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 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.
My phone in school. It was a smartphone, back before smartphones were quite the norm, so it was a big deal, and I was in another state as a minor, so I did need a phone. There was some two for one deal, so my parent got theirs and mine, so it wasn’t quite so bad, but it was technically a pricy bit of tech.
Campus was on a hill, so I stumbled and dropped it while walking down the stairs.
I think it would translate to, like, five stories of stairs if it was in a building and not on a hill?
It never went into the grass, just kept bouncing down stairs. 🤦
This made me laugh. I’m sorry for your loss.
My sister and I figured out that we could draw. On the windshield of our neighbours car. Using stones.
…
I definitely have seen artistic careers with better beginnings.
Believe it or not, she’s now running a graphics design studio.
I believe you
They used to make these things called “Shrinky-Dinks”, which were sheets of thick plastic that you would color with pencils, then cut them out and stick them in the oven and they would shrink down to a smaller size.
Well one day when I was 3, I decided I could do this by myself, except that I put them in the toaster oven on the grate on like 400 degrees. Of course that shit melted through the grate and onto the heating element inside the toaster oven. Thankfully my parents noticed the smell before a fire started. Not sure how much a toaster oven cost in the '80s, but they had to get a new one one.
I broke a microwave when I was little because I didn’t know I had to remove my fork from my plate of broccoli, then proceeded to accidentally break the garbage disposal trying to dispose of the broccoli because I didn’t know broccoli couldn’t go down the disposal.
Wait, why can’t broccoli go down the disposal?
Certain materials found in foods, such as an overabundance of fiber, clog and damage the blades in the garbage disposal. Broccoli is at the top of this list.
I’ve never heard this before. If broccoli isn’t allowed I’m surprised anything is!
I set the mayority of my mothers 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
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-”
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.
Lol yeah as an adult I feel like I’ve done similar things. Not with a house fire or immediately life threatening scenario. But definitely like “well I don’t really want to deal with that problem…I’m just going to walk away and hope it goes away” lol!!
I really, really liked disassembling stuff, and then not knowing how to reassemble. The most regrettable thing I disassembled was probably the Wii U. It would be nice to still have one, but I also really don’t feel like buying one, so, yeah.
This is how I got into cyber security lol
😬 i did this, but with my brand new telescope
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 was probably 9 or 10 at the time, visiting at a (wealthy) friends house, and my friend was showing me a bunch of his dads cool stuff, among which was a legitimate whip, like straight up indiana jones style. Naturally, I had to try it out…indoors…underneath the crystal chandelier hanging in their entryway…I wasn’t allowed over anymore after that.
crystal chandelier… yikes, you did them a favour.
Our very expensive fridge. My dad beat the living shit out of me. I still remember the beating 35 years later.
How did you break a fridge?
Hell if I remember the details. That was like 35 years ago. I think I was pretending that I was fixing it? Lol
My grandparents had a lot of antiques, some probably which they inherited. My grandfather was particular proud of his clockwork wind-up clock (which was an antique even back then). I disassembled it to find out how it worked, but couldn’t figure out how to reassemble it (and my granddad couldn’t either).
He should have looked it up online
I broke my dad’s laptop by dropping it on the ground. I was pretending to work, with my parents right there.
But honestly, all the other little stuff that I broke combined probably cost more than that laptop. Recently I changed the battery of the clock and it immediately stopped working. It’s like I have the hands of destruction.
Laptops used to be better built back in my day. You used to open up the case, cradle it out of its straps, pull the analog wires to attenuate the device correctly, apply the friction resin to the input rod, and finally place it underneath your chin and play it.
I don’t understand modern laptops these days
We call people like you passion fingers.
“They fuck every thing they touch”
You guys could’ve fixed that! You’d just have to open it up to reset or replace the button and hit the Degauss in the settings (assuming it had the option)!
Me : Kicked a football into our neighbour’s dining room. Said sorry . Dad fixed it for them. A week later , again kicked it into their dining room. Got an earful . Never took penalties from that spot again.
My bro : Climbed on top of our TV at home like King Kong and the table broke. Him, the TV and the table all came down. My dad was as mad as godzilla.
Nothing big tbh.
A car window, or a record player would be it, I’m just not sure which cost more.
They were both accidents, though the car window was ab accident due to stupidity rather than a completely innocent act that went wrong.
The record player, I was just trying to play one of my 45s, and the arm snapped off. I don’t really remember applying much pressure, and I was about 5 or 6, so it wasn’t like I was a powerhouse. My dad didn’t get it repaired, so no clue what monetary cost would have applied. He ended up buying a better one second hand from my uncle, which was about 150 back in the eighties, so not cheap but not crazy either.
The car window was my dumb kid ass chucking rocks with my sister. Now, the dumb part was throwing them in the direction of the cars at all, but me and my sister were both pretty damn young, and I had no idea I could throw a small rock that far. Maybe the size of a dime. Wouldn’t have thrown that direction if I had thought I could hit anything.
Again, not sure what the actual cost was because my dad never said. But it was enough that he couldn’t make a trip to go to a wedding up north, so there’s that as a rough idea.
Other than that, I was not a destructive kid, nor a reckless one. Anything else I ever broke was genuinely something where it would have broken for anyone, or was just a result of a kid not having perfect balance and control. You drop shit when you’re a kid, but it was always minor stuff.
