The OFFICIAL Unofficial Achewood Message Board
Trivial Pursuits => History => Topic started by: jay-ell on September 09, 2003, 06:42:54 pm
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Yesterday, I performed what is unquestionably the single least intelligent act of my entire existence. I'm going to share this with you because I am determined that somewhere, somehow, someone must have done something even more appallingly stupid than me, and I'm determined to find out who. I figure you guys are a pretty good start. :P
Picture this in your mind: In my bedroom stands a dresser. This dresser has five drawers and is approximately five feet tall. At the time of this incident, there were three things on top of the dresser: A stack of clean clothes, a lamp, and one of those Homedics waterfall thingies with no water in it. The dresser is in the corner of the room placed diagonally so that there is a little triangular prism of wasted space behind it. Both rear corners of the dresser directly abut the wall on either side.
On glancing at the dresser while getting ready for bed last night, I noticed two things: (a) the ##### I wanted to wear to work today were at the bottom of the stack of clean clothes and (b) they were probably wrinkled. So I put one hand on the side of the stack of clothes to stabilize it, grabbed the ##### with my other hand, and pulled. The pajama ##### which had previously been on top of the stack of clean clothes fell off the top of the stack and behind the dresser.
Not wanting to leave the pajama ##### there, forgotten and dry-rotting until we move houses, I determined that I had to come up with a way to retrieve the item. So, of course, I did the natural thing: I removed the laundry from the top of the dresser, climbed on top, and leaned waaaaaay over to reach the pajama #####. Throwing them to safety behind me, I began my ascent back over the top of the dresser.
But wait -- it seemed gravity had suddenly increased in intensity since last my feet had touched ground! You will recall, at this point, that the dresser is five feet tall. I am five feet seven inches tall. I was bent at the waist and my hips were keeping me balanced on the edge of the dresser. I had expected to be able to raise my head and do a sort of reverse sit-up to right myself, but in my careful calculations I had neglected to account for the wall which I now found to be in my way. Without a handhold to be found and only twenty or so inches of space in which to maneuver, my options seemed suddenly quite limited. It was at this point that I remembered that I am in fact claustrophobic.
To make an already-too-long story a bit shorter, I was forced to call (loudly, shrilly) to my husband, my darling, my…my hero to come and rescue me. Being, as he is, a good man, he did not so much as chuckle at the sight of my ensnared posterior emerging from behind a piece of bedroom furniture, my sweatpant-clad legs flailing wildly. Instead, he simply cleared the lamp and mini-waterfall off the top of the dresser (which, of course, in my confidence I had left in place) and tipped the dresser away from the wall to such point as I could slide to safety.
As soon he assured himself that I was safe and unharmed, my husband looked me in the eye and asked the dreaded question: “How, exactly, did you…?”
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Heh heh heh.
Must refrain from picturing JL bent over dresser... so sweet... so vulnerable...
I gotta go now.
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Well, the story did make me feel a little better about missing the bench I tried to sit down on this morning, and I'm sure that if I dig a little further back in my memory I'll be able to think of an act of humiliating stupidity to rival that. I'm not terribly slick, as a general rule.
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Come on, there have to be some stories out there. You're killin' me here!
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Honestly, I do that sort of thing so often that if I remembered the stories I'd have no room in my brain for anything else.
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There's always the story of how I almost overcame my fear of heights.
*clears throat*
The following is mostly true.
My college is located in a beautiful valley in the Blue Ridge Mountains, part of the southern Appalachians. One hundred years before I enrolled there (I have since graduated), the mountains were all clear-cut and replanted. None of the trees has been chopped down since, though a few have fallen of their own accord and/or lack of health. The point is: trees are everywhere on that campus.
Being, as it were, out from under the thumb of oppressive parentage, I began periodically to relive parts of my childhood - but only on the weekends. During the week I had work to do, you understand. Some Saturday morning, I would wake up, and tell myself, "Hey! You're not afraid of this anymore! That's for idiots to be afraid of." This tactic would work up my confidence to such a point that I would begin to feel more than myself, sometimes more than a man. If continued weekly, I would have relegated every one of my major fears in just under three months.
One such morning, I decided I was no longer afraid of heights. In such a green environment, what is the handiest way to prove one's loss of said fear? Tree-climbing, of course. I ate a good breakfast of coffee, cereal, and eggs from a box, and went searching for the tallest tree I could reasonably get my short self up into.
Using a length of nylon rope hooked around the lowest branch of a mighty pine, I walked myself up the side of the tree, swiveled myself around, and sat there, ten feet in the air. This was fantastic! Look how far I could see! So far, so good. I balance myself to a standing position, and begin to climb. I look down, but never below where my foot will go next.
Another thirty feet up, I turn to look out and see the entirety of the residential side of campus surrounding me. I pick out the buildings, see some folks I know, and turn around and climb some more.
At the top of the tree (seventy feet? seventy-five?) I see a small seat formed of the narrowing trunk and a couple spindly branches with some sort of unnatural green color. As I hesitantly, though bravely, pull myself up toward it (take THAT, fear of heights!) I can make out why the color seems unnatural: The object in the seat is a Kermit doll. Not just that, but it's wearing a pearl necklace and long false eyelashes.
Needless to say, I burst out in a fit of laughter. Wouldn't you? You're seventy-five feet up a tree, as far from the ground you've ever been without taking stairs or an elevator, and there's a Pop Culture Icon in drag.
The fit proved to be my downfall: laughing so hard, I grabbed my belly with one hand and leaned my head against my arm, which in turn leaned against the tree trunk, now only a couple of inches thick. I stopped laughing in a hurry when I heard a snap. The branch under my left foot had given way. The next snap I saw before I heard. As I reached up to grab some other skinny branches with my hands, the branch under now both feet gave way. I fell straight down.
I felt like Wile E. Coyote, just before he falls off the side of a cliff. I saw myself about to fall, and then, after I had what felt like three seconds to recognize that there was nothing I could do with it, I disappeared from a side view in a wisp of smoke.
Twenty screaming feet from the ground, I landed on a branch. I didn't land on my feet, or even on my ass. You got it, folks, I landed right smack dab on my twig and berries. I hadn't really changed position from when I first fell, and the branch just slid right between my legs. I almost passed out from the pain; I wish I had just gone and passed out.
Due to the anti-gasm, I had no sense to reach in front of me and grab the tree, or to balance myself on the branch. I grabbed my injured bits and screamed again, only a different scream than that which emanated during the freefall. Handless, in pain, screaming, scratched all to hell by pine needles and tiny branches, I fell twenty feet straight down and landed on the ground, flat on my back.
That's when I passed out.
I've gone treeclimbing since, but never so far, and never with such reckless abandon. Ah, the impatience of youth.
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Well, I'm sure I've done a few other things just as stupid, or stupider. Most of them little things, like just not thinking about something and it not turning out quite right, but often the outcome only involves minor annoyance or huge debts.
I did however manage this...
A few years ago when I was stuck at home, all alone, on a sunny day, I decided to take my skateboard outside. Now, I am fairly proficient on a plank. I can do interesting things with halfpipes, and can skate around a town with relatively few dismounts. However, what I always lacked around the house was a good jump.
All I had as an area to play with was the driveway - a 6 or 7 metre long slope, just over the width of a car, with an apron running along the front of the house perpendicular to the slope, of around the same width (though as depth comparatively).
I had a long stretch of smooth wood, formerly the top of an old desk, that I though would be perfect, so I set it up near the bottom of the slope, propped up on some good bricks. Now all I had to do, after a few good drop offs from it to test, was find a way to make the transtition from concrete to wood a little, well, less like approaching a pavement.
Hindsight being everything, I ought to have just gone for ollie-ing onto the plank, and then coming off the end into a nice kickflip, but I found a piece of thin wood that smoothed the transition.
Hindsight again - I should have tested the above remedy to said problem.
I set off up the slope, prepared, and pushed off. There was no hanging around, I wanted it to be a good jump, so I was going fairly fast.
My front wheels, upon hitting the thin wood, plunged through it, and jammed against the desk-top!
Suffice to say, after measuring the distance from the front of the board, to the shirt and blood marks left on the concrete, I managed to propel myself around two and a half metres!
I guess what's stupider about it is that I am now quite chuffed by it...
I spent half an hour in the bathroom feeling slightly ill, swearing I'd never skate again. Needless to say within the hour I was back outside skating around, ollie-ing badly from the new pain in my legs!
As I say, I have done many many stupid things, since me and spur of the moment common sense aren't always best of friends, but the only ones I can think of are mainly monetary at the moment.
Just always remember, if you do something stupid, I've probably done something like it, or will in the next week! I may be somewhat intelligent, but I'm certainly retarded!
Oh yes, I just remembered the one that has actually crippled me for life - I was climbing a farm gate - 7 horizontal bars, so a fairly high one, and I did it differently to usual, instead of one foot either side for safety, I put both my feet over, seperately, so I was facing away from the gate, with my feet balancing on one bar, on the heels. This meant that as I leaned back for balance, my feet slipped out, and I fell back over the gate to the side from which I came. Thanks to the height of the gate, I came down almost vertically on to the top of my head... On a rock... Ever since, if I sit on the floor, legs straight or crossed, my back is the worst curve shape. I just cannot straighten my spine when sitting with my legs making more than a 90 degree angle to my body. I don't really remember the pain since I was fairly young at the time, and I think the concussion kind of numbed it.
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Of course you didn't let go of the leash. The dog might have run in the street. A heroic story indeed.
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Wow, I feel really really smart right now.
I guess the only really stupid thing that I can think of offhand was that I made coffee without first emptying the coffee pot of old coffee, thus filling the counter with java.
And then I cursed, cleaned it up, filled the reservoir, changed out the filter and scooped in some more coffee, and did it AGAIN. Only this time there was more coffee in there.
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Sympathies on all of the injuries thus far...
I've managed to get through life thus far without any horrific self-injuries (unless you count the time I took a wrong step on the staircase of my dorm, skidded down on my ass from the first-floor landing to the basement floor, and had to take a second to realize I wasn't dead) but, doing high school theater, I twice managed to "tree" myself and need to be talked down. Both were from landings less than ten feet off the ground, and in both cases I knew about my severe-verging-on-crippling fear of heights, but I decided to climb up anyway.
To be fair, one of them was in my high school's prop room, which was unbelievably ill-designed: a cluttered floor, with one tiny triangulated (rungs nailed diagonally between the corners of the wall) ladder up to the prop loft above. In retrospect, it was probably better to have sat up there mewling about how I was gonna DIEEEEEEE than to have attempted the descent and fallen on old wooden chairs and paint cans.
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I don't tend to have a problem with heights although I do tend to fall down a lot. Most of my avoidable-through-application-of-common-sense mishaps involve chemicals or electricity.
Once when I was 10 I was building a plastic model. This was back when you could get the good kind of glue with the Toluene. Mmmmm. Anyway, there was special finishing glue you could get that had a consistency like water and the tremendous properties of the thicker, sniffin' kind...
I wasn't a glue abuser, I built models. But in this case, somehow, I managed to spill a dollop of the thin kind on the head of my bed. Near the pillow. I lay down later to go to sleep and it was one of those nights where you fall asleep just BEFORE your head hits the pillow.
The next thing I remember is strange. I'm not in my bed anymore, I'm on the sofa. And I can feel my heart slowing down. It misses a beat here and there - and then I'm floating above myself and I turn over and I'm face to face with me. I'm hovering near the ceiling. There is a strange pounding in my head and my heart is missing more beats, then it stops. In the silence I start to float towards the corner of the room and then, all of a sudden, my heart starts back up and I'm sucked back in, my eyes jerk open and I'm sitting up and looking around.
I am still not sure how I got to the sofa. I guess I must have staggered there realizing what more exposure to the fumes would do to me. And I don't know if the whole thing was a glue hallucination or something way weirder.
Nothing like that has ever happened since.
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Feel better yet, jl?
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OK, here's mine.
When I was in college, I had a red VW convertible Bug. Like all Bugs it had its idiosyncracies. There was no floor in the back seat for instance.
The quirk relevant to this story, however, involved the emergency brake. Thankfully, the emergency brake worked well. It would stop and hold the car just fine.
It just wouldn't lock in place.
Being the inventive sort that I am, I fashioned a device to lock said emergency brake in place, namely a Coke can that I bent in half and wedged under the brake lever. Cheap, easy, recyclable and it worked well.
At this time, I lived with my parents and commuted to school. My parents' house had a steeply sloped driveway which led down to their street, which formed a short level patch.
Since the ground continued to slope, the neighbors across the street's yard was yet lower than street level. Therefore, they had a retaining wall about 3 feet high abutting the street. That is to say, there was a 3 foot drop off from the street to their yard.
Here's a diagram (hope this works.)
\
\
\
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| ^^^^^^
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drvwy street yard house
One fine morning I was, as was (and is) my practice, running late. Since "wake and bake" was my policy at the time, other factors may have been involved.
I went out to the car, started it, removed my handy-dandy Coke can and prepared to back down the drive and proceed to class.
Just then I remembered what I'd forgot. I had to run back in and grab it.
So, I hastily shoved the Coke can back under the brake lever, jauntily hopped out of the car and trotted back toward the house.
Only to see the damn Coke can slide out.
Now, I'm not a small man and the VW Beetle is not a large car.
But the laws of physics are pretty damned merciless. So, needless to say, grabbing the door handle and attempting to slow the car's ever more rapid careen down the driveway was, in a word, pointless.
Until the day I die, I shall never forget the sight of my beloved red convertible Beetle fully airborne, in full majestic flight toward the master suite of the neighbor's house, a mere 40 feet or so away. I know it's cliche, but time stood still for me then. The moment had a terrible beauty all its own.
The car landed almost gracefully and barrelled across the grass.
It stopped no more than three inches from the house.
Needless to say, I was stunned by this turn of events. It took several moments for me to react in other than incoherent syllables and random pacing.
Finally after several deep breaths, a few "Wows", more "Far Outs" than I like to admit and at least three "Holy Shits", I was more capable of addressing the situation.
I didn't know whether to call the police, a tow truck, the National Guard, my Dad or Maury fuck*ng Povich.
Finally, I got in the car and turned the key.
It started right up.
I drove through the yard, across the front walk, over to the driveway and up to the street.
The car ran fine. Nothing seemed to be damaged.
Nobody had seen any of this. No witnesses.
I could not believe my luck. I breathed God's own sigh of relief, sat for a few seconds to gather myself for the drive, then with the cheery manner of a man who has dodged a bullet with his name on it, set off toward class with a song in my heart.
It was 35 minutes later and I was parking in my secret spot next to campus when I realized that I never did go back to grab what I forgot.
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Thanks, guys. I laughed so hard reading this thread it literally brought tears to my eyes. You guys are great.
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Indeed, the image of a red Bug convertible flying gracefully towards the house -- and stopping three inches from it, a perfect landing on the lawn -- is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. This thread has improved the quality of my life.
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Thank you, you are both very kind.
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Pfft. All your stories are too long. I didn't read them. Make them shorter. For example, look at this anecdote that Hemingway posted on a similar thread-
'Tried to iron my shirt while wearing it. It hurt.'
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I first read this thread and was assaulted by so many memories of past stupidity that I was debilitated. I’ve pulled the ‘forgot to use the parking brake’ a couple of times myself, once with car damage and once, miraculously, without. But one thing sticks out as completely retarded (
When I was sixteen, I opened a bottle of hydrochloric acid by biting the stopper and pulling it out with my teeth. The acid got on my two bottom front teeth and ate out their interiors. So I had a couple of half-hollow lower front teeth that lasted a little while (over a year actually) but eventually broke into pieces.
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When I was sixteen, I opened a bottle of hydrochloric acid by biting the stopper and pulling it out with my teeth.
Why were you doing this, again?
Of course, this reminds me of a friend of mine in high school Honors Chem who, while we were working on an inorganic analysis thing using concentrated acids and bases, managed to spill concentrated hydrochloric acid on his hand. His brilliant solution? Spill concentrated ammonium hydroxide on it so that they would neutralize. Suffice to say that it didn't work... "OW! Shit! Hey, pass me the NH4OH... ... OW, JESUS!!"
The saddest thing: he graduated near the top of our class.
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When I was sixteen, I opened a bottle of hydrochloric acid by biting the stopper and pulling it out with my teeth.
At the high school I used to attend - Lockerbie Academy (yes, the Lockerbie), all of the teachers had, let's say, colourful personalities.
When the chemistry head of dept. and the technicians realised their store of Potassium was not only improperly stored, but that they had too much and didn't want to disclose the information, they decided to get rid of it.
This they did by taking a row-boat out onto a small lake, and tipped it in...
Need I say what happened next!
I swear, this is absolutely true, and one of the most utterly retarded things anyone could ever do, particularly when they ought to have known better!
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I had a LOT of trouble in chemistry class. I spilled hydrochloric acid, quite concentrated, all over the sheet for my practical exam. At first it was fine. Then it turned black and fell apart.
It may have been the only time that teacher ever smiled at me.
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When I was sixteen, I opened a bottle of hydrochloric acid by biting the stopper and pulling it out with my teeth.
At the high school I used to attend - Lockerbie Academy (yes, the Lockerbie), all of the teachers had, let's say, colourful personalities.
When the chemistry head of dept. and the technicians realised their store of Potassium was not only improperly stored, but that they had too much and didn't want to disclose the information, they decided to get rid of it.
This they did by taking a row-boat out onto a small lake, and tipped it in...
Need I say what happened next!
I swear, this is absolutely true, and one of the most utterly retarded things anyone could ever do, particularly when they ought to have known better!
I've forgotten much of my high school chemistry. Would the result be similar to what you'd get if you dropped sodium into the lake?
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I've forgotten much of my high school chemistry. Would the result be similar to what you'd get if you dropped sodium into the lake?
Yeah, exactly. Although... if I'm recalling correctly, unless it was a seriously large amont of potassium, wouldn't the effect not be particularly dramatic? I don't remember sodium or potassium exploding particularly gloriously.
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We used to steal potassium from the lab and throw it in rain puddles. It actually was pretty bright and loud and dramatic.
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We used to steal potassium from the lab and throw it in rain puddles. It actually was pretty bright and loud and dramatic.
Indeed. It is fairly fierce. And it was a rather large quantity (probably a very large quantity when you think about the amounts you tend to see of it in High School chemistry lessons!). It ended up without the boat. It also wasn't in one piece, which meant the reaction was far faster and more spread out.
I would have paid to see it.
I'm also still amazed no one managed to drown during that.
Also, yes it would be like Sodium's reaction with water, only Potassium, having the higher atomic number, reacts far more fiercely.
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Yes, but potassium is a heavier element, farther down the periodic table - and thus even more reactive.
Man, I would have loved to have seen that (from a safe distance)!
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Thanks Mr. Wizard!
Sounds to me like the described dumping would have been better accomplished with a large slingshot made of inner tubes, or perhaps a catapult such as Wile E. Coyote would order from the Acme Company so as to acheive the desired potassium immersion yet remain at a remove from the desired spectacular display.
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... Somehow I'd managed to forget about potassium being farther down the scale than sodium. I guess high school chemistry was a while ago.
Still: cesium. Consider it, won't you?
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Still: cesium. Consider it, won't you?
This would make an awesome billboard.
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Thanks Mr. Wizard!
Sounds to me like the described dumping would have been better accomplished with a large slingshot made of inner tubes, or perhaps a catapult such as Wile E. Coyote would order from the Acme Company so as to acheive the desired potassium immersion yet remain at a remove from the desired spectacular display.
How about say, a hole in the ground!?
Seems slightly more obvious to me. Possibly less fun I guess.
Yes, I'd use your technique on second thoughts.