Mine was our CRT TV. I would rapidly push the power button on and off because I thought the picture coming and going looked cool but eventually it fell inside of the TV. I think I later stuck a magnet on the TV.
Not looking for Reddit answers like “My parent’s marriage”
I also put our phone in a bucket of water. My dad asked me to hold it but I was already carrying a bucket of water so I just put it in the bucket.
This actually got a good laugh out of me. I have a toddler, and I can see what you did totally made sense in your mind, and that it was dad’s fault for not being specific enough with the instructions.
A brand new multi thousand dollar video camera that my pops had saved up for. I disassembled it entirely, just trying to figure out how it worked. He wasn’t even mad at me. I grew up and now can fix just about any electronic down to the component level. I like to think he saw the curiosity in me and was more proud than anything.
Huge respect for pops for not disassembling you.
I love this lil’ story, thanks for sharing
or he’s doing the long con, and waiting till you buy something expensive so that he can disassemble it “out of curiosity” to test your reaction
In grade 2 I burnt down a shed causing $2000 damage in the 1970’s. (Around $10,000 in todays money)
I was playing in the shed and decided I wanted to build a fireplace… out of wood. (In my defense it was a type of laminate, so I didn’t know it was wood at the time.)
I nearly did something similar. My friend and I found a lighter and didn’t want to get in trouble for burning stuff so we did it under his porch.
In grade 2
How old were you in grade 2?
If it’s anything like here (Canada), it’d be around 7-8yo.
Yup, and this was here in Canada.
I grew up in a very unorganized town that wasn’t really regulated with traffic laws. I learned to drive a truck at about 12.
When I was 14 I was driving my dad’s truck around town. I suddenly had the urge to see how well the brakes worked. I drove fast down a gravel road than slammed on the brakes as hard as I could. Within seconds it blew both front brake lines.
Later that same year in the winter I got the truck stuck on some ice. It wasn’t bad, I just happened to stop on a very slippery patch of ice and couldn’t move forward. I got the idea that as the tires spun, they were getting hot which meant it was melting the ice. If I did it long enough I would eventually get down to the gravel. I got impatient and spun the wheels faster smoking them like crazy while the engine roared. In the middle of the noise and smoke, a tire exploded and the truck jumped and deflated. I had blown out a tire.
Dad wasn’t happy with me for a long while because the truck went to the shop and we had to pay a lot of money to get them fixed.
At the very least, I never made these mistakes again.
I’d argue that if pushing the brakes hard can blow up the brake lines, they already needed fixed.
Yeah, that definitely saved them from a later tragedy.
I set the majority of my mother’s finest dresses on fire. I was very young. We had a powercut one night so we were using candles. It came back soon after, but i was still a curious boy with a candle in my hand. I wanted to go somewhere dark again so i went inside my closet and closed the door. My mom ran out of space in her room for her dresses so she put them on my closet. Only the stuff she didn’t use often so it had the worst and the best. They were wrapped plastic and i was fascinated by how the plastic shrunk when the flame got close. But eventually I got too close and actually set it on fire. How did i react? Got out, shut the closet doors and went to watch tv. It’s a miracle i didn’t torch my whole house
That’s such a great reaction to starting a fire in a closet full of priceless and flammable stuff! “Oops! I think I’ll just close the door on that problem and hope no one notices.”
I’m tempted to call it such a child’s reaction to a problem they don’t know how to solve. But I know I’m guilty of doing the same thing as an adult, just not with a potentially fatal raging closet fire fueled by a plastic coated wedding dress.
The more I think about it, the more in awe of what you managed to achieve.
How did i react? Got out, shut the closet doors and went to watch tv. It’s a miracle i didn’t torch my whole house
Lmao - reminds me of when I was in my early twenties and couldn’t handle my beer. We had a few people around, and the toilet was occupied, so I threw up in a bucket and hid it in a closet and went back to the party. Cue to next morning, “Lads… why is there a bucket of-”
My teen brother parked his motorcycle on the driveway. I don’t even remember how I managed to tip it over; I must have tried to climb on the seat or something and pushed at just the right angle to make the kickstand give way. Then in a tears and adrenaline fueled panic, I pressed it up… and tipped it over on its other side. I left it as it was dinged up on both sides. I tearfully confessed to my brother what I had done and he didn’t really care; ends up it was a total junker but in my little kid eyes it was the coolest thing ever.
I worked briefly at dominoes. One day I parked my bike a little too close to the others and didn’t put the kickstand properly. It tipped over and dominoed five other bikes.
My sister and I figured out that we could draw. On the windshield of our neighbours car. Using stones.
…
I broke the screen on my laptop, but that was only after having it for like five or six years. And even after that, I still used it as a closet web server for years after that with SSH.
Edit: I think I was about 16 when that happened.
Crashed the family car on my first day driving. Into our house. Our driveway is a mini hill with a turn to get in and then loop to the side with the corner of the house being at the corner. Accelerating up the little hill meant the house jumped in front of the car! As it was my first time driving, the blame was placed. Firmly on dad, as teacher.
Luckily the damage wasn’t too bad to repair, but still the two most expensive things were broken on one day.
This text feels so like AI.
Lol, probably the spellcheck inputs. I also have a new keyboard that means muscle memory is a bit off.
I am not a robot. Promise. But that’s what a robot would say.
You write uniquely, and the current thing probably came over me. Sorry :p
Was going through some semi-justified teenage angst stuff back in the day and my laptop was having some small issue, so I smashed my laptop.
I’m not normally prone to anger - then or now, so that was particularly out of character for me. I also wasn’t able to replace it for a long while, since I wasn’t like, rich or anything like that.
Honestly though, I’ve never regretted it. Given the circumstances (tl;dr: poor upbringing, loneliness), I can totally see why someone would lash out like that eventually.
I mean, you could regret it, but also offer yourself understanding and forgiveness
That’s a fair point, honestly.
it sounds like that laptop had it coming, for the sheer neglect and poor upbringing it inflicted
An arcade center VR headset.
This was in the 90s or early 2000 when VR was non existent to consumers. During holidays visiting the US we ended up in this arcade center, probably in LA, where they had circled booths with an old FPS VR game that you play standing up. The headset looked like a helmet and was plugged from the top.
During my game, I turned on myself (360 no scope style) so much and always in the same direction that the cables got tangled and finally broke, probably with a little spark and some electrical sound. Game over.
As a French preteen, my English was bad and all I remember is the “shiiiiiiit” the worker said when he looked at the headset and cables.
Sorry buddy 🤷🏻♂️
Was it this thing? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuality_(product)
I paid $5 USD as a kid to play this thing at the mall, which was a fortune to me, but I loved stuff like this so much I thought it was worth it. The game was so shitty I couldn’t even tell wtf was going on or what I was supposed to do. Just randomly floating through a sea of polygons until the guy said time was up.
Yeah it looked a lot like the first picture in the Wikipedia article.
I don’t remember the game but I couldn’t understand shit as well nor the graphic style.
I’m not sure how much my brother costs, but the three of us brothers were running across the top of monkey bars and jump kicking each other. I kicked my youngest brother off and he busted his head on the ground. It’s ~40 years later and he still has the scar on the back of his head.
I thought that was going to end with him dead
Yeah, it seemed really flip
Oh wow, yeah I see that now. Oops!
VHS player when I was a toddler. Was in the daycare and saw a cord, so naturally I pulled it. It was on top of the TV, which was bolted to the wall high up. Shattered on impact. Nearly fell on my head too.
I put a sandwich in the slot… Twice. I distinctly remember thinking how perfectly it fit. Didn’t bust, but wasn’t a good idea.
An antique crystal vase my parents received as a wedding gift.
I was maybe in my tweens and bought flowers for some occasion (a birthday or anniversary maybe) and the florist said I should use boiling water to keep them fresh (yes, it is a thing), but obviously I misunderstood, and not knowing any better I added the boiling water directly in to the vase (which I chose because it was my favourite) and of course it exploded in my hand. Lucky I wasn’t hurt, and I did manage to glue some of it back together, but I was not getting away with it. My mother was furious.I’m not even a tween and I still don’t understand what they meant for you to do. Are the flowers supposed to be in soil, and you’re supposed to just water the soil with a bit of boiling water?
I mean, as an adult, I’d probably check if the material could hold boiling water…but even that’s not 100% if it seemed ceramic or something, haha
Maybe boiled water, like water that has been boiled and is now cooled off again
Ahh… to disinfect it or something in a place where the water might not be fully clean?
Yup, that’s what google told me. It removes some of the bad stuff that might be in the water
Huh, interesting TIL
You say you’d check, but couldn’t look up “boiling water flowers” before replying here? At least when this happened I had the excuse of not having the internet yet (and being a literal child, following the obviously unclear instructions of a professional, to the best of my understanding)…
https://www.sarahraven.com/articles/the-basics-of-arranging-cut-flowers
Reminds me of a story of my parents. They were in Venice for their anniversary and had rented a room above a glass maker. One morning he wanted to show them how beautiful the morning light looked as it falls through this huge glass pyramid he had made. An enormous thing. One of his master pieces. Super expensive and also super heavy. He dropped it and it shattered into a million pieces.
I still have the crystal they got me as a souvenir. It makes nice rainbow colours when the sunlight falls through.
At least it wasn’t you who did it, and you got a cool gift out of it lol
When I was 6 I microwaved a metal measuring cup full of water, which ended up arcing and burning out the transformer. Apparently it fucked up my parents’ finances for a while at the time
I have a similar story, when I was young I had this weekly science magazine that would come in the mail.
The one page showed a match lit in a microwave with a glass measuring cup to catch the hot plasma. I obviously tried it because it looked cool. When my mother heard the microwave making all kinds of noises she opened it up and pulled out the measuring cup not realising that its really hot, she dropped it and it shattered all over.
I destroyed the microwave and the measuring cup.
Apparently it fucked up my parents’ finances for a while at the time
What year was this?
Early 2000s. My dad is a farmer and it was a rough year for the harvest. It didn’t help that my parents were pretty poor for a long time, and didn’t seem to recover until after their divorce during the 2008-9 financial crises
