Stupid Things You've Done
 

This isn't really a prank, yet, it kind of is. I'm filing this under "stupid things I've done" because no one is really pranked and the fun is harmless.

The Coffee Cup

Coffee and donuts are inspiring foods, so as I sat at the table at the local Dunkin' Donuts contemplating the empty styrofoam cup before me, an idea struck. I cut the "spacer" ring off the bottom so the cup would sit flush against any surface, then I walked out to my car and removed a magnet I use to hold a radio microphone to the door frame. I dropped the potent magnet into the cup, replaced the sippy lid, and stuck the thing to my roof near the driver side door, ensuring that it was at a slight angle so it appeared that it would fall at any moment. The neodymium magnet held fast, even at 40mph, and I drove away.

Horns honked, pedestrians waved, and people yelled as the majority of my fellow commuters attempted to warn me, even at high speed, that I left my coffee on the roof, despite that it is ludicrous for coffee to sit on a flat roof at such velocities. The kindness somewhat restored my faith in humanity -- strangers in this cold, seemingly uncaring world were concerned for my coffee's well being! Driving through the business park and through campus caused groups of people to stop and watch, yet no speed bump nor fast turn would shake the cup. This caused some confusion and, I think, even a little frustration as some people want to see coffee spill all over the car, road, and windows. When it doesn't happen, there is dissapointment.

That night, a biker pulled up beside me. "Hey, man, you left your coffee up there."

"Yeah, I know. I'm trying to cool it off a bit." And with that, I pulled away from the stop and drove around a bend at 35mph. I wish I would have had a camera with me to capture that expression I saw in my rearview mirror. He sat at the stop sign, watching until I was out of sight.

Hard drive magnets work quite well and you can get a cup to hold at 50mph or so without much issue, although the sides and top wobble a lot with the wind. Other ideas I had included chinese takeout boxes, donut bags, 7-11 "big gulp" cups, and a baby carrier.

The baby carrier obviously pushes this stupidity too far. :D

I'd love to hear of other stupidity from other Cellarites.

That's not stupid at all. It's actually clever.

Stupid is when someone says "That's wet paint" and you touch it to check.

Ahhhh grasshopp-ah-- Do not take advantage of this kindness whence discovered, less it not be there when you truly require it...

No that's when the sign says "dry paint." :lol:

I have done that many times and have ended up with a white, black or green hand. I guess I'm just curious.

My stupid things are usually just ditzy things... and considering that I'm really not all that ditzy to begin with it makes them even more funny.

A few weeks ago, I squirted toothpaste on my hand, believing that it was facial lotion but I was about to brush my teeth so it just didn't make sense. I scraped it off with my toothbrush and carried on with my tooth cleaning.

I tend to trip and fall when just walking down the street - and by fall I mean that I am flat out laying on my face!

I've run several stop lights thinking that they were stop signs.

I've stopped at green lights - again - see above.

I often forget that I'm clipped into the pedals on my bike and fall over.

If I think of anymore - I will list them, but for now - I'm depressed by my stupidity.

I think you are describing absent-mindedness. To me, stupidity is when you are given the chance to think, you do think, and you think poorly. If you never get around to thinking, you are just being forgetful, absent-minded, or unobservant. Not stupid. But the end result is often the same.

An old buddy of mine, Jim, once told me the tale of a buddy of his, so this is a FOAF story:

Nights in the South Dakota countryside are very very black if there's no moon. Jim's buddy and some companions were having a kegger out on a ranch. This was a ranch with modern conveniences like electric fences to keep the cattle in with. Electric fences on South Dakota ranches in the seventies were often powered by twelve-volt batteries with a gizmo to switch the fence on and off periodically to save current, so you had an on-again-off-again DC circuit.

They were getting towards the bottom of the keg as late afternoon became evening became night. The beer had its usual effect on everybody, and they were dealing with it by going outside and very informally pissing, availing themselves of fenceposts, and everything came out all right. They got drunker as the night got blacker.

Our Hero (no name given by Jim) fumbled his way outside along a fenceline, unzipped, and let fly. For a few moments, all was well. Then the only electric fence in the immediate area switched on.

Twelve volts or so of direct current locked him open and apparently did not throw him clear. He stayed there until pretty much drained.

A new and undesired understanding of the phrase "piss and moan," I suppose.

So don't do this.

Your friend is unfortunately a liar. Mythbusters did a whole segment where they desperately tried to electrocute themselves by peeing on fences with far higher voltages than normal, and they were completely unsuccessful.

Tell you what kiddo , why don't you do your own experement , go to the local hard wear store , get you a dog zapper fence . set it up and take a squat and see how FAR you jump ,,,,, they were looking for killer current , dog zappers use high voltage , low current ( 900+volts , .001 amps ( current ) ) , volts hurt , amps kill

I talked a friend into pissing on a hog fence once , he fell over after he jumped ,
of corse he wasn't that smart , this is the same guy i talked into pissing on a spark plug to shut off the lawn mower

I have friends with 'odd' interests. One had a particular fetish with all things...'sparky'.

Had a TENS unit, and an old abdominal/hernia fix that involved staples or clamps of some such. Placed TENS unit somewhere in the vicinity of the twig and berries. Turned it on, turned it up, and landed somewhere about 6 feet from his couch.

Some months back, I was downtown and forgot to feed the parking meter. Sure enough, when I returned to my car, there was a $10.00 parking ticket. As luck would have it, I had driven about 3 blocks down the street, cussing the gods of meter maids, when I spied the ax murderer's car, also parked at an expired meter. Apparently he had bribed the meter maid or else she had gone off for lunch because there was no ticket on his car.

Thinking fast, I pulled up alongside his car and put MY parking ticket on his windshield. What the hey, he owed me $10,000.00 and $10.00 was a start in the right direction. I never dreamed he'd be dumb enough to pay it, though.

However, 3 days later when I went down to city hall to inquire about my ticket, they told me it had been paid the day before. Heh, Heh, Heh!

Ok stupid things , i can think of MORE that i care to rember !!!
But on that comes to mind ,
I was in a new steel mill a few years back as it was being built , i was settign up this BIG ASS scale , i had to set the structure , then go back and forth from the instrumentation to the structure , about 5 floors of steps , i had the quickest rout picked out , i was happly running up and down the steps , back and forth ,
well for some reason they had blocked off one of the flights of steps so I had to re-rout , no big , there was about 4-5 different sets of steps , i was running down the steps ,
1 flight , turn the corner
2nd flight , turn the corner
3rd flight , turn the corner ( i think to my self "self ,this will work!!! , hell its going to put you closes to where you need to be any way " !!!!!)
4th flight , turn the corner
5th flight , about 2 steps down the 5th flight the staris abruptly ended ,
no saftey tape or barriers ,
as i said i was running the stairs ,
so I found my self hanging in mid air ( a Verry Wily Cayote type moment ) ,
it seemed like a long time that i hung there , such a nice view from that perspective !!!
befor i fell about 20 feet onto a pile of rocks and sand !!!

No bad owies from this , a few guys i knew ran over to see if i was ok ,
then laughed in my face , hell i even had to laugh as i limped away

Back in my misspent youth, I was launching bottle rockets from the rain gutter (remember those, old guys?) of my '66 Chevy Biscayne four door while my pal drove it down a country road. A big piece of burning fuse came off of one of them and landed between my legs. I slapped at it and thought I had it out.

20 or 30 minutes later, I noted that my ass was becoming rather more warm than the humid midsummer night could account for (no AC, and wouldn't have been useful anyway as we had all the windows down so we could shoot bottle rockets from the rain gutters). I raised up my ass off of the seat, and a cloud of smoke rose up, filling the car like something out of a Cheech and Chong movie, even with the windows down.

We wasted a lot of beer putting out the seat that night. They used to put *a lot* of foam in those old Chevy bench seats, and it melts rather well, you see.

you're lucky you didn;t melt your ass cheeks together.

drinking too many martinis and throwing up on the table at the bar. then waking up the next day to 2 messages from this guy at the bar I gave my cell phone number too. Not good.

Thats the time you thank your friend for carrying you out of the bar, driving you home, taking off your boots and throwing your sorry ass on the couch.

I married a drug/alcohol counselor.

I believe I win this round.

Only if he was an addict, as well. ;)

Here's a really stupid thing I did today. (I wonder if I'll get arrested? :worried: )

Remember how I posted that I figured the ax murderer did away with my kitty, Traveler? OK, you all don't remember, but that's the context for the following:

I had put up "lost cat" fliers around town, but two days ago we had a horrific wind storm which blew all my fliers away. The wind also caused 2 hour power outages in my town, snapped the branches off trees and caused the wood slats on my front deck railing to blow off and land in the neighbor's yard three houses down. But that stuff is not important. My fliers were all gone!

At this point, I don't expect to ever see Traveler again. People have tried to be helpful and I got a number of calls from folks who thought they found him but hadn't. People even come up to me on the street and ask about him. Well, the ax murderer got him.

Still, I decided to post the fliers one last time as a sort of ritual in Traveler's memory. He was a very cool kitty and I miss him alot.

I went around with my staple gun and my fliers and I posted a flyer in front of the post office and then went in to check my mail. Well, as fate would have it, the ax murder's PO Box is in the row right above mine. When I walked in this afternoon, the postal workers had gone home for the day and no one else was in the post office. I had my handy staple gun in my hip pocket, and I whipped it out and pretended to be Annie Oakley and shot at the ax murderer's box.

Well, damned if I didn't score a direct bull's eye! The staple went right into the key hole of his box. Now, I am not a good shot and the odds of this happening must have been a zillion to one.

I stood there for a moment dazzled by my excellent shooting skills until I realized its probably a Federal crime to tamper with someone's post office box. So I went over and tried to pry the staple out. It was in there good! I tugged at it and it finally snapped off with part of the staple still in the key hole.

The ax murderer is not going to be able to open his box on Monday, and I will be the prime suspect. This wouldn't bother me but for the fact that the post office might have one of those closed circuit cameras like ATM's do and what if my Calamity Jane stunt got caught on video?

So I'm wondering. Should I go turn myself in on Monday and hope that my co-operation will put the postal service in a forgiving frame of mind or should I say nothing and wait to see if anyone comes after me? :hide:

What a dumb stunt!

I'm guessing the guy asked for your phone number *before* you hurled and passed out?

It depends on how small a town you live in and if you have any allies at the P.O.

I find small towns tend to keep things local.

stupidest things i've ever done. i'm 23 now, but i've done some stupid things...

when i was 7 i used to sit on this glass table on our back porch all the time. being the naturally inquisitive and curious person that i was and still am, i wondered if i could stand on it to get to my roof (what i would do from the roof was unknown and unimportant, i just wanted on the roof dammit). so i stood on the table to see if it would hold my wieght (i currently weigh about 120 lbs, i'm skinny, at the time you can estimate). at first no problems, i remember thinking "wow" and at that instant i went straight through the glass, cutting open my ankle and big vein. i have a cool scar and dumb story to show for it.

also when i was little, our dining room was really small. it had the table, 3 walls and a wine cabinet. i used to run around the table in circles for no reason and one of these times i met the corner of the wine cabinet with my ear, splitting it apart about a mm at the top. i have this funny two-bump scar thing, that you can't even tell is there unless you feel it for yourself or look at it really closely (which none of you will ever do, i hope). now the stupid part is that i have the same scaring on my other ear perfectly symetrical with the other one. yes, that's right: i ran the other direction around the table and did the same thing.

let's see...what else...

in high school i was out at like three in the morning with a friend riding shopping carts around a parking lot when i rolled one down a hill and into a police car which came looking for us (and failed to find us). we found a roll of carpeting outside of someone's house and carpeted an entire coldesac. we put people's mailbox's facing inwards, we put other people's houses up for sale...you know i don't think i have the guts or mental problems to do these sorts of things anymore...

I don't know if I have allies at the post office or not. I'm friendly with them, but its just in a chit chat sort of way. I don't know any of them off duty or anything.

They might have to even put a whole new lock on the box for all I know. I don't see how they'll be able to get that bit out without taking it apart. I'm tempted to go over with something to try to work the staple out, but that could REALLY backfire on me!

Right now, I'm thinking the best thing to do is to go in first thing Monday and fess up to my foolishness and abjectly apologize. I wouldn't, though, if I knew that they didn't have any videocams in the place.

Maybe I'll just staple myself inside my house and prepare for a seige with the SWAT Team. :eek:

Confess, but tell them you were trying to juggle the staple gun while using both hands to get stuff out of your mailbox and it "went off accidentally." They don't have any reason to think you are acquainted with the tenant for the box above yours. Say something like "Wow, that sure was lucky that I didn't shoot myself, hee hee, that would be hard to explain at the ER", etc. Anybody in public service jobs hears so many idiotic stories they probably won't think yours was anything suspicious ;)

we found a roll of carpeting outside of someone's house and carpeted an entire coldesac

EGGSALANT !!!!!!!

The trouble is that this town is small enough that the folks at the post office know of my relationship, now non relationship to the ax murderer. I don't think they'll buy that the gun went off accidently and just so happened to hit his box.

I think I'm going to have to come clean with them and admit that I was aiming at his box and also honestly admit that I had no idea that I would actually manage to lodge a staple in it. I really thought the damn thing would just bounce off and no harm done. I have trouble making the staples stick into wood telephone poles! I never dreamed one might be so deadly to a metal post office box.

The Post Office will probably forgive you.......and turn you over to the phone company. :lol:

I assume so! Night is a little fuzzy!!!!

LMAOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!! We would get along great!!! Love the bike fall over one!!!! :lol:

lessee here. i did do something similar to amnesiac42 only i was about 4 or so. with a brick. on top of a glass table. good thing dad was a surgeon. i've still got the scar on my left cheek/lip. if you research on some of my pics you can see there. now, when and if you do find those pics you'll ask your self "well what about the other scars?" easy. a jeep cj5 on county fire roads late at night and add in a high rate of speed. misnegotiated a left turn and got clothes lined by a mesquite tree then rolled up in the barbed wire fence we just drove through. yeah, it it it hurt. another stupid thing was racing supercross in my youth. i can tell you 3 days ahead of time when a cold front is coming and how strong the SOB is gonna be. only, i don't regret racing. i just wish i knew then what i know now......

oh yeah, and let's not forget my latest and greatest of speeding with an open container last friday and having to do the "drunk test dance" in front of the man.

I wish I had gotten out more before I reached an age of accountability (18). :yum: I especially like the idea of putting houses up for sale, that could go unnoticed for a while. teehee

Yeah, I'm fond of the thought of putting someone else's house up for sale, myself. There's probably some stupid law against doing that, though.

I never heard from anyone about the stapled shut mail box, so I think that one is just going to be our little secret.

As far as stupid deeds from my mis-spent youth, I'd say that driving over Red Mountain Pass with a pint of Wild Turkey in the middle of a raging blizzard was right up there. On the way, I over took a snow plow driver who got slicked off the mountain by an avalanche about 20 minutes after I'd passed him. :headshake

Ummm...how does passing a snow plow that got thrown overboard qualify as stupid? What would have happened to you if you'd stayed behind him, hmmmmm??? :headshake

.

OK, that's it, LJ! You, me, staple guns on Main Street at high noon. May the best girl win! :p

Patrick, I don't think I was stupid to pass the snow plow driver. I was stupid to put myself in the situation in the first place. Let's see: Red Mountain Pass, blizzard, 2:00am, pint of Wild Turkey... I know! Jump in the car and drive 60 miles to Ouray from Durango! I mean, doesn't everyone?

There, but for the grace of God, go I.

Jumping out of a moving car.

We were at a festival, we had decided to go & play rounders (similar to softball). About 8 of us squeezed into one car, in varying states of sobriety. We were within the actual campsite rather than on the open road.

I was squidged up against the door, and as we bumped over the field I wondered if we were going slowly enough for me to open the door and fall out without hurting myself. I really did think it through, and decided the car was going as slowly as the buses & trains I had stepped off in the past.

What I didn't consider was that I would not be springing out in a forward motion and landing on my feet. Instead I fell out backwards and there was bumping and rolling involved. I ended up losing quite a bit of skin - just grazing, but difficult to keep clean when camping. Oh and some spectacular bruises.

Even now I am puzzled as to why I thought it was a good idea.

stupid things i've done? hmm...

you really expect me to remember their names? :headshake

Or at least be the one with the least trouble removing her shirt after you've both shot those staple guns empty!
:eek: :mg: ...ooch! eech! owie!

Standard category, "Seemed Like a Good Idea At The Time".
We all have some in that category. :thumb:

hehe... sounded like a good idea at the time...famous last words.

I love science. I learned I am related to Bill Nye the Science Guy on my wife's side (I would have married her anyway, but that's a different thread :blush: ) Aaaannnyway... I have this great recipe for Instant Ice Cream. I think I've posted it...maybe not. But it is 50% dessert and 50% performance art. In addition to the regular ice cream makings, the secret ingredient is liquid nitrogen.

I made a batch at work one time. The ice cream was delicious and all my friends enjoyed it. Afterward we would play around with the liquid N, freezing things. Leaves would crumble, flower petals shattered, little drips dropped from waist height onto the tile floor made little bombs, hissing and smoking. All in good fun.

Not only is liquid N reeeeaaaaallllly cold, when it boils away it expands considerably. Like 800 times it's liquid volume. I took about a capful and poured it into a two liter plastic pop bottle. When I shook the bottle, it became rigid with pressure. I opened the cap and **WHOOOOSH** the gas came out!

Well, following the maxim of shadetree scientists everywhere, if some is good, more is better, right? Well I put about an inch in the bottom of the bottle, not even enough to connect all five of the little wells in the bottom of the bottle. Shake shake shake. Like. A. Rock. Well, I couldn't wrench the top off and quickly became bored with it and set down the bottle and went on my way. I really did forget about it and was back at work on the computer when the bottle exploded.

The sound was literally deafening. People came running from all over the floor, even from the floor below. What happened?! I could barely hear them, my ears were filled with ringing. I managed to talk my way out of it somehow. I had a large office at the time, and there was green plastic shrapnel everywhere. I found little green bits of twisted melted plastic for months afterward. But the most amazing part was that the cap to the could not be found. The only clue we had was a hole one inch in diameter in the ceiling tile directly above the place where the bottle blew.

That cap weighs, what, a fraction of an ounce? The hole it cut in the one inch thick acoustic tile was as clean as if it were laser drilled. No breaking out in the backside of the tile. I don't know, that cap was probably moving at the speed of sound. Cause I never heard of it again. To think I was shaking it around just minutes before...:shudder:. Like juggling a live hand grenade.

Yeah, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Er... How did you talk your way out of it, BigV? Alien landing? Drive by shooting? Construction work across the street? Inquiring minds want to know!

How about being lost in the middle of the commercial airliner approach path to Mexico City International Airport at midnight in a Cessna 152?

I didn't get into that spot by myself, it was a group effort. There were three guys from Albuquerque who wanted to do a scuba diving tour of Mexico and I went along as interpreter (due to the pilot being my boyfriend). Due to leaving the previous destination late in the day (a frequent problem when guys stay up drinking every night of their vacation) it was already quite dark when we were approaching Mexico City. Although the pilot had an instrument rating, we could not find the outer marker to save our lives. Everybody was looking out at the ground and searching for the signal and we just could not find anything where "it is supposed to be." We kept circling and circling, and nothing.

At that point we should have figured out an alternative, like going to Puebla, but instead we got the bright idea to go in further and talk to the tower. It is International Law that all controllers are supposed to speak English, but guess what? Nobody in the Mexico City tower could understand a thing the pilot said, so I got put on the radio to talk at them in Spanish. We then discovered that THEY didn't know where WE were either! It was pitch black and we were swinging back and forth trying to pick up the marker and suddenly we noticed we were not alone out there. In fact, we were getting less alone all the time. I said "Jesus! Let's get out of here!" but my boyfriend-the-pilot said "They're just going to have to talk us in now." I said "HOW??! We can't understand a word they say!" So with his Chuck Yeager attitude he just picked up the radio again and kept repeating the same request over and over again: to get a controller online who could speak English because we were coming in for a landing and could not get lined up properly without the outer marker. Then I would repeat it in Spanish, then he would say it in English again. (plthijinx can probably correct me on the procedures because I am remembering it from 30 years ago and I didn't understand then what I was doing)

Somebody in the tower told us something to look for on the ground where another beacon was supposed to be and we were all staring out the windows trying to find it, with all these huge commercial airplanes in holding pattern around us and getting thicker traffic every minute. We could pick up their landing instructions coming in from the tower on our radio but nobody telling us what to do still. It was the most bizarre thing I had ever seen, I was looking out the window and there were people in a Braniff liner looking back at me! The tower told us to keep holding, we kept getting blithering instructions in something that was neither English or Spanish and completely incomprehensible. My boyfriend finally radioed very calmly that he intended to follow the next plane going down for a landing if he didn't get specific directions how to come in otherwise because it was only a matter of time before somebody hit us and we would come down on top of them. I don't even remember seeing any runways in sight, just all those huge planes all around us.

The other planes now began getting into the act because the word was spreading that there was a single-engine Cessna lost out there and they were more nervous than we were (this was in the days were there were considerably more primitive warning devices onboard commercial airliners, if any). One pilot even shouted into the radio "Will you fucking tell him how to land and do it now!!" For whatever reason, maybe it was that the other captains refused to attempt landing until they knew we were out of there, everybody in the sky was put on hold until we got down, with a controller who spoke well enough to get it done. I honestly expected to be arrested when we checked in after landing, but nobody paid the slightest attention to us. We did the usual sign-in-and-bribe-the-customs-officer routine and left the terminal. It occurs to me now that there was probably not even a report filed by the tower of this incident, and that "air traffic control" was a truly relative term there. What is the "near miss" category in the US, 2 miles? Heck, how about 200 FEET?!

The really stupidest part I played came later, when I kept flying with this guy. By the time we arrived at the hotel, he had started shaking and could not sleep all night. He said he'd decided to give up flying because of not being able to handle the situation we had just been through. I should have agreed with him.

Without access to liquid nitrogen, dry ice works well when mixed with a little water, or Red Devil brand Lye and aluminum foil. Louder than a 12 gauge and enough to make car alarms in a nearby parking lot go off. The little 20oz bottles usually blow out the bottom and are still pretty damn loud. In a dorm setting, lowering an "armed" 20oz with a string to someone's window two stories down at 3:30 in the morning is hilarious.

Beware: they are, under legal definition in most states, bombs. They will blow your fingers off, getting caught is a bad thing, don't try this at home, etc, etc.

BigV, you are one lucky SOB!!

probably a good idea.
thinking about this: 1. his marker panel was either not turned on or was broken. 2. mexico city's outer marker could have been inop. (a marker beacon is a transmitter that emmits a cone like radio signal straight up widening with altitude to a max width of something like a 1/4 mile or something, it's not something that you can see on the ground at night. daytime? perhaps.)
or 3. he didn't have the right frequency tuned in for the ILS/LOC approach or NDB.

I talked my way out of it by running out the door "looking for the explosion" same as everyone else. There was only a BIG noise, but no smoke, and except for the easily overlooked plastic "shrapnel" remains of the bottle. I just sideslipped the attention and kept looking with the rest of them. Lucky, in more than one way.




edit: brainlocked and failed to finish a sentence, now fixed.

Ya coulda shot yer eye out!

Maybe someone triple-dog-dared him. :lol:

BigV - I am dying here!!!
I mean, I do realize that you are a very lucky person, but dayum that is soooo funny!!

[wiping away tears] ohhhh man that's a classic - epecially the "joining in the search for what made that noise". hahahahha [/wiping away tears]

Nice to know that there's always someone who'll go one better:

'A speeding motorist faces a driving ban after being caught four times by the same speed camera in the space of one minute and 37 seconds. The 40-year-old motorist unwittingly passed the speed trap in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland, before turning round at the next roundabout to investigate a mysterious flash. He drove past again, and once more was puzzled by a flash of light. It took two more attempts - both being flashed - before he spotted the camera perched on top of a trafiic light...

I was looking for a place to post a stupid thing I said last night, but it's insignificant compared to the other posts in this thread. Carry on.

I missed my final exam.

Top that.

Yikes! Will your instructor let you make it up later?

That's like some nightmares I still have!

Just stopped showing up, didn't turn in the final paper for the class, but still passed. What did I learn?

That you can half ass it and still win?

I'm taking to the proff and the chair trying to get something, if nothing less, a withdraw or some kind of make up test.