Stupid things you've done...

Gary W. Graley

Gary W. Graley

“Imagination is more important than knowledge"
Knifemaker / Craftsman / Service Provider
Joined
Mar 2, 1999
Messages
27,494
Most if not all of us have done a few bonehead things, what made me think
of this today is what happened to me a few minutes ago...:)

Had to go into work this morning, always a fun thing :rolleyes:

So I grabbed a can of diet coke for on the way home.

Get home, out of the car, grabbed my backpack full with camera and laptop
grabbed the stuff I need for my trip next week
Grabbed the 'open' can of diet coke with my left hand

And as I walked to the house, the wind is blowing very hard, the wind
started to blow my hat off my head, so I threw my left hand up quickly
to stop it....hehehe, the soda in the can flew up and onto my head
drenching me in sticky cold soda, what a goof eh?

Oh well, my wife and daughter got a good laugh out of it !
G2
 
Used a fillet knife, after cutting a lot of fish, to slice lemons. Slice, Slice, Slice, slice [ouch] :eek:
 
I have, on occasion, checked my watch while holding a beverage- spilling it on myself or the ground in the process.
 
Last weekend putting the 72 quart cooler in my trunk, I banged my head on the trunk latch.
Not to bad, eh?
I needed to rearrange the load, took the cooler out and banged my head putting it back in.
The same spot too.
Ouch-DOH-ouch
 
Called the Police when I was home drunk in my youth to report a hit and run with a fatality, the victim............a chicken from my coop that got spooked ran out into the middle of the road and was run down.
 
I once thought some stuff was stolen from my car and had the cops come and fill out a report. . . then I walked into my house and saw my stuff stacked in my bedroom. I had forgotten that I had put it there earlier in the day. :o
 
Mike, that reminds me of a time when I use to travel alot for our company
down in FL, the car I rented was a Ford something and it's shifter was on
the floor, but it was an automatic, but laid out so you felt like it was a
standard, a little weird but ok. All the cars I've owned have been manual
transmissions, so I kept leaving this car in Drive when I got out and had
to run after it a couple times in a parking lot as it rolled away.

Well, one night I stopped at the front desk of the Holiday Inn to get my laundry
and came out and the car was gone! STOLEN I thought, ;) and started
looking around and asked a guy if he saw someone take off with my car
he said, "No, but a car just rolled down the hill and hit that car over there"
as he pointed to where my car was kissing bumpers with another car!

Yep, left it in Drive and it rolled down a pretty steep hill, a little to the right
and it would have rolled into traffic! Luckily it didn't roll too fast and neither
car was injured at all, just felt pretty silly! :)
G2
 
Too many to write about. It would take up pages, but here's my favorite...

I was about 12 years old and I liked to play with things that went bang. I took an empty CO2 cartridge and drilled out the plug. I cut the strike-anywhere tips off of kitchen matches and stuffed :eek: them into the cartridge until it was almost full. I even packed them in real tight with a small wood dowel. DOUBLE :eek: Somewhere, I had acquired some 1/4" safety fuse and stuck the end of about 3 feet of it in the cartridge and shoved it down a gopher hole. I lit it and backed off about 10 feet.

KABOOM!

I was showered with dirt and when I stuck a stick is the depression of loose dirt, I couldn't find the bottom. I still shudder to think what would have happened if it went off in my hand while I was tamping the matches into it.:barf:

That didn't stop me from doing dumb things, but after that I stuck to black powder and much longer fuses.

Don't try this at home!
 
Made the wrong connection on my two way work phone and told my boss I thought he was a lazy ass and a dumb F@#$.
 
The rolling car reminded my of one that I did.

I think was 6 or 7. We had a 1927 Pierce Arrow police car. My dad was a mechanic and we always had neat cars. Of course, in the late '40s they were just old cars.

I don't know what the PA weighed, but the bumpers were at least 1/4" thick. Anyway, I used to play inside. It had all sorts of neat things to push, pull and twist on the dash and steering wheel. One day I managed to put it in neutral and pushed the button on the parking brake. The brake lever fell forward and the car started rolling down the driveway. I wasn't strong enough to pull the brake lever back up and it rolled across the street and mangled the left front fender of the car parked there. Fortunately, my dad did a lot of body and fender work and he fixed the neighbors fender.

I don't remember getting in trouble for that. I may have been yelled at, but that's all.
 
Gary W. Graley said:
Most if not all of us have done a few bonehead things, what made me think
of this today is what happened to me more than once....marriage...divorce....






Oh well, my EXe's fared very well . Guess it has been my contribution to the economy.....


Uncle Alan :confused:
Click to expand...
 
My very first boneheaded thing I did was a truly major one.

I was 2 or 3 years old, and trust me most parents wouldn't have allowed their kid to see 4 if it were them.
It was truly a major screw up, although I was really too young to morally be held accountable for my actions.

My mother was doing something else, and I kept bugging her for her to play the violin. She was a genious with the violin. She kept refusing. Again and again I kept bugging her until I became quite angry and started pounding on the violin case.

She thought I couldn't possibly be strong enough to do any damage so she left me be.

That proved to be a mistake. I broke the violin, through the hard case.

Anger problems coupled with excellent strength even at a young age was too much for that violin.

The big problem was not that it was just a violin.

I can't even bring myself to say what type of violin it was. I really can't.

Let's just say I pretty much destroyed a luxurious 5 bedroom house with tennis court and pool when I was 2 or 3 years old with my own two hands.

Needless to say, 25 years on, my mother still speaks very softly when talking about that incident.

Oops.
 
Yikes, that must have been some violin!!!

I remember an 'ALMOST' dumb thing I was a witness to, in 8th grade in
Georgia, at a catholic school at the time, you'd think 8th graders were
smarter than this? I walked into class and one of the kids had a D Cell
battery and he was pressing two pieces of stripped wire, one on each
end of the battery, while trying to put the other ends into a wall socket :O
luckily for him a nun walked in just in time before he could get the wires
straight enough to line them up to the socket holes, otherwise it would have
been a very very bad day for him!
G2
 
Okay, I have one from my youth. I'm actually very upset that I can't think of anything more recent. I'm constantly doing silly stuff, and I pride myself on my willingness to offer myself up for the sake of a good laugh. I'll think of something, I'm sure. :)

Anyhow, as a child I had one big experience with vandalism. I was about 12 y/o and was staying the night at my friend's house for a slumber party. All the girls decide to go out "toilet papering" the neighborhood. Me, being the perpetual overachiever that I was, I set my sights on greater mayhem: glue. My friend had this super sized bottle of Elmers that fit the bill. We ran around the neighborhood. I came up with all kinds of creative uses for the glue. Then we all hit my friend's neighbor's yard. Yes, her neighbor. I decorated their vehicles with glue and toilet paper. What? It stays on better that way. Then I headed to the mailbox wondering if it would hold. As I was busying myself with glueing the gentleman's mailbox shut, I suddenly heard a scream, "Get the f*** away from my f***ing mailbox!" The whole party darts straight across the street and into our friend's house. Yes, we were accomplished criminals. :D As I reached the front door, the police were pulling into her driveway.

We all rush into slumber party garb when the doorbell rings. The three policemen at the door explain the purpose of their visit. One of them holds up my super sized glue bottle and asks if it belongs to anyone. Oh yeah, I just threw it on the ground outside the door to my friend's house. The other policeman takes out his super flashlight and tells us to line up so he could check our hands. Needless to say, my hands were full of glue. I was the first person he checked because of my obviously guilty demeanor. I was cursed with a face that reveals my every thought. Anyhow, they tell me to step to the side because I was going with them. :( One by one my friends were checked. One girl even managed to pass off the glue on her hands as dead skin. It turned out, I was the only one getting arrested that night. I was fortunate in that my friend's mother pretty much begged them not to take me. LOL Finally, they relented but not before they informed me that they would be taking fingerprints on the glue bottle. If it matched mine, they would be back to get me. :eek:

The following day, my mother came over to pick me up. As I get into the car, I see the neighbor standing across the street giving me the evil eye. As she's pulling away, she spots the neighbor and says, "Oh, look at who that is, it's so and so, I used to work with him at..." "He's such a nice gentleman. I really love that guy..." She was gushing for God's sakes. :( I still can't understand how she missed the stare. I honestly don't believe he came over because of my mother.

I spent a month of sleepless nights waiting for the police to come and arrest me. I kept imagining this huge fingerprint database out there. Did they get mine? Was it a good set? When did they get it? At birth? And what about the glue bottle? Surely, there were some good prints there. How long did it take to run a fingerprint test? When would I know that I was in the clear? LOL It was at least a decade before I shared my story with my mother. Over ten years later, and she still became irate when I told her. Even today, I know she'd get extremely pissed if I were dumb enough to bring it up.

Anyhow, I think there is a myriad of stupid behavior in that experience. It did work out in my favor since I quickly learned that I'm not built for a life of crime. I tried a few more times, but I was never very successful. :rolleyes:
 
I'm in high school and work a part time job at a video store for $6.75 an hour (before taxes! ;)). I pull in $80-100 a week, so obviously every bit helps. I cashed my paycheck, went to Strawberries, bought a Johnny Cash CD (the check was for $104, which is pretty big in relative terms), and then went to Burger King for lunch. Later that day, I realized that the envelope and all of my week's pay (minus the $9 for the CD) was missing. I searched EVERYWHERE.

Finally, my friend Mark and I returned to Burger King. We checked the trash that I threw my food away in (outside because I ate in the car). We pulled the big red lid off, and revealed a stomach-churning sight: a crisp, fresh, white trash bag that had not one piece of trash in it. We entered Burger King, walked up to the counter, and asked the cashier if it would be OK if we went dumpster diving. He kind of laughed, he was a nice guy in his early twenties, and asked his manager. He even asked her if he could help (anything beats being a cashier, I'll have you know). She declined his offer, but handed us a pair of plastic gloves. My respect for that place went up. Not only were they taking a big liability risk by having two 17 year olds tromping around in their trash dumpsters, but they even offered us gloves!

At first we just looked at the bags. We decided that we only had to check bags with a lot of brown paper bags inside (eat-in orders don't come with the bags). We checked for my bag/reciept, but we finally broke down and hopped in. It was extremely nasty, but still kind of fun. Nothing beats a rotten fast food tomato fight! As we had to open bags, the job got messier inside of the dumpster. Part of me was waiting for a slimy tentacle to wrap around my calf and pull me under or the the walls to start closing in like in Star Wars. The other part really needed that $95. Some of the stuff we saw is just better left unsaid, but I learned that night that Burger King has an entire dumpster filled to the brim with grease and fat. A little part of me died when I saw that. A little more died when we had to leave without the money. He had work in the morning, and I really appreciated his help and he had done enough. We left, embarrassed as we walked out of the fenced-in dumpster area.

Later that night, I went back again, checked the parking lot, another parking lot, and then gave up and wend home again. I moved my car forward in the garage so I could open the rear door without it hitting the lallycolumn, and as I was just giving up, I tripped on the snowblower that was now a lot closer to the driver door. I fell, my arm hit my sideview, and it shattered. Not only did the heated lens shatter, but the face plate and the housing all got little plastic fractures. It couldn't have been less graceful. SAAB replacement parts, even 11 years later when you'd think there would be plenty of used ones, were hard to find.

Luckily, I found a used mirror for $40, and it's good as new. But I learned that night that sometimes you should just cut your losses!
 
Rat Finkenstein said:
I have, on occasion, checked my watch while holding a beverage- spilling it on myself or the ground in the process.
Click to expand...

I new a group of beautiful young lasses in college that used to look for guys wearing watches and holding their beer in that hand, and go up to them and flirtingly ask them what time it was.... just to see how many of them they could get to dump their beers!:eek: :D
 
Didn't happen to me, but i thought this was worth sharing.

A buddy of mine was drinking quite a bit one night while being real focused on playing his guitar. He had no cigarettes left so he asked his buddy for one, smoked it, needed another later, so he asked him again. He says "Sure, just don't smoke it backwards this time."

Hahaha i love that guy.
 
When I was 13 years old, my family packed the car for a cross country trip and I put the last piece of luggage for the trip. My aunt asked me if i had the keys in my hand, I held the keys up to show her. She said, Ok, close the trunk! I threw the keys in the trunk and shut the lid. It took me a long time to live that down, and I pretty much thought I did, until a friend of mine came over for a family dinner when I was 18. He was told the story and ribbed me about it. They next day I drove over to his house and after being there a while, he and I decided to take off to the movies, store or wherever we were going, and I gave him the keys to unlock his side of my car. He unlocked the door, through the keys over to my seat and said something to the effect of he had to go back to the house for a second, and he closed the door. His eyes got big and he rattled the door, telling me he locked the keys in the car. I knew he was kidding, and walked around and tried the door, IT WAS REALLY LOCKED! How could he be so stupid! I was kind of harsh to him and he just laughed, which got me pissed enough to pick up a rock and shatter the back side window so I could reach around and unlock his side door. His eyes got big again, because then he just reached through the aleady open passenger side window and unlocked the door. It was open all along.
 
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