Everything I do is smart and responsible, but occasionally the universe hurts me for no reason and makes it look like it was my fault.
/giphy it happens
We were hitting rocks with tennis rackets at businesses during gym class. I missed the rock and cracked my elbow with the edge of the racket, really hard. I almost passed out from the pain, and my whole arm burned and tingled for 3 days. Now I have no ‘funny bone’ sensation in that arm.
When I was in high school, on a dare during biology class, I inserted a pair of forceps into an electrical socket. The human body is an excellent electrical conductor.
About twenty years ago I had washed a chef’s knife and was drying it off by holding a dish towel between my thumb and forefinger. I’m not sure exactly how I did it, but I got the knife turned sideways and cut my thumb pretty deeply. It wasn’t to the bone, but it was enough to cut the nerves and nick the ligament or whatever.
I had surgery, and it’s mostly functional now. But it was just one second of not paying attention.
Oh, I was out of work, but there’s a COBRA loophole (or was) which gave me thirty days to sign up and pay after being laid off, so I did that after the accident, and the insurance covered most of it.
Then I got another job and had to take a drug test a week after I quit taking the vicodin. That’s when I learned the worse the drug the less the time it stays in your blood. Weed stays forever, but opiates are gone in no time.
Don’t remember how old I was, maybe 8ish, but I had to get 3 stitches when I sliced my finger open with a butter-knife. Opening a frozen bagel.
/giphy sharp butter knife
@thejackalope I did the same thing, but with a carving knife. Didnt go to the hospital and probably shouldve gotten stitches. And yes, alcohol was involved.
One should never, ever use a steak knife as a screwdriver. I learned the lesson the hard way and jammed the knife about 1/2" into my palm. I hit a vein and severed a nerve. I required five hours of surgery to reattach the nerve. Sad to say my middle finger is still numb seven years later!
When i was a kid i “goofed off” clinbing a high dive ladder and fell back onto the cement deck. As an adult i was on a bicycle, paying too much attention to the scenery while going 16 MPH and somehow landed “on my face” (and knees and hip and elbows). Neither time did I break any bones, though with the bike i have a lot of scars (and yes i had a helmet on, i cringe when i see people riding without one), thus the "little stupid and little hurt."
I almost voted “no and am amazed” so want to hear from those people what they think pushed them in that category.
/giphy look ma no hand
I need a multiple options selection for this answer.
But I promised the rocket skates story, so here’s that one.
I once bought a gas-powered skateboard because it was on clearance for cheap at Pep Boys. Something like this:
It seemed a perfectly legitimate means of transportation if driven sanely, but it was immediately dubbed the “death trap” by the friend who was with me when I bought it.
About the second weekend I had it, I brought it out around my hot rod friends. We took turns driving it around the parking lot. Then my one resourceful friend started wondering how we could make it faster. He tinkered for a second, took off the air filter and said “That ought to make it faster. Go see.”
Note that until this time I didn’t really know how fast it was before the tweaks. Making a full throttle run now would prove nothing. But peer pressure is a bitch. So after a few minutes of pressure, off I went, squeezing the throttle as far as it would go.
It was fast. Damn fast. I balanced as well as I could as I passed through two and three times faster than I’d ever ridden it before.
That balance failed me at some point nearing its maximum velocity. The board and I developed a high speed wobble about halfway across the parking lot. I tried for what seemed like minutes to get it under control, but it was only getting worse.
I decided at some point that my best course of action was to part ways with the board and try to run it out. I jumped off and got a step in with my left foot, but my right foot did not cooperate. Instead, it seemed like it flailed up over my head.
It did. Partly because my left foot ran across the ground at a speed roughly half that of my current forward progress, so I was already pitching forward and headed for the asphalt. And partly because the toe of my right boot was still wedged under the bar at the back of the board.
I’m told the board, with my right leg attached, flew up and over such that it appeared I kicked myself in the back of the head. I do know that when I became aware of myself I was lying face up on the pavement and my head hurt pretty badly.
I had a knot on the top rear of my head approximately the size of a softball. Of course I wasn’t wearing any kind of safety gear. But miraculously, aside from some minor scrapes, I escaped further injury.
We put the air filter back on the motor and I loaded the skateboard back into my car. A week later I sold it for what I had in it, having never ridden it again. And I didn’t have to explain the scrapes on the top of the board. The kid who bought it knew he was getting a deal on a death trap.
When I was a young kid back in the 80s, I and a bunch of friends were crushing quartz rocks to make “angel dust” that we would then smuggle inside my space shuttle pencil sharpener. I didn’t even know what angel dust was back then. I decided using a larger rock to crush up the smaller rocks would be much faster. I threw the rock down, it smacked the smaller rocks, bounced off the side of the concrete school wall and proceeded right towards my face. A lot of blood and a few stiches later, I still have a cool scar right above my lip.
One time smashing rocks on a post, needless to say, I got a splinter into my right thumb. Went to the urgent care to remove it, weeks later thumbnail fell off, and a new one underneath it.
A few years later, used silicone caulk to attempt to fix a leak in a bicycle inner tube on the front wheel. Later that day, rode bike down hill at maximum speed and took a turn. Quickly break left arm in a compound fashion, took 2 months to heal.
Lastly, went to a rocky beach, went into the water, gone head over heels, then hit said rocks and got stung by salt water on top of my sunburns.
Sent to boarding school so I did equestrian events. I was also breaking in a horse, which proved to be quite a little prankster, I thought I had her trusting me enough to let me try bare back. We also had her “twin” brother and he was never allowed out of the stables. So I came down, put on my helmet, grabbed her by the mane and was surprised she didn’t move so I hopped on and that’s when I saw the female hiding behind the stables watching. I didn’t even last eight seconds when he went to town. Broke some bones landing & more when he brought both front hooves down on me. So, very stupid (kinda hard to miss a male horse- they are very well endowed) and very hurt.
When I was younger (maybe 6/7ish) my brother and I had made up a new game which consisted of a bunch of random nothingness and the newest part of the game was he would pretend to kick me in the face and it would be hilarious. Well stupid kid that I was - I decided it seemed a good idea to lean forward. After a swift kick to the face, a lot of blood and crying all seemed fine until years later at a random eye doctor appointment it was discovered I had been walking around with a detached retina for all that time and had no idea. They basically threw me into straight into surgery and now I have a really fun bump on my eyeball that I can use to freak everyone out with. Fun times.
As a pre-teen I placed a 22 cal bullet on the sidewalk, covered it with a metal trash can lid, and proceeded to hit the lid with a hammer where I thought the bullet was.
It worked! (The gunpowder exploded.) Unfortunately the lid did not contain the shrapnel.
Bits hit my hand, causing it to bleed profusely really needing wound cleaning and stiches. But I didn’t have the guts to tell my parents so I somehow hid the tightly wrapped wounds - it seemed to take forever to stop bleeding.
For over a decade I had a bump and scar on my finger as a reminder. I figured the bump was a piece of the bullet. But somehow the bump disappeared, leaving scare to this day several decades later.
Then there was the time we knotted several 5 foot sewer pipe o-rings (huge rubber bands) together, staked them across a 15 foot deep pit where they were installing the sewer lines… and slingshoted my little brother out of the pit several times. But I don’t think anyone got hurt other than feelings when we got busted when a cop saw a kid flying out of the pit.
I was riding my bike that had handlebar grips and decided to ride between two construction barricades. Well, I thought I could make it between those two because the space was big enough to fit my handlebars. Not the extended grips which caught the edges of both barriers perfectly. My bike stopped under me, the front tire pivoted me and the back end of the bike right over top of the front. I remember a passenger in a passing truck exclaiming, “whoa! Did you see that?!” No bones were broken, but my pride was wounded and I ended up with a scar. No biggie
I made various explosives and other types of pyrotechnics (smoke bombs, thermite, etc.) a number of times as a kid (aged 12 to 16 or so) with much success and very little stupidity (other than the whole making explosives in the backyard and garage as a kid thing).
One time tho, I had a one pound coffee can (from back when they actually contained a pound of ground coffee) that had about an inch of homemade black powder in it. For some reason, while holding said can and looking down into it, I dropped a lit match into it. (This was the very stupid thing.)
Fortunately, I wore big aviator style eyeglasses back then (mid-1970s and all) and my eyes and eyebrows were not damaged at all. However, my forehead and much of the hair above it were rather singed, the skin about like a very bad sunburn and burnt hair is a very nasty smell. (This was the not very hurt thing.)
There are numerous other stories, eg. on at least two occasions while sharpening knives on a bench grinder without being all that careful a knife has zinged past my leg to end up stabbed into the wall behind me, but I feel the match thing was probably my most stupid thing to have done purposely.
@baqui63 I used to do home-made fireworks as a teenager, mostly made from disassembled “legal” ones that were legal in our county (and so wimpy and useless). Had a couple of interesting malfunctions when setting them off but through good fortune never anything while making them.
When I was 7 or 8, a neighborhood kid of my age was trash-taking to my 15 year old foster sister. He then threw one of those heavy, hard plastic dinosaur toys at her (and it was a stegosaurus), and I threw myself in front of my foster sister. I ended up laying on the street with a concussion, bleeding from my forehead. The blood was flowing and getting into my eyes and so all I could see was sunlight and red. My foster sister and my sister helped me to our house, to my parents, and I ended up bleeding all over my favorite pillow, and getting stitches into forehead several hours later after the bleeding wouldn’t stop.
So yeah, I sacrificed myself to a dinosaur for my foster sister’s safety.
Went Skydiving Solo for the first time…Very bad sense of direction. Got lost, could not find the landing zone. landed on the side of a mountain. When they found me they couldn’t believe I survived. Broke my ankle in 16 places dislodging my left foot from my skeletal body. Oh BYW: at the the time I was 49, way to old to not know better.
Fishtailed my wrx at 80mph into the side of a semi trying to not hit a coyote. No airbag, no injury, no dead coyote, no clue how my car didn’t go under a wheel and instantly turn me into mush.
I decided to try crossing my arms on the handlebars of my bike while riding down a hill. I didn’t stay upright for very long. No broken bones but many contusions and scrapes.
10 or 11 years old. My dad had several old “junk” bikes, and I didn’t have a bike, so I took the frame from one, wheel from another, etc. Had a functioning bike when I was done, but all the seats were crap. No big deal, I can just ride standing up. Before long, I was riding with no hands (like my friends all did while sitting down).
All was well until I was coming home from baseball practice, bat in one hand, glove in the other, riding my franken-bike with no seat and no hands. I’m still not sure why it started to wobble, but I do know that cast on my arm the rest of the summer sucked.
I dislocated my knee while bowling. Wii bowling. Kneecap was about three inches to the right of where it should have been. I’m still not quite sure of the mechanics of what happened, but I sure felt stupid!
I also got a piece of non-traditional body art (scarification) that hurt like hell. Though I love it, I’m pretty sure most people think it qualifies as a stupid decision!
And I was once attack by a rabbit, bad enough to where I needed stitches. I was young, walking a mini-lop on a leash, and I bent over “to see if it was ok”. The damn mini-Cujo launched itself straight at my face. So much blood!
While riding in a canopy-less golf cart at full speed, decided to jump up and grab an over-head branch for an improvised “cool” exit. (I hadn’t even told the driver I was going to do this.) As the cart passed beneath me, my body swung parallel to the ground before I lost my grip and fell. Fortunately, the worst damage I sustained was knocking the wind out of me
I ran over my foot with a hospital bed about six hours ago. I was trying to avoid hitting someone hanging out in a hallway. No harm done as far as I can tell.
One day, as a kid, I was cutting open the package for a model, so I could build it. Specifically, this model:
The box was taped together with a lot of tape, and the regular blade on my Swiss Army knife wasn’t doing the job, so I switched to a serrated blade. And proceeded to slice into my thumb.
It hurt. I bled. A lot. And I was home alone.
But, I was also a Boy Scout, and knew enough first aid that I was able to stem the bleeding and dress the wound. I eventually got the box open and built the model, though my thumb was pretty dang sore and had a literal hole in it for a week. Now, I just have a nice scar there.
I once wrecked my motorcycle, with the only real damage being to my ego, and shortly thereafter cut my hand pretty bad opening a box of chamomile tea. Everyone saw my hand and was like, “WHAT HAPPENED?!” “I wrecked my motorcycle. Also, I cut my finger”
The only thing that comes to mind is when one of the cats, Charlie Ahole (ah-hole-ay; means asshole), was playing up on the bank early one morning (back yard fence is modified to keep our cats in our yard, so they do have access to outdoors, just on our property) and there was a small bush that had limbs that were maybe 3/4" diameter. Somehow, one of his back legs slid down and was wedged between two of them. He started screaming because he couldn’t pull his leg out.
I tried to hold him while pulling the limbs apart, but it was way too awkward and he was scared and he bit my hand. A couple of times. I was yelling for my husband to come out and help and he ran out of bed and was able to pull the limbs apart and Charlie ran off.
The bite wounds were pretty bad, but I flushed them out and soaked them in a bleach/water solution for about five minutes and thought I’d be okay. It’s not like I hadn’t been bitten by a cat before.
We went to breakfast, came home, my husband went up to our property to play on his tractor. Just another Saturday. As the day went on, my hand started to swell up and I felt crappier and crappier. I called him many times during the day to let him know there was a problem and he never answered. Phone service was iffy up there. Well, he finally called back around nine that night. Turns out he’d been chatting up the proprietress at the little local store, and there wasn’t any service at the road. (Yeah, nothing hinky going on, he’s just a yakker and once he has a captive audience, he won’t stop talking. It’s part of his charm. We laugh about it.)
By the time he got home, the skin on my hand was tight and shiny. And it hurt. Since it was almost eleven at night, we didn’t do anything then, but we went to Urgent Care the next day and I was put on heavy duty antibiotics, got a couple of shots and went home.
We were going to Disneyland that week for our annual meet (that I organized every year) and it was imperative that I get better. The antibiotics were so harsh they (warning, going into TMI area) killed the good flora and stuff in my body. And I got the yeast infection from hell. Not life threatening, but you know how it’s really frustrating to have on socks and boots that lace up and you’re in a place where you can’t just take them off to scratch that really annoying itch? Yeah, it was like that. I couldn’t sit, I couldn’t move, I couldn’t do anything. A wire bottle brush may have helped, but I doubted it would. A friend advised getting one of those OTC medications for yeast infections. I stupidly got the one that took care of the problem in one treatment. Too harsh. My nether regions blistered.
When I was little I tried to open a bottle of lye with my mouth and ended up going to the hospital… but I did get to eat popsicles for the rest of the night
Someone in my neighborhood was honking a horn on a Saturday morning. I was jumping up, trying to see over the fence where the truck was. The last time I came down, I jammed my toe, breaking the end off the metatarsal bone and requiring surgery to set. I was a senior in high school, and I went to both prom and graduation with a hooked steel wire sticking out of the end of my toe.
Most recently, I turned my telescope into a laser during the eclipse.
I was trying to set up the telescope, one of those large reflectors, and figured that it would be easier to aim it if I was able to look through it.
I wasn’t completely stupid. I placed a napkin in front of the viewer without a lens (obviously because the lens focusses the light more), in case it was focused enough to burn it. Nothing happened. Just to be extra safe, I put on my solar eclipse viewers, and put my eye to the telescope.
Instantly I saw a bright flash and turned away as quickly as possible. Was it really bright enough that it hardly had any effect on the brightness of the sun?
Turns out, the focused light was enough to melt through the darker surface of the solar eclipse glasses. My eye was a bit irritated for the rest of the day, but completely fine after that. I checked on it the next day, and there was a slight red area on the sclera (the white part) of my right eye. I realize that had the laser pointed directly into my iris or pupil, I may have gone completely blind in that eye.
A few years back, we were taping up our windows readying the house to paint. I was up atop the scaffolding we’d rented working on the second story windows when I put one foot up flat against the house, and my other foot was down on the slat slid back and down to the ground I went, fracturing my L4 vertebrae. Good times.
I chased away a cat that was pissing on our back porch and broke my leg.
Several years later, I rode a bike (I had not ridden a bike in many years) down a very steep hill, without applying the brakes. When I came to a sharp curve, I couldn’t remember which brake was on which wheel, froze up, and hit a concrete hillside at over 20 mph. I rolled a good 20 or 30 feet, and narrowly missed a patch of prickly pear. The bike was fine, and I had only fairly minor scrapes, considering how far I flew. I don’t think I even had any bruising.
In middle school, I decided to go sledding down a very steep hill after an ice storm. I was going way too fast and had zero control, which was fun until I hit a weird bump, launched myself in the air and then landed on my face at the bottom. The entire front was mostly a giant bruise.
In high school in the 90s, fake nails were a big thing. I was doing my own, put one on crooked, so I pried it back off, somehow flicking the super glue into my eye. We went to the ER where they flushed my eye until the super glue dissolved, but it left a scratch on my retina, so I had to wear an eye patch for a week or so while it healed.
Where’s the “Yes, but I’m not telling you anything” option?
@cengland0 I agree-- yes I did something stupid as a child but I’m taking the 5th, as in 5th amendment
/image Chemical burn on my balls! Animated gif
Everything I do is smart and responsible, but occasionally the universe hurts me for no reason and makes it look like it was my fault.
/giphy it happens
Um, the winners already got their Darwin Awards, and unfortunately unable to attend this celebration of their prowess.
/giphy Darwin Award
@mike808 like a really slow train wreck! Except I have no idea what’s going on!
B.Stick your head in.
III. ???
d. Profit!
We were hitting rocks with tennis rackets at businesses during gym class. I missed the rock and cracked my elbow with the edge of the racket, really hard. I almost passed out from the pain, and my whole arm burned and tingled for 3 days. Now I have no ‘funny bone’ sensation in that arm.
@edguyver14 besides the point…but what state did you grow up in?
@elimanningface state penitentiary?
When I was in high school, on a dare during biology class, I inserted a pair of forceps into an electrical socket. The human body is an excellent electrical conductor.
Aaaaah, the dare.
Was it at least a double-dog dare?
About twenty years ago I had washed a chef’s knife and was drying it off by holding a dish towel between my thumb and forefinger. I’m not sure exactly how I did it, but I got the knife turned sideways and cut my thumb pretty deeply. It wasn’t to the bone, but it was enough to cut the nerves and nick the ligament or whatever.
I had surgery, and it’s mostly functional now. But it was just one second of not paying attention.
Oh, I was out of work, but there’s a COBRA loophole (or was) which gave me thirty days to sign up and pay after being laid off, so I did that after the accident, and the insurance covered most of it.
Then I got another job and had to take a drug test a week after I quit taking the vicodin. That’s when I learned the worse the drug the less the time it stays in your blood. Weed stays forever, but opiates are gone in no time.
Yes, I fell in love with you, mediocrebot, you brute
Don’t remember how old I was, maybe 8ish, but I had to get 3 stitches when I sliced my finger open with a butter-knife. Opening a frozen bagel.
/giphy sharp butter knife
@thejackalope This gives me the chills more than any of the other knife stories!
@thejackalope I did the same thing, but with a carving knife. Didnt go to the hospital and probably shouldve gotten stitches. And yes, alcohol was involved.
One should never, ever use a steak knife as a screwdriver. I learned the lesson the hard way and jammed the knife about 1/2" into my palm. I hit a vein and severed a nerve. I required five hours of surgery to reattach the nerve. Sad to say my middle finger is still numb seven years later!
When i was a kid i “goofed off” clinbing a high dive ladder and fell back onto the cement deck. As an adult i was on a bicycle, paying too much attention to the scenery while going 16 MPH and somehow landed “on my face” (and knees and hip and elbows). Neither time did I break any bones, though with the bike i have a lot of scars (and yes i had a helmet on, i cringe when i see people riding without one), thus the "little stupid and little hurt."
I almost voted “no and am amazed” so want to hear from those people what they think pushed them in that category.
/giphy look ma no hand
Surprisingly no given that I was dumped into a extremely good R&D lab with no real training of experience.
I need a multiple options selection for this answer.
But I promised the rocket skates story, so here’s that one.
I once bought a gas-powered skateboard because it was on clearance for cheap at Pep Boys. Something like this:
It seemed a perfectly legitimate means of transportation if driven sanely, but it was immediately dubbed the “death trap” by the friend who was with me when I bought it.
About the second weekend I had it, I brought it out around my hot rod friends. We took turns driving it around the parking lot. Then my one resourceful friend started wondering how we could make it faster. He tinkered for a second, took off the air filter and said “That ought to make it faster. Go see.”
Note that until this time I didn’t really know how fast it was before the tweaks. Making a full throttle run now would prove nothing. But peer pressure is a bitch. So after a few minutes of pressure, off I went, squeezing the throttle as far as it would go.
It was fast. Damn fast. I balanced as well as I could as I passed through two and three times faster than I’d ever ridden it before.
That balance failed me at some point nearing its maximum velocity. The board and I developed a high speed wobble about halfway across the parking lot. I tried for what seemed like minutes to get it under control, but it was only getting worse.
I decided at some point that my best course of action was to part ways with the board and try to run it out. I jumped off and got a step in with my left foot, but my right foot did not cooperate. Instead, it seemed like it flailed up over my head.
It did. Partly because my left foot ran across the ground at a speed roughly half that of my current forward progress, so I was already pitching forward and headed for the asphalt. And partly because the toe of my right boot was still wedged under the bar at the back of the board.
I’m told the board, with my right leg attached, flew up and over such that it appeared I kicked myself in the back of the head. I do know that when I became aware of myself I was lying face up on the pavement and my head hurt pretty badly.
I had a knot on the top rear of my head approximately the size of a softball. Of course I wasn’t wearing any kind of safety gear. But miraculously, aside from some minor scrapes, I escaped further injury.
We put the air filter back on the motor and I loaded the skateboard back into my car. A week later I sold it for what I had in it, having never ridden it again. And I didn’t have to explain the scrapes on the top of the board. The kid who bought it knew he was getting a deal on a death trap.
@djslack I literally cried the entire time reading this! Wow, that’s funny to have happen to someone else. Nice write up.
When I was a young kid back in the 80s, I and a bunch of friends were crushing quartz rocks to make “angel dust” that we would then smuggle inside my space shuttle pencil sharpener. I didn’t even know what angel dust was back then. I decided using a larger rock to crush up the smaller rocks would be much faster. I threw the rock down, it smacked the smaller rocks, bounced off the side of the concrete school wall and proceeded right towards my face. A lot of blood and a few stiches later, I still have a cool scar right above my lip.
Yes, many times.
Here’s the result of the most recent. Definitely not the most severe. This time it was swimming near rocks during a storm.
@Pantheist That’s what he said!
@cranky1950 No really dear it was rocks
One time smashing rocks on a post, needless to say, I got a splinter into my right thumb. Went to the urgent care to remove it, weeks later thumbnail fell off, and a new one underneath it.
A few years later, used silicone caulk to attempt to fix a leak in a bicycle inner tube on the front wheel. Later that day, rode bike down hill at maximum speed and took a turn. Quickly break left arm in a compound fashion, took 2 months to heal.
Lastly, went to a rocky beach, went into the water, gone head over heels, then hit said rocks and got stung by salt water on top of my sunburns.
Sent to boarding school so I did equestrian events. I was also breaking in a horse, which proved to be quite a little prankster, I thought I had her trusting me enough to let me try bare back. We also had her “twin” brother and he was never allowed out of the stables. So I came down, put on my helmet, grabbed her by the mane and was surprised she didn’t move so I hopped on and that’s when I saw the female hiding behind the stables watching. I didn’t even last eight seconds when he went to town. Broke some bones landing & more when he brought both front hooves down on me. So, very stupid (kinda hard to miss a male horse- they are very well endowed) and very hurt.
Wife #1.
@Pavlov Ow!
When I was younger (maybe 6/7ish) my brother and I had made up a new game which consisted of a bunch of random nothingness and the newest part of the game was he would pretend to kick me in the face and it would be hilarious. Well stupid kid that I was - I decided it seemed a good idea to lean forward. After a swift kick to the face, a lot of blood and crying all seemed fine until years later at a random eye doctor appointment it was discovered I had been walking around with a detached retina for all that time and had no idea. They basically threw me into straight into surgery and now I have a really fun bump on my eyeball that I can use to freak everyone out with. Fun times.
Who knew metal trash can lids don’t stop bullets?
As a pre-teen I placed a 22 cal bullet on the sidewalk, covered it with a metal trash can lid, and proceeded to hit the lid with a hammer where I thought the bullet was.
It worked! (The gunpowder exploded.) Unfortunately the lid did not contain the shrapnel.
Bits hit my hand, causing it to bleed profusely really needing wound cleaning and stiches. But I didn’t have the guts to tell my parents so I somehow hid the tightly wrapped wounds - it seemed to take forever to stop bleeding.
For over a decade I had a bump and scar on my finger as a reminder. I figured the bump was a piece of the bullet. But somehow the bump disappeared, leaving scare to this day several decades later.
Then there was the time we knotted several 5 foot sewer pipe o-rings (huge rubber bands) together, staked them across a 15 foot deep pit where they were installing the sewer lines… and slingshoted my little brother out of the pit several times. But I don’t think anyone got hurt other than feelings when we got busted when a cop saw a kid flying out of the pit.
I was riding my bike that had handlebar grips and decided to ride between two construction barricades. Well, I thought I could make it between those two because the space was big enough to fit my handlebars. Not the extended grips which caught the edges of both barriers perfectly. My bike stopped under me, the front tire pivoted me and the back end of the bike right over top of the front. I remember a passenger in a passing truck exclaiming, “whoa! Did you see that?!” No bones were broken, but my pride was wounded and I ended up with a scar. No biggie
I made various explosives and other types of pyrotechnics (smoke bombs, thermite, etc.) a number of times as a kid (aged 12 to 16 or so) with much success and very little stupidity (other than the whole making explosives in the backyard and garage as a kid thing).
One time tho, I had a one pound coffee can (from back when they actually contained a pound of ground coffee) that had about an inch of homemade black powder in it. For some reason, while holding said can and looking down into it, I dropped a lit match into it. (This was the very stupid thing.)
Fortunately, I wore big aviator style eyeglasses back then (mid-1970s and all) and my eyes and eyebrows were not damaged at all. However, my forehead and much of the hair above it were rather singed, the skin about like a very bad sunburn and burnt hair is a very nasty smell. (This was the not very hurt thing.)
There are numerous other stories, eg. on at least two occasions while sharpening knives on a bench grinder without being all that careful a knife has zinged past my leg to end up stabbed into the wall behind me, but I feel the match thing was probably my most stupid thing to have done purposely.
@baqui63 I used to do home-made fireworks as a teenager, mostly made from disassembled “legal” ones that were legal in our county (and so wimpy and useless). Had a couple of interesting malfunctions when setting them off but through good fortune never anything while making them.
I stabbed my hand with a knife. Through an apple. Context prohibited.
@greengalore
My guess is you were trying to remove the core of an apple.
When I was 7 or 8, a neighborhood kid of my age was trash-taking to my 15 year old foster sister. He then threw one of those heavy, hard plastic dinosaur toys at her (and it was a stegosaurus), and I threw myself in front of my foster sister. I ended up laying on the street with a concussion, bleeding from my forehead. The blood was flowing and getting into my eyes and so all I could see was sunlight and red. My foster sister and my sister helped me to our house, to my parents, and I ended up bleeding all over my favorite pillow, and getting stitches into forehead several hours later after the bleeding wouldn’t stop.
So yeah, I sacrificed myself to a dinosaur for my foster sister’s safety.
@janelane1980 You did that because you cared; that doesn’t sound stupid at all.
Does jumping out of a tree onto a trampoline count?
How about sliding down the barn roof onto a mattress?
No one got hurt, but Grandpa beat our asses.
So getting caught made it stupid.
@2many2no No disrespect intended, but why would you think that these could possibly not count?
The fact that you are thinking “these weren’t really stupid” says a lot about your judgment.
@DrWorm At the times, in our eyes, those plans were brilliant. And I’m still rather proud of my lack of judgment.
Thank you.
Let’s just say that it was what made me come up with the “wear an Ove Glove while using a mandoline” idea I mentioned elsewhere…
Went through a stop sign and crashed the car
Went Skydiving Solo for the first time…Very bad sense of direction. Got lost, could not find the landing zone. landed on the side of a mountain. When they found me they couldn’t believe I survived. Broke my ankle in 16 places dislodging my left foot from my skeletal body. Oh BYW: at the the time I was 49, way to old to not know better.
@deg10204 Didn’t anyone try to talk you out of it? That’s kill yourself dumb.
Fishtailed my wrx at 80mph into the side of a semi trying to not hit a coyote. No airbag, no injury, no dead coyote, no clue how my car didn’t go under a wheel and instantly turn me into mush.
I decided to try crossing my arms on the handlebars of my bike while riding down a hill. I didn’t stay upright for very long. No broken bones but many contusions and scrapes.
10 or 11 years old. My dad had several old “junk” bikes, and I didn’t have a bike, so I took the frame from one, wheel from another, etc. Had a functioning bike when I was done, but all the seats were crap. No big deal, I can just ride standing up. Before long, I was riding with no hands (like my friends all did while sitting down).
All was well until I was coming home from baseball practice, bat in one hand, glove in the other, riding my franken-bike with no seat and no hands. I’m still not sure why it started to wobble, but I do know that cast on my arm the rest of the summer sucked.
I dislocated my knee while bowling. Wii bowling. Kneecap was about three inches to the right of where it should have been. I’m still not quite sure of the mechanics of what happened, but I sure felt stupid!
I also got a piece of non-traditional body art (scarification) that hurt like hell. Though I love it, I’m pretty sure most people think it qualifies as a stupid decision!
And I was once attack by a rabbit, bad enough to where I needed stitches. I was young, walking a mini-lop on a leash, and I bent over “to see if it was ok”. The damn mini-Cujo launched itself straight at my face. So much blood!
@QuietDelusions I’ve seen such rabbits before.
/image rabbit of caerbannog
@QuietDelusions he can leap about… LOOK AT THE BONES!!
@QuietDelusions can you at least try to describe the mechanics of the “bowling incident” ?
@QuietDelusions Wii bowling injury AND attacked by a rabbit – we have a winner!
@uhhhhno I took a step back to throw the ball, and next thing I know I was on the floor crying. I still have no idea exactly what happened!
@narfcake It was the most foul, cruel, and bad-tempered rodent you ever set eyes on.
While riding in a canopy-less golf cart at full speed, decided to jump up and grab an over-head branch for an improvised “cool” exit. (I hadn’t even told the driver I was going to do this.) As the cart passed beneath me, my body swung parallel to the ground before I lost my grip and fell. Fortunately, the worst damage I sustained was knocking the wind out of me
I ran over my foot with a hospital bed about six hours ago. I was trying to avoid hitting someone hanging out in a hallway. No harm done as far as I can tell.
One day, as a kid, I was cutting open the package for a model, so I could build it. Specifically, this model:
The box was taped together with a lot of tape, and the regular blade on my Swiss Army knife wasn’t doing the job, so I switched to a serrated blade. And proceeded to slice into my thumb.
It hurt. I bled. A lot. And I was home alone.
But, I was also a Boy Scout, and knew enough first aid that I was able to stem the bleeding and dress the wound. I eventually got the box open and built the model, though my thumb was pretty dang sore and had a literal hole in it for a week. Now, I just have a nice scar there.
I once wrecked my motorcycle, with the only real damage being to my ego, and shortly thereafter cut my hand pretty bad opening a box of chamomile tea. Everyone saw my hand and was like, “WHAT HAPPENED?!” “I wrecked my motorcycle. Also, I cut my finger”
The only thing that comes to mind is when one of the cats, Charlie Ahole (ah-hole-ay; means asshole), was playing up on the bank early one morning (back yard fence is modified to keep our cats in our yard, so they do have access to outdoors, just on our property) and there was a small bush that had limbs that were maybe 3/4" diameter. Somehow, one of his back legs slid down and was wedged between two of them. He started screaming because he couldn’t pull his leg out.
I tried to hold him while pulling the limbs apart, but it was way too awkward and he was scared and he bit my hand. A couple of times. I was yelling for my husband to come out and help and he ran out of bed and was able to pull the limbs apart and Charlie ran off.
The bite wounds were pretty bad, but I flushed them out and soaked them in a bleach/water solution for about five minutes and thought I’d be okay. It’s not like I hadn’t been bitten by a cat before.
We went to breakfast, came home, my husband went up to our property to play on his tractor. Just another Saturday. As the day went on, my hand started to swell up and I felt crappier and crappier. I called him many times during the day to let him know there was a problem and he never answered. Phone service was iffy up there. Well, he finally called back around nine that night. Turns out he’d been chatting up the proprietress at the little local store, and there wasn’t any service at the road. (Yeah, nothing hinky going on, he’s just a yakker and once he has a captive audience, he won’t stop talking. It’s part of his charm. We laugh about it.)
By the time he got home, the skin on my hand was tight and shiny. And it hurt. Since it was almost eleven at night, we didn’t do anything then, but we went to Urgent Care the next day and I was put on heavy duty antibiotics, got a couple of shots and went home.
We were going to Disneyland that week for our annual meet (that I organized every year) and it was imperative that I get better. The antibiotics were so harsh they (warning, going into TMI area) killed the good flora and stuff in my body. And I got the yeast infection from hell. Not life threatening, but you know how it’s really frustrating to have on socks and boots that lace up and you’re in a place where you can’t just take them off to scratch that really annoying itch? Yeah, it was like that. I couldn’t sit, I couldn’t move, I couldn’t do anything. A wire bottle brush may have helped, but I doubted it would. A friend advised getting one of those OTC medications for yeast infections. I stupidly got the one that took care of the problem in one treatment. Too harsh. My nether regions blistered.
But Charlie’s leg was okay.
I’d have to say that marrying my first wife counts on both the stupid and painful aspects.
@macromeh heh. Marrying my ex was stupid, and ended up causing a lot of pain.
I understand.
I did a lot of stupid things with varying results. Worst pain was getting hit by a car. Not going to do that again.
When I was little I tried to open a bottle of lye with my mouth and ended up going to the hospital… but I did get to eat popsicles for the rest of the night
Someone in my neighborhood was honking a horn on a Saturday morning. I was jumping up, trying to see over the fence where the truck was. The last time I came down, I jammed my toe, breaking the end off the metatarsal bone and requiring surgery to set. I was a senior in high school, and I went to both prom and graduation with a hooked steel wire sticking out of the end of my toe.
@DocBJ “…and when they got home from the evening in lover’s lane there was just a bloody hook hanging from the car door handle!”
Most recently, I turned my telescope into a laser during the eclipse.
I was trying to set up the telescope, one of those large reflectors, and figured that it would be easier to aim it if I was able to look through it.
I wasn’t completely stupid. I placed a napkin in front of the viewer without a lens (obviously because the lens focusses the light more), in case it was focused enough to burn it. Nothing happened. Just to be extra safe, I put on my solar eclipse viewers, and put my eye to the telescope.
Instantly I saw a bright flash and turned away as quickly as possible. Was it really bright enough that it hardly had any effect on the brightness of the sun?
Turns out, the focused light was enough to melt through the darker surface of the solar eclipse glasses. My eye was a bit irritated for the rest of the day, but completely fine after that. I checked on it the next day, and there was a slight red area on the sclera (the white part) of my right eye. I realize that had the laser pointed directly into my iris or pupil, I may have gone completely blind in that eye.
It was a great day.
Does the picture have to do with someone’s “very stupid and/or very hurt” story?
A few years back, we were taping up our windows readying the house to paint. I was up atop the scaffolding we’d rented working on the second story windows when I put one foot up flat against the house, and my other foot was down on the slat slid back and down to the ground I went, fracturing my L4 vertebrae. Good times.
@moonhat Ouch!
I chased away a cat that was pissing on our back porch and broke my leg.
Several years later, I rode a bike (I had not ridden a bike in many years) down a very steep hill, without applying the brakes. When I came to a sharp curve, I couldn’t remember which brake was on which wheel, froze up, and hit a concrete hillside at over 20 mph. I rolled a good 20 or 30 feet, and narrowly missed a patch of prickly pear. The bike was fine, and I had only fairly minor scrapes, considering how far I flew. I don’t think I even had any bruising.
In middle school, I decided to go sledding down a very steep hill after an ice storm. I was going way too fast and had zero control, which was fun until I hit a weird bump, launched myself in the air and then landed on my face at the bottom. The entire front was mostly a giant bruise.
In high school in the 90s, fake nails were a big thing. I was doing my own, put one on crooked, so I pried it back off, somehow flicking the super glue into my eye. We went to the ER where they flushed my eye until the super glue dissolved, but it left a scratch on my retina, so I had to wear an eye patch for a week or so while it healed.
@shaunanl woah!! I used to do my own nails during that time too. Superglue in the eye sounds verrrry painful!
/giphy eye pain
Sadly, I’m perfectly capable of hurting myself doing non-stupid things.
During the full eclipse I sat butt naked on a fire ant hill with some friends. Is that stupid enough?
@JoetatoChip Sounds risky, even without fire ants. You were supposed to be wearing eclipse glasses.