Stupidest thing you did as a kid...

[Jman]

A very short story.

My pal Curt and I were about eleven years old at the time we had discovered the bees nest. It was built inside the foundation of my Grandfathers garage. The worker bees traffic in and out of a large crack had caught our eye. This is 1966 in the Allegheny foothills of Northwestern Pennsylvania. Not much happening. Over several summers Curt and I had amassed a vast understanding of this particular specie of wasp. Armed with this knowledge we decided to equip ourselves in a manner that proved our superiority in things such as this.

With just a few minutes of scrounging around in the garage we were rewarded. The biggest prize was a short roll of visqueen (plastic) about five feet wide and fifteen feet long. We placed one end of the sheet on the ground at the crack in the foundation. We placed other items needed for this operation on the ground within reach at the crack as well. A quick review of our strategy and we were ready to engage.

Curt and I stretched out back to back on top of the far end of the sheet. We began a slow "roll up" towards our target. Our plan was working perfectly. Before long we had rolled ourselves to the other end directly in front of our quarry. A couple of things became apparent. It was profoundly hot in our tube. And Curt, I think, smelled like a turd. But not to be dissuaded we pushed on. As planned, our tube of protection included an opening on the end which we would use to manipulate the other items we needed to complete this operation. This included a one pound coffee can three quarters filled with gasoline. Positioned next to the can a few kitchen matches. With little hesitation I emptied the contents of the can into the foundation opening.

This action alone elicited a dramatic and slightly unexpected reaction from the occupants. Not one to panic I remained focused and reached for a match. Things become a bit fuzzy from this point on but I do recall a handful details clearly. The muffled explosion extinguished the match instantly. A six inch round opening in our tube is absolutely more than enough space for several hundred highly motivated wasps to enter. Dry wood shingle siding does not put up much of a fight in a fire. Two boys pushing in opposite directions in this contraption resulted in nothing more than a huge Chinese finger trap. The more we tried, well, you get it.

My seventy three year old grandfather did show some concern for us while he deployed his garden hose in a effort to save as much of the structure as possible. Though the kinks in the "cheap piece of crap" absorbed much of his attention. To his credit it's my understanding that he drove both Kurt and I to our general hospital were we spent the better part of a week recovering (barely) from a couple hundred stings between the two of us.

Curt and I had learned our lesson. The following summer we employed the use of snowmobile suits instead. Yeah, thats the ticket.

How did I (we) survive childhood?

Hope you enjoyed my little story (it's true) and if it made you smile...that's better yet.

Jim

[G-ManBart]

Lmao....too funny.

I decided to cut an apple with my pocket knife but thought that it might be dirty, so I took a Bic lighter and went to sterilize the blade. I should mention I was sitting on the edge of my bed at this point. I got distracted as I was heating the blade, moved a little and looked back to see the hot blade poke the side of the lighter, at which point the whole thing exploded in my hands. I dropped it, it bounced on the floor and wound up under the edge of my bed. I noted a few slightly charred strings hanging down from my bed, but didn't see anything else, so I opened my window all the way, and left the room to air out. About five minutes later I went back to see the corner of my bed had turned into a small pile of smoldering ashes. I realized I'd better clean it up before I got into BIG trouble. So, what did I grab? The family Electrolux vacuum cleaner! Yep, it sucked up the ashes AND the cherry hot embers with them, instantly turning the machine into an impromptu blast furnace At that point the vacuum started to smoke and I realized it was beyond my ability to contain, ran outside and found my mom who was working in the yard. Let's just say she wasn't very happy. She called the police (before 911) who sent the fire department, but an officer got there in time to throw my mom the garden hose so she could dowse my bed. Smoke was billowing out of the window at this point. Mom got the bed put out, the fire company got there a minute later and checked things over. They picked up the mattress and were taking it down the front steps at the very instant my dad pulled into the driveway. He thought they were carrying a body out. Needless to say he was even LESS happy than my mother at that point

It was a very, very long afternoon and evening. Dad had a softball game (it was a Sun) and my mother told him to just go and blow off some steam...he went 3 for 4. I barely slept (guest bedroom) and woke up before anybody in the family, rushed to get a shower, get dressed and waited at the bus stop for an hour to go to school...figured it was best to avoid as much contact as possible for a day or so.

It has now become the #1 favorite family "story" at holiday gatherings any time there is anybody in the room who hasn't heard the story a time or two. For years we'd see friends we hadn't seen in a while and invariably someone would say "so did you hear how Chris burned down his bed?". I deserved it, but it IS getting a little old

[Chris Keen]

I don't know why, but garden hoses and fire just seem to go together don't they?

.......... late one Summer day when I was in 8th grade I thought the bird bath in the back yard would make a really nice Olympic Torch filled with gasoline and set a-blaze!

Yeah well, my parents had gone out shopping, and I thought I had all kinds of time ..... but just then I heard a car pull in the driveway and by the time I realized it was them it was too late. I grabbed the garden hose to try and quickly put the fire out, but all I did was spread it all over the back yard! I had no concept of the burn-time of gasoline, and having poured at least a gallon of gas into the bird bath I was simply spreading the fuel along with the flames.

Mom and Dad walked out the back door just in time to see me running around trying to stomp out 30 little tiny fires all over the grass.

Did I do that????

[Mark K]

I was probably in 1st grade, and in the very early 60s it was not at all unusual for a kid my age to have a couple of packs of black kat firecrackers, and a punk to light them - unsupervised by parents. I after blowing up a bunch of stuff, I had some "duds" so I took the firecrackers apart and piled up the flash powder on the drive way, but my punk had gone out. So, I realized I could light the powder with the cigarette lighter in my Dad's '55 Chevy Impala. I got that thing hot and holding it in my little fingers, I pushed it down on the top of that 3" pile of powder. Flash!! I saw that my Dad's cigarette lighter was all gray from the smoke and was so worried about him being pissed, that I did not really notice my totally blistered hand/fingers until I got the lighter cleaned up.

Spent the rest of the night with my hand immersed in ice water.

How did we survive? Remember when the only "Seat belt" was your Dad holding you back from the steel dash of the car when he had to slam on the breaks?

Mark K.

[Wild Gene]

I wouldn't know where to start. They all involve guns, fireworks, gas, horses, motorcycles, a '69 Mustang or farm equipment. Add to that a very Italian childhood, it really is amazing I've lasted this long.

I know that if you touch an aluminum sprinkler pipe to a powerline, it will burn holes in your boots. I know that an electrical outlet and knives do not mix. I know that if you pop a truck out of gear on a hill, it will go really fast. I know that if you open a spring loaded gate when your smartass little nephew is walking in front of it, he will fly the other direction and I will get grounded. I know that you always keep an extra key in the motorcycle so when the cops take your key to leave in the mail box you don't really have to push it all the way home. I know that if you stand too close to the gas, it will burn off your eyebrows. I know that if you do get caught driving over 100mph, what your parents do is way worse than what the cops do, and never drag race in front of the county courthouse. I know that you can bury a D8 up to the seat faster than you can un-bury it. I know that when you chain a truck to a fence, neither wins. I know that it is a long way down from the roof. I know that you can get a concussion if your head gets stuck between the sidewalk and a Hoppity-Hop. I know that a 16' load of onion bins will not fit under 14' gas station roof. I know that tractors will run over or smash or trap you if dad is driving.

These are but a few "things I know", but I would never admit how I know them.

gene

[Anubis]

Ah where to begin. You'd probably be better served to ask GentlemanJim for stories about me.

Here's just ONE of the many many things. I was young, I don't remember how young but young enough to not remember this, it had to be told to me later. I had this babysitter who I didn't really care for I guess. Anyway we lived in Los Alamos and she wanted to take us all to Santa Fe to go shopping. So I told her I had to run to the bathroom first. After getting in the bathroom I promptly plugged the bathtub and sink then turned the water on and left. Needless to say we were gone to Santa Fe for quite a while. Apparently she had a pool in her house when we got back

Then there's the story of peeing, yes peeing, off the merry-go-round onto all the mean kids that kept keepin me off it

[Bigpops]

For some reason all of my STUPID stuff involves girls!

We had just moved to Houston Tx., turned 12, and I found the girl of my dreams (Carrie). Well one day, as I was riding my new 1977 Suzuki RM 80, she walked by our local riding spot with her friends. On our track we had a nice jump that was approx 4-5 feet high, that we usually jumped in 2nd gear, as it provided a great deal of loft.

Well, Carrie made the comment that I was a good jumper and wondered how far I could go. That's all it took.

All I remember is hitting 5th gear with the throttle pinned....seeing her long Blonde hair flowing in the breeze as I went whizzing by.......and waking up with the smell of 2 stroke fuel, a revving motor, burning bike, sore leg, and stars in my head.

Long story short.....15 stitches in my leg, a nearly totalled bike, and nearly 4 months of zero riding till I recovered and fixed things up.

Ohhhh....we "went out" for about a month and then she dumped me for my friend!

[JRW]

Based on what I heard from a kid down the street, shotgun primers with a BB taped over it fit perfectly in an AL arrow. Hmm...what to fill the hollow tube with?

Remember the old metal band-aid boxes with the hinged lid? If you cut the heads off of a couple hunderd matches, fill it to the top, tape the lid shut and punch a whole in the side for a shotgun primer initiator you can get a pretty nice fireworks display. Looking back, at least I was smart enough to shoot it with a BB gun from 20' away. Good thing I didn't have the internet to learn about Tannerite

[Graham Smith]

In the 50's I found out what happens if you put two keys into an electrical outlet - which also allowed me to learn why there are fuses. I also learned that there are things that were in old tube type radios that could store a remarkable amount of electricity, even when the radio was not plugged in.

In the early 60's I learned some other neat things:

Did you know that you can create a really impressive arc welder with two pieces of coat hanger and an AC-DC transformer?

Do you know what happens to your hands if they are holding on to those two bare coat hangers if your stupid friend turns on the electric switch before you tell him it's OK.

Did you know that if you empty out a CO2 cartridge, you can stuff it full of match heads, put it in a pipe, and make a dandy rocket?

Did you know that if you empty out a CO2 cartridge, you can stuff it full of powder from fireworks, put it in a pipe, and make a dandy explosion?

Did you know that if you explode a CO2 cartridge filled with powder from fireworks inside a pipe, that the pipe and the CO2 cartridge will splay open like ripe bananas and the now flattened CO2 cartridge will fly thorough the air until it buries itself deep in the garage door 2 inches from your head?

Edited April 23, 2010 by Graham Smith

[Chris Keen]

I did not know all that stuff! Thanks Graham!

[GrumpyOne]

Did you know that 1 lb of FFF Black Powder, dumped into a piece of 3' long 1 1/2" galavnized pipe with a cap screwed on one end, buried with just the open end out of the hole, with a small hole in the end cap of said galvanized pipe, in which a small piece of 1/8" copper tubing has been stuck into, and also filled with FFF black powder, then a small engine piston, wrapped in rags, is stuffed down the throat of said beast, packed VERY tightly in, then the small copper tube of powder is lit, it will cause an explosion which will rattle windows, lift you off of your feet, open a hole approximately 3' across and 4-5' deep in the ground, turn said piece of galvanized pipe into something resembling a cigar in which one of those old cigar loads has gone off in, and cause you to spend countless hours wondering, looking, and worrying, where that piston has went?

[Sarge]

Shot 63 windows out of the school house across the street.

[Graham Smith]

Did you know that 1 lb of FFF Black Powder...

Thanks. I needed that. I don't feel so stupid anymore. Now if you would just tell me, were you intentionally trying to kill yourself or just launch the piston into orbit?

[Graham Smith]

Not me, but the brother of a good friend... Dave decided he was going to scare the hell out of his brother and two sisters, so he went into the upstairs bathroom which over looked the patio where his siblings were sitting. He lit a cherry bomb and tossed it out the window. Problem is, he was laughing and the window wasn't all the way open and the cherry bomb hit the edge of the window and bounced back into the room, right into the toilet.

My friend says there was this loud "whoomp" sound and Dave came running out of the back door screaming "I blew up the hopper. Dad is going to kill me when he gets home.", and continued running into the woods. Dave didn't come home for three days.

[BMartens]

Shot 63 windows out of the school house across the street.

Okay, 63 windows...

1. Did you get caught at 63?

2. Did you run out of ammunition at 63?

3. Were there only 63 windows?

Just curious...

[EkuJustice]

We decided to recreate the challenger explosion with one of those model rockets you shoot up in the air. Had the wadding which prevents fire replaced with toilet paper, some fuel. It worked kind of as planned though had a nice big fireball.

We also use to play war games. This was before paintball or airsoft so the BB gun was the weapon of choice. I was lucky enough to have a couple of guns including a mag fed co2 pistol. Safety equipment, sun glasses or the like were good enough

Edited April 23, 2010 by EkuJustice

[sfinney]

Had more than one BB gun fight inside a camping tent with a few other kids.

[fiddler]

I think this was me.

[Chris Keen]

Ahhhh yes ...... the "before" picture!

[Vlad]

My first smart idea that I remember was taking the the leads for a electrical tester and stick them in the wall socket. Did I say leads, I meant lead, and I mean both ends of it. Did I mention this was eastern Europe and the sockets are 220? Yup, it smarted.

A couple years roll by, and playing with my Matchbox cars I managed to lose one under the couch. Well, I wasn't old enough to be able to lift the couch, and I couldn't quite see where it went so I stuck a lit match under it to see better. Turns out that when the underside of the couch caught fire, I did have enough strength to lift it up on one end so I could drench it with pots of water from the kitchen. I even cleaned up everything nice and neat and my mother didn't find out about this until many years later as we were moving and she saw the underside of the of the couch with a huge burned out hole. I still got smacked.

And then there was my grandparents TV set. This thing was a huge old beats with lots of tubes in it and it was always breaking down. For a while, the back cover was off, because every now and then something went strange inside of it and my grandpa would smack the back of the circuit board with a plastic rod to make it work again. One night, I was watching TV, and the something went strange. Being overtired I forgot the stick and just smacked it with my hand ..... I have no idea what amps or volts moved through that thing my arm tingled for a week and it took twice as long for the blackened skin on my left hand to finally fall off.

And there was highschool ... Picture it .. Mid eighties, Bucharest, Romania.. A very old prestigious high school in a huge building from the mid 1800's. Massive building, with all sorts of old piping and ancient heating systems. Hell .. You can see the pictures http://sfsava.licee....licvir/poze.php (the internet is awesome). Now picture the old chemistry labs, hell you don't even need to imagine it, there is a picture of it on that page. Well, that is a picture of the NEW chemistry lab, but I'm getting ahead of myself. I have fond memories of of that place, but we hated chemistry, well we hate the chemistry teacher really, we were fine with chemistry itself, as it turns out. One boring winter, some of us decided that if we wanted to be free of that class, it wasn't going to happen by itself, we had to make it happen. We also decided that cabinets holding the chemicals were easy enough to lock pick with a dull spoon, and that there are times when the lab is unlocked and unsupervised. I'm not going to go in great detail explaining our thought process, because frankly it is was one of those things that only make sense to 15-16 year old boys, but suffices to say that lots of pure sodium was shoved very deeply and very carefully into the drain pipes. Water was turned on, and some running away at speeds that only teenage boys can achieve might have been involved. One of the more interesting results was not so much that the lab needed some remodeling, but that the old pipes were so bizarre that one of the side effects was that the heating system also burst, apparently it was an old coal fired boiler that was retrofitted to gas with classic communist eastern European quality parts. However the most interesting part of this we didn't do THAT much damage to anything but the pipes (and some of the lab), in fact as far as I know to this day the school still thinks this was a problem with an over-pressured boiler that caused strange side effect, oddly localized to a lab and some burst radiators around the school. We did get quite a bit more of a result then we expected though. Turns out they close the school down in the middle of winter when the heating system fails. This was a very much unintended consequence because it meant I was stuck home with my mother for 2 weeks.

I sure hope the statue of limitations has expired on this.

PS: Holly crap, I checked out the website of my old high school some more, and the damn chemistry teacher is still here. Gah, I can't imagine the number of smart kids who ended up hating chemistry because of that woman.

Edited April 23, 2010 by Vlad

[Sarge]

Shot 63 windows out of the school house across the street.

Okay, 63 windows...

1. Did you get caught at 63?

2. Did you run out of ammunition at 63?

3. Were there only 63 windows?

Just curious...

The next morning my teacher and principal came in the classroom and were counting the little tiny holes bb guns make in glass windows. Since my house is the only one in the vicinity they question me and I confess. I know its 63 windows because as my dad was beating me with my bb gun he said you shot out 63 mother#%&$! windows you son of a &*?"!$#. Then the gun broke in half and he continued to wail on me with a 2x4. To this day I can feel it in my tailbone when a good rain is coming on.

Thanks for making me explain/remember that!

[SiG Lady]

Well, I was fascinated with fire as a kid and loved to build little bonfires just about anywhere I could get away with doing so. Not with the evil intent of destroying anything, but just because I liked fire.

One simple-but-memorable little blaze was on a hike in the hills behind our homes (back in the days before suburban sprawl ate up every square inch of open land) where we found some neat little random, deserted outbuildings from some ancient farm or something. Well, I couldn't pass up a little mischief opportunity, so we built a small fire inside one of them--mainly so we could SEE... the place seemed to have no windows and was dark as night inside. Naturally, with no windows, the smoke built up in a freakin' hurry and we couldn't see a thing--in part because our eyes were stinging so badly. We noticed quickly that the little fire was essentially out of control (old wooden building, remember) and we had no way in the world of putting it out. We just looked at each other and then ran off in a damn' hurry. There were no other bldgs around and the grass was green (so it was likely early spring) so we gave no thought to the possibility of a wildfire spreading (which it might've--who knows). We didn't hear anything on the news that night about a wildfire in the hills, so we just kept our mouths shut for a few years.

[VegasOPM]

I used to collect broken motorcycles, get them running (sort of) and sell them to unsuspecting friends. I had 2 Yamaha dirt bikes that hadn't been started in several years. I emptied the tanks, but forgot about the reserve tank- so when I loosened the petcock, old nasty two stroke gas cam pouring out all over the garage floor. Somehow, I figure that the best way to clean it up would be to burn it. My friend heard me thinking out loud and ran to get a hose while I lit a match.

WHOOM!!!! The gentle little fire that I had imagined was actually an explosion that brought a friend running from 10 houses away. Big, black cloud of smoke, plastic gas tanks on fire, tires burning, my buddy valiantly trying to fight the fire- but only succeeding in spreading the conflagration across the floor. We finally got the fires (yes fireS) put out and turned a fan on to blow the smoke out. When I went inside to assess the damage to my person (eyebrows do grow back thankfully), my Mom walked downstairs and asked what that strange noise was....

Of course there are other stupid things, but I am not sure what the statute of limitations are...

[JRW]

I also have no idea what happens when you introduce styrofoam into gasoline...

Can anyone imagine how dangerous we all collectively would have been as kids if we had access to the internet? Granted we would be too lazy to do it ourselves and just watch it on YouTube, but imagine the carnage.

[SiG Lady]

It seems like we were all pretty skilled at 'carnage' even WITHOUT the Internet...!