazed I am not dead considering I used to take things apart (like TVs) that have some pretty serious capacitors in them. Even though I neve
          • My parents had an old B&W TV that started turning substantially green. There were no external knobs on the back to adjust the tube, so I cracked it open. I found the color drive knobs, they were metal slots on the tube itself. I found a faint "G" on one, and started to adjust it when I realized I wouldn't know when it was good enough, so I turned on the TV.

            I was fine, until I adjusted my grip on the screwdriver, and my hand slipped onto the metal shaft. WOO~!

            I felt like I could play piano for a while.
            • Ahh you have of course reminded me of two other stories from my youth, where my brother confirmed two things for me (he was a great test subject):

              - peeing on an electric fence hurts like hell (sadly I wasn't there when he did this)
              - an electric cattleprod does hurt when applied to a big metal belt buckle (I was there for this one as the prod wielder hehe)

      • um. You only did that once? You were a smarter kid than I was :-)
  • First the question: does anyone know anyone who actually had their eye poked out by a stick? I was talking to the fiance about the whole "don't play with sticks or you will poke your eye out" thing and I was wondering if somewhere there is a poster child for this?

    Anyway, onwards to the story. It involves me at 17 or so, driving too fast in my crappy old chevy luv truck on a wet pothole filled road. As I dodged through the potholes I started to fishtail and eventually lost it, driving off the road and up an

  • Playing hockey 9 hours before major surgery. (when I had to avoid food and water for 24hr before. Was so dehydrated that they had to postpone the surgery.

    or

    crystal meth.

    -Ab
  • its a toss up between:

    a.) 11 years old, and I was throwing a tennis ball around inside the house(a forbidden activity) and I knocked down one of those spring loaded roller window shades. During the desperate attempt to fix it before Mom found out I was using my teeth to hold the little metal tab on the end while I rewound the shade, it slipped and spun out while chipping away a bunch of my front 2 teeth ...damnit that hurt.

    or

    b.) I was working for a landscaping outfit and was pounding a 12 inch spike

    • Re:hmm (Score:2)

      by nizo ( 81281 ) *
      Hehe your stories reminded me of my brother, who used to do yardwork back in highschool. He was using a weedwhacker which got clogged somehow. So what does he do? Turns it on end and starts looking down the business end. Somehow he turns it on and his face got weedwhacked. The cord hit right next to his eye, so he almost got a permanant reminder of why you should never mess with a weedwhacker while it is plugged in. He also had several scratches across his face for awhile that looked a serious cat attack or
  • I do lots of stupid things so it's kind of hard to pick one out of the batch, but I would like to share an experience close to your story.

    One time back when I was in high school (note that this story doesn't take place at school, though if it did it would be even more hilarious) in the middle of the night I must have been dreaming. I don't really remember at the moment what I was dreaming about, but I sat straight up in bed, while still sleeping, and punched myself in the eye. I don't think that really c
    • This reminds me of my friend Josh. He was the guy that went to church because his mother made him, not because he wanted to be there. Typical geek, he read a lot, didn't have a lot of friends. He's a lawyer now. I was probably one of his closest friends. Everyone always wondered why he was in a bad mood all the time. I went to his house one day and we were in his bedroom and he has a hanging lamp over his bed. I said, "Man, how do you keep from hitting your head on that lamp?" He said, "I don't. I
      • He wakes up and yells, "What the FUCK!?" Then realized where he was.

        The difference between religious folks and followers of JC is that the religious folks would get uptight over someone yelling "FUCK" while followers of JC would accept him as he is.
        Luckily most churches have at least one or two followers of JC amongst all the religious folks.
  • And for something stupid. The lesson is either A) don't do something stupid or B) don't get caught.

    Ahh, youth.
    • Despite the immense challenge it provides, I find A to be a lot easier than B. I also find that lawyers get paid MADD BANK.
  • Well, there was this one time, long ago, when I accidentally hit the "enter" key about eight characters through typing "rm -rf *.log" in the "/" directory of a small oil company that I was working for. Oh yeah, did I mention I was logged in as root?

    In the .0062 seconds it took me to register my error and ctrl-c it, I had managed to wipe out most of /bin. I never understood the term "sweating bullets" until that moment.. Luckily, I didn't delete any of their seismic data. But it took a long, long time to
    • I was working on a very time crunched migration from OtherVendor's equipment to MyEmployer's equipment, involving the SAP backend database that they ran the company on. The consoles for three systems were set up in a row on a table. I was sitting at the middle console. We were working on the middle machine and the machine to the right was (supposed to be) copying the database over the network. I needed to reboot, typed the command, nothing happened. Then the screen to my right cleared.

      I had been rsh'd

    • I've done similar.

      I trusted a disk-scanning utility to work properly on DOS 300MB HD, back when that was a BIG drive. (Yes, I said Megabyte, not Gigabyte.) This was on an ESDI controller, where you set the drive type to 1, and the BIOS on the controller takes over. Well, the util decided to believe the params for the BIOS rather than the ones on the partition table.

      I was up all night manually putting the partition table back together. Got it all back, too.
    • That is how I got to upgrade a Sun at my first job. I went to clear out /tmp and blew everything away in / instead (which included the kernel). Backups, what backups? The machine was fine until a reboot, so it seemed like a good opportunity to upgrade it to the newest version of the OS.....
    • type ls followed by the rest of the line, then hit enter.
      If it looks okay, hit up-arrow, then hit home, then edit the line to change ls to rm or rm -rf.
  • drilled a hole in my leg. 5/32" if i recall correctly. i was drilling rivets out of a plastic saddlebag, working at a bench, sitting on a stool. when one of the rivets finally drilled through, the drill slammed down and bounced off the plastic and into my leg. i remember not thinking about the pain of the new little hole in my right thigh, but thinking, "great. i can't believe i'm so stupid that i just drilled a hole in my fucking leg."

    that may or may not be the dumbest thing i've ever done, but it is
    • Mine was a staple gun in my thigh. Fortunately it was only a 1/2 inch staple.

      I was just dinking around, and wondered what would happen if I squeezed the handle, just once. . .

      ^_^

      • I was just dinking around, and wondered what would happen if I squeezed the handle, just once. . .

        That's how it always begins. There are times at my current job when I'm tempted to touch a piece of equipment with a 40,000 volt potential just because I'm curious. It looks so benign. Then I quickly run away before I have a chance to kill myself.
  • grade school age: I was being bugged by my little brother who simply would not leave my room after getting back from church one day. OS I throw stuff at him. Now it is a game for him. Evnetually I pick up my grand dad's fiberglass recurve bow and slot a wooden dowel (kid "safe" version of an arrow) and shoot it at my brother's head. I hit him on the front teeth.

    Lots of crying; Dad running in, seeing the situation; breaking the bow in half over his knee, me getting a serrious spanking; etc.

    No damage do
  • I've done so many things that were stupid in hindsight that I have no idea where to begin...

    One harmless example that comes to mind -- anything to do with twins is guaranteed to throw me off. As soon as the word "twins" gets into the conversation, you can expect me to say something really quite stupid somewhere along the line, even more so than normal (though I have learned to keep myself in check for a while).

    Case study: a friend tells me he's got a twin sister. Talks about her at length, about growing

    • Amen to both.

      Friend of a friend is the cutest, sweetest, most adorable girl you'll ever meet but she's not very tall and a bit sensitive about it. She came up to me at a party once wearing six-inch soles, noticable difference. I'd had a few drinks and it was all I could do to repeat over and over again in my head "don't mention her height, don't mention her height". Until the beer won and it came out, and she got really offended.

      Actually I never apologised properly for that. I was far too embarrassed to f

  • Heh (Score:2)

    by elmegil ( 12001 ) *
    I'll mention the stuff that's somewhat ironic and long enough ago that I can't feel too embarassed by it.

    When I was in third grade, I wanted to be magneto. And I knew that you made a magnet by running wire in loops around a nail and running electricity through it.

    So I made a ring of several loops of (thank goodness) insulated wire, put it on my hand, excused myself for the bathroom, and plugged into the wall socket.

    Yes, you heard that right.

    Arguably the STUPIDer thing that I did was a few years later, taki

    • I forgot to mention; in third grade, I got a nasty jolt up my arm, which hurt for a while after that, but luckily didn't scramble myself any worse than that.
    • Oh, the irony? My degree from college is electrical engineering....

      Yes, but you did this stuff before you got the degree.
      Solution? Make all curious kids do an EE degree before they're big enough to reach the power sockets in the house.
  • I really don't do dumb things. Honest. Scout's honour. Would I lie to you?

    Well, okay. I had a knife-fight with Thalia about a month ago. Got poked with a butcher knife a few times. No lasting scratches, and it was fun for me. So, not dumb.

    Uh, besides that... Dunno. I've made a few U-turns on crowded roads in the past year that I am not proud of. Nothing colossally stupid.
  • She was more the size of a Silver Dollar.

    Dumbest thing I ever done.
  • Back when I was in California, about age 5 or 6, there was this family that was friends of my parents from the Navy. They had a daughter a handful of years older than me, and since there weren't alot of kids in the neighborhood, we ran around the neighborhood alot.

    She was in a karate class of some sort, and one day came home, and when we got together spoke those immortal words. "Let me show you something I learned in class today." I said the most intelligent thing at the time, "Sure", and she proceeded to
  • Our basement growing up had many boxes left over from several moves and my brother and I would make forts out of them on either side of the basement. We would launch Hot Wheels, SW action figures, Transformers (Actually GoBots because my parents were sorta lame.) and other assorted childhood items in our regularly scheduled Fort Wars. Regularly scheduled meant Saturday mornings after the 90 minute long episode of the Smurfs had finally ended. By which time we were completely jacked on junk food breakfast ce
  • I was learning how to set up Samba on my RH9 box at home. Since all the online tutorials set up the first share to /tmp I did the same. Then I moved (read: deleted) all my photos, documents, etc. from my windoze machines to the share drive.

    Yeah...

    A few days later I was scratching my head after noticing that my Samba share was empty...and then yelling and breaking things after read up on what the /tmp directory is for...

    ARGH

    The other stupid thing wasn't so much done *by* me as done *to* me.

    When I was

  • ...one night in high school, I decided to experiment with alcohol. So, I had someone pick up a bottle of Wild Turkey for me. I don't quite remember everything that happened that night, but I know my parent did find out when the hospital called them. That sucked. I've pretty much avoided alcohol ever since.

  • I renovated a friends kitchen. Tore up the subfloor, replaced floor joists and put it all together again putting down some new good looking tile. Up until that point I seemed like a competent person.

    Then it was time to reinstall the dishwasher. This was a very cramped space and not much room to work to get the in/out water lines hooked up as well as the power. Anyway, so I'm back there trying to get it all in place so we can slide the machine in.

    Bzzzt!

    Me: OOooooh that tingled nicely. I must've put the fr

  • Well in that case it was:

    1. See pretty rattlesnake
    2. Decide to pick up pretty rattlesnake.

    Rattlesnakes hate that, in case you were wondering. Got a really cool scar though.

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