Somebody once told me the world was gonna roll these people, mainly because they aren't the sharpest tools in the shed.
They might have thought they were good ideas at the time, but these people clearly ignored the warning labels on whatever they were doing, along with all other forms of common sense. Some came out fine on the other end, and some people paid the price dearly. Regardless, you would hope that these people think better next time they ever come up with an idea that stupid.
Content has been edited for clarity.
Eternal Sleeper Sofa
“When I was about 10, I folded myself into a sleeper sofa with the help of my cousin. Here’s why this is an incredible bad idea:
You cannot breathe, you cannot move, you can shout for help, but your cries for help will travel at best 5 feet because your mouth is smothered by a mattress. The spring mechanism in combination with your weight will make it nearly impossible for someone to pull the mattress back out, unless they are very strong or you are very light
My cousin had to run upstairs to get a grownup to flip the sofa on it’s side so I could roll out. If I did this stunt while I was by myself I probably would have suffocated very quickly.”
Extreme Darts
“Remember lawn darts?
My group of friends made our own rules. Two teams, one in the front yard, one in the back. One member from each team on the side lawn from where you could see both teams at the same time.
The goal was to fire that giant dart (we only had one, lost the others in a game of ‘woods darts’) over the house, and make a member of the other team, rightfully afraid for their life, move out of the way of the dart.
One point if you made them move. Minus one point if it landed within arm’s reach and they didn’t move.
This game lasted until someone’s parents came home and were horrified when they saw what we were doing.
The 80s were a simpler, more dangerous time.”
Fore!
“Me and my friend decided to golf off each other when we were around 14. The initial idea was to drive off the tee that was in our mouth, but common sense kicked in and we decided against it. But still wanting to go through with it, we decided to do it… with our butt cheeks (cringe).
I went first as the hitter, and it went way better than I expected. I lined that ball up and drove it as far as I could, while still caring for my friend’s butt safety. Not a scratch on him so I was ready to be hit off of. I laid down on my stomach and put the tee in place, and my friend lined his shot up once and goes all in for his swing. He follows through and puts the driver right into me, and at that moment it felt like every thing I once knew was wrong. And my butt was hurting like crazy, but that’s besides the point. Listen to the advisory kids.”
Bootleg Fireworks
“I decided to make my own fireworks.
Apparently potassium nitrate (or stump remover) and sugar mixed together makes for a pretty good smoke bomb. The way you make it is you mix the two ingredients together and put it in a pan over a small flame. the heat melts the two together into a chocolatey brown goo. If you put that goo into a cardboard toilet paper roll and stick a wick in there you have a pretty big smoke bomb.
The first time I did it we had a lot of fun smoking out an entire park. Then I decided we needed to go bigger. This is America, after all. So I doubled the ingredients and started cooking it on my stove. Stupid me forgot that the video said MEDIUM TO LOW HEAT and I had the burner on high. Halfway through cooking it, the heat caught the mixture on fire and started going crazy. I got my brother out of the house and dumped water on the mixture. For the next two hours, you couldn’t go in my house because the smoke was so thick you couldn’t see more that two feet in front of you.
My parents were crazy mad at first because the ceiling was burned, the counter tops charred, and the floor was even melted a bit. Then once they got the insurance money their attitude changed completely. We now have a brand new kitchen that was way nicer than our last one.”
A Potato Malfunction
“I tried to make a potato launcher out of PVC pipe, one summer day. The guy on the YouTube video said not to try it at home without adult supervision, but of course at the ripe age of fifteen I wasn’t about to let that stop me.
So I went to the garage on gathered all of the required materials (my parents probably wouldn’t notice a bunch of PVC and their sack of potatoes was missing anyways), and proceeded to build my masterpiece.
I figured that just having it shoot straight would be kinda lame, so I decided to pseudo-mod it by cutting a slit into the edge of the PVC cap to act as a sort of scope. Thing is, I forgot to shave off the ends that were stuck on the ‘barrel’ and proceeded to fire off my first round.
I ended up getting potato bits everywhere in my garage and almost cut my arm open on a flying piece of PVC.
Remember kids, do not try this at home is a valid warning.”
Pool Vaulting
“My friends and I recently used our pool skimmer to have a pole vaulting tournament as seen on a Nationwide commercial. The fact that the idea came from an insurance commercial should have been enough to deter us. Ended up vaulting all the way to the far end of the pool and smashed my feet into the wall. Besides my two sprained ankles, everyone else was fine. Pool skimmer worked really well as a pole.”
He Tried To Make Orange Soda
“Put orange juice in a soda stream and tried to carbonate it. It had a warning saying not to do it. I read said warning. I’m usually not the type of person who ignores warnings, but this didn’t seem like it would be an issue. I thought it was because the carbonator tube would get sticky and clog but I thought that I could clean it.
Nope, that’s not why. It’s because it explodes. I was finding sticky spots for months.”
Just Like Daredevil
“I was staying at my friend Ben’s house, who was a bit of a latchkey kid. The movie Daredevil had just come out, and I was maybe 12? It was 2:00 in the morning and we were busy skating around the front of his house, annoying the heck out of his neighbors.
I got the awesome idea that we should light the skate rail we had on fire, JUST LIKE IN DAREDEVIL! So, I grabbed a can of gasoline that was sitting in his garage, and proceeded to coat the rail with it. After coating the rail with the gasoline, I lit the gas and it was a little lackluster. I figured, ‘let’s just throw some more gas on this THANG!’ so I did. The gas trickling out of the can caught fire and the can exploded in my hand.
Luckily, my reflexes saved me and I let go of the can just as the flame hit it. Ben’s lawn was completely aflame. I just walked inside and didn’t do anything about it because I didn’t want to get in trouble.”
Don’t Try Wrestlemania At Home
“My brother and I would play WWE with some of our friends as kids. And the idiot would never let anyone win, so one day he came after me when I had one of the championships, I forgot to say that he had the other two belts.
So he and I had a match, and at one point I decide to go for a power bomb, I couldn’t lift him up all the way and dropped him on the air conditioner, ‘accidentally’. He was on the ground, lying in the fetal position in a puddle of water so I went for the pin, and the idiot puts his arm up.
I remember the kids that were doing commentary screaming out of shock. I waited for him to get up and went for a super kick, I ‘missed’ and he pushed me into the bottom left corner of the window, and that piece broke and I got a cut on my forehead.
I wanted to cry so bad but he tackled me into the wall, put me on the bed and did a ‘rock bottom’ from the bed onto the floor. He pushed me off the bed. He pinned me, and won my dang cardboard belt. He held all the titles in our little wrestling group at the time, and I still hate him for it.”
A Swan Dive
“I was around 3 or 4 and my sister was 18 months and after watching Barbie Swan Lake before bed we decide to imitate the scene where Odette jumps the waterfall in the bedroom we shared. Me being the eldest, I naturally went first, jumping from our windowsill onto our bedroom floor. I landed it and felt like a boss, but then came my baby sister’s turn. She broke her leg trying to copy me. Needless to say, she can’t remember much. Although my parents and I have fond memories of her running around the garden with a neon pink cast.
She now claims she got her ‘revenge’ by pushing me off my scooter when I was 8 and she was 6 so I broke both bones in my arm. Unfortunately, I can remember that a lot more and spent a holiday abroad in a bright orange cast.”
Listen To John Cena
“Back in 2007, me and my friends were really into WWE and we would do ‘matches’ on his trampoline. Suddenly an argument got heated and my friends brother ‘back-breakered’ him on the patio floor. Another time, he had a plastic WWE microphone and I took it with me when I went to pee. Now I was a very scared kid and I was deathly afraid of this Jigsaw mask from the movie SAW that he had. So I go out of the bathroom to find him at the end of the hallway with the mask on running at me.
Now in the WWE, for those who don’t know, when two guys are talking on the microphone and an argument heats up, a lot of the times they take a microphone to the face. So there I am, holding the microphone as he comes at me with the microphone and me remembering the microphone to the face segments, I smack him dead in the face with the heavy plastic microphone. He plopped to the floor and when he takes the mask off he’s bleeding all over the place. I was just distraught. Worst of all was hearing him scream and yell at the clinic as they were stitching his head. I was traumatized by that for the following months, but he was really cool about it and he didn’t hold anything against me except for our other friends that hated me thinking I did it for the laughs. I lost contact with him years ago, but he was a really cool and genuine dude.
Moral of the story is, whenever Chris Jericho or John Cena tell you not to try any of that stuff at home, YOU LISTEN TO THEM.”
A Future Engineer
“When I was around 11, I started asking my parents and all the other adults I knew if I could have their old electronics to disassemble for fun. All of them thought this was the typical ‘kid disassembles and then reassembles a printer’ thing that my dad had already done with me several times.
Nope. I had blueprints (very poorly drawn, because I was 11) for a number of devices I wanted to build. I’d read up on wikipedia and my dad’s old electrical engineering textbooks to figure out what materials I needed to build a cutting laser, a microwave ‘flamethrower’, an arc welder, and a few other things I’ve forgotten over the years. As the broken electronics filtered in (computers from the early 90s, defunct DVD players, etc.), I slowly acquired the parts I needed.
My mother figured out what I was up to and stopped me shortly before I was about to extract the capacitor from a broken microwave. She was afraid of how much charge the capacitor could store, and it turned out that given my poor grounding safety practice, I likely would have fried myself.
Turns out, my dad’s old textbooks hadn’t explained the potential health ramifications of electricity, and for all the math I could do, I was still a idiot.
The other, less dangerous stuff still would have been awesome, but I was banned from messing with electronics until I left for college a couple years later.”
The Dad Was On Board With It At First
“I built a rail launcher at a friend’s dad’s machine shop out on his farm back in 10th grade. We cut a small tree in half with the single bolt I made. Our capacitor array wasn’t set up the best and the transference rails had some…intense arcing (powerful enough that the affected parts of the rails were completely vaporized). It took about a week and a half to build everything out of scrap his dad had around the shop.
That was incredibly amazing but scared the heck out of us. His dad was on board with it until we actually fired it. He was expecting something along the lines of an oversized BB shooter in power, not a cannon equivalent to a high powered weapon.
‘Oh my gosh! Can’t you kids just make a dang potato launcher?!’
In hindsight, I’m glad I had the thought to block the thing from view because the arcing probably could have had permanent effects on our sight.”
An Evil Knievel Prodigy
“I wanted to be a stuntman growing up and my all time idol was Evil Knievel. Before I knew parkour existed, I was into jumping from roof to roof at my grandmas house; the houses weren’t too far apart. One day, I was climbing up to my training area, I used to have to climb the gate and up the side of the wall, I slipped and fell and fractured my tailbone.
I also received one of those rockets that you launch and it comes down on its little parachute. Some friends and I wondered what would happen if one of us got shot by it, so we took turns shooting it at each other using a pipe to aim it in our general direction. We were wearing our four wheeling helmets and swimming goggles for ‘safety.’ He got hit square on the head and survived our amazing stunt.
We also tried building an underground base using an old camper shell as a roof and charged kids money to jump their bikes and whatever over our area of operations if we were in it. I think that was the stupidest thing we really did. Some kid took his dads four-wheeler and tried to jump over us while we were laying down in it and almost crushed us. We were about 9-12 years old and the neighborhood kids would make us feel like rock stars when we rolled by on our Huffy’s.”
We Should Have Listened
“8th Grade: our metalshop teacher told us scary stories about safety so we wouldn’t chop our fingers off in any of the dangerous metalworking equipment. One day, he told us about putting match heads in spent 22 shells and hitting that with a hammer. The climax of the story was when he dramatically showed his thumb, which was missing the end part, presumably the punishing result of the aforementioned crafting activity.
The INSTANT we got out of school, a group of us went looking for spent 22 shells (which were curiously easy to find, now that I think of it). We got a box of barn burner matches, and set to detonating. Those things are LOUD, and they shred the brass in interesting ways. This went on until one of the spectators got a hunk of sharp hot brass in his cheek and ran howling down the street. We scattered, and nothing was ever said about the whole incident.
Until now.”
Went A Little Heavy On The Fireworks
“I’m Indian, and I lived in Dubai around the age of 15. It was Diwali (the Hindi Festival of Lights), and we had a bunch of fireworks. Now technically, the public celebration of Diwali and other Hindu festivals is discouraged in Dubai, especially with the unauthorized use of fireworks, but the majority of the city was South Asian and nobody cared.
So I visited a friend’s house that evening. She lived on the 12th floor of an apartment building in a densely populated part of the city (lots of other buildings close by). She said that she had some sparklers, so we went out onto the balcony to light them. Things were going well, until I picked up a really heavy-duty-looking thing that I thought was a large sparkler (which was in very similar packaging). The warning on the side said ‘do not hold during operation’ or something along those lines, but I was really sure for some reason that it was a normal sparkler and so I ignored the warning.
I lit the thing, pointing one end away from me. Suddenly, massive fireballs started shooting out across the road. The force was great enough that I felt like I was holding a hand cannon. It was really lucky that I got the ends correct, or the first fireball would have hit me square in the stomach. There was nowhere to point the thing, because the entire view was blocked by another apartment block close by. So I was basically shooting fireballs at the next building, and people were screaming at me to stop from their balconies. I tried aiming down at the road, but people down there were shouting and waving at me to stop, probably because there were lots of cars.
And the stupid thing wouldn’t stop for ages. I panicked, and turned it around and started firing into a bucket of water that my friend had brought out. The force was great enough that the water looked like it was exploding out. In the process of turning it though, a stray ball must have grazed her, as she threw her dupatta (shawl) in the bucket too (it had caught fire).
Finally, the thing stopped. Her parents were pretty angry, as they thought I had done it on purpose. They had previously thought that I was a smart, responsible kid, but I think that ended that day. We were all scared that the police would pay us a visit, but luckily, nobody came.
Read warning labels on fireworks and make sure you know what they are before you use them!!!”
My Dad Should Have Known Better
“I was 16. It was the end of my junior year in high school, back in the late 90s. I had grown up with computers and was super interested in them, and at my school that summer they were offering a ‘Build your own PC’ class. I told my dad I wanted to take it. He looked at the price ($400 to just take the class, $1600 to keep the computer you built) and told me I could take the $400 one. I pouted and asked what good was it to build a computer if I couldn’t keep it. He said ‘Fine, don’t take the class.’
A week later, he picked me up at school and drove to Fry’s and bought ‘Fixing and Upgrading your PC for Dummies’ by Andy Rathbone. In his mind, this $20 book was going to take the place of the $1600 class.
It actually did. As he upgraded his computer, he gave me the parts of his to put into a cheap case with a cheap motherboard we got from Fry’s. I learned an awful lot about hardware, and to this day I’m still more comfortable with the internal guts of a computer than I am with the software, despite the fact that I’ve taken programming courses much more recently than I’ve done any work on a computers innards. I had started with a cheap power supply, but the one in his computer was a much better one. He was getting rid of it because he found out that it was causing brownouts on his motherboard. Well, that wasn’t going to be much good if it did the same on mine. So we cleaned it out.
After making sure my computer worked with the power supply, we turned off the machine and unplugged it. The computer was 3 feet away from its cord on our dining room table. We both grounded ourselves occasionally by touching the metal inside the case, despite the fact that we weren’t on carpet so not really building up any static electricity. This was before canned air was much of a thing, I was using a paint brush to clean the vents, but it really wasn’t doing much good. My dad is like ‘Oh, we’ll just open it up.’
I pointed out all the warning stickers all over the thing, it can still hold a charge for weeks after it’s unplugged, it’ll void all these warranties, all that other stuff. My dad, who is very comfortable with electricity, says ‘Well it’s not like you’re going to be touching exposed circuitry or metal with your hands. You’re just cleaning off the fan.’ So I trusted him. We opened it up.
This meant an impromptu lesson on what the guts in there were. He showed me the capacitors and other stuff. At one point, my finger went between two things that were sticking up about an inch or so, and at least 2 inches apart, with nothing whatsoever in between them, because he asked me to point something out to him. That was the point at which I electrocuted myself.
It really was as far as I can figure, a mild electric shock. It was extremely unsettling to feel. I can still recall the almost jiggly feeling it left me with, 20ish years later. I had never known before that, that electricity could just sit around in the air, much less how strong of a sensation you could get by touching charged air.
Six months or so later, my dad gave me a ceiling lamp for Christmas. He tells me ‘But you need to install it. You’re skittish around electricity. I’ll help and tell you what to do, but you’re going to be the one on the ladder doing it.’
I can’t think of anything I’d done in the 6 months from letting him talk me into electrocuting myself to the point at which I got the ceiling lamp, that would make him think I was skittish around electricity. It’s not like I frequently dealt with exposed wires, and I was still pulling off the case to upgrade that computer every time I got a few bucks or a new toy.
I really wanted to tell him ‘Well, if I’m skittish around electricity, it’s your fault.’
Instead, I installed the lamp, feeling more skittish on the ladder than I was with the exposed wires.”
