I'd like to keep this one light.

Anyone willing to tell the story of the stupidest thing you ever did as a child that could have/should have gotten you or someone else hurt, killed (maybe by your parents if they had known), or in jail? Did you do it by yourself or was it a group stupid moment?

I have to sort through mine before deciding which one to "fess up to.

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The only reason some people get lost in thought is because it's unfamiliar territory.
- Paul Fix

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1981-1989!

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Eric Van De Ven Magnum Inspections Inc. (954) 340-6615
www.magnuminspections.com
I still get paid to be suspicious when I got nothing to be suspicious about!

As kids we would have BB gun wars and shoot each other. The only so called protection was we wore winter coats. We were such red neck kids we also use to go to the farmers field and shoot his cows both the bulls and cows. We one time we crawled up close to a bull and shot him with a BB in the b_lls. It pissed him off so much he charged us and we ran so fast to the fence we dropped the gun and had to wait till the next day to get it back. We still laugh at this almost 30 years after every time we see each other.
Top these stupid kid antics.

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Well thats my 2 cents.
Brian Kelly
Kelly Home Inspections

Well...

(One of them) Was when I was 9 years old and living in Grand Prairie, Tx. It was close to the 4th of July and my running buddy (Larry Daniel) and I had our usual stash of Black-Cat firecrackers.

This was a time when a loaf of bread cost 15 cents, a gallon of gas was 11.9cents/ gallon and you could buy hamburgers at the local grease pit for 6-for/dollar. So... having scroungded a whole bunch of pop bottles to sell at 3cents each, having mowed lawns for a week and a half (one dollar and a half, for the front and back yards for some of these folks that hadn't mowed in a month--- but that's another story). Larry and I were able to accumulate a nice little stash of fireworks unbenownst to our parential units (back in the day, anyone could buy fireworks almost anywhere in town).

Well, this day started out as any other day would. Larry would call me or I would call him and we would roam the neighborhood together, either looking for something to do, a baseball game to start or join, or just hang out together and talk about girls. We met down at the corner, about half way between our homes (6 blocks apart) and decided to walk down to the corner grocery store ("Gil's" I believe it was), where we were a fixture to the owner/ clerk (Gil). We probably were in there 5-6 times a day, if for nothing else, to buy a 1 cent piece of bubble gum or just to get out of the heat and talk to the older people when they came in-- Gil didn't mind (or just didn't show it).

We were just about 1-1/2 blocks from the store when Larry pulled out a firecracker and lit it and threw it close to my feet (while I wasn't looking) and laughed his ass-off-- BOOM!! That sucker went off and scared the unsuspecting crap out me. Well, IT WAS ON!!

While we weren't exactly packing 'heat' in those days, we were never unarmed. Fireworks, specifically 'Blackcats' were plentiful and always in-hand or in pocket. Since we were only able to cob a few matches at-a-time, that was our only limitation as to how many we could afford to expend/carry at-a-time. After twisting several together, I lit the 3 (twisted) fuses and returned fire.... well, no big deal cause Larry was absolutely expecting a return on his instigation. This foolerly went on for a couple of minutes and we quickly got bored with trying to blow the other's ear off.

Soon, we began to look for ant-hills and any type of can(s) to lauch up in the air...or something of the like (The trip to the store was now secondary). Well, in the middle of the street, we noticed a man-hole cover where we could better use our resources to hear a loud and thunderous echo'ing effect by lighting our firecrackers and dropping down the man-hole cover key-way--- that'd be cool, right?? We thought so.

As you can imagine 43-44 years ago, there wasn't the amount of traffic as there is today... no where near. We had not seen but one car pass un along the route that we always take to the store. So there was nothing to tell us to be reeeaaaaal careful.

O.K.-- Larry is now out of matches, so the burden is on me to come through with the most awesome echo'ing sound of the morning (can's blowing up, horney-toads with popped bellies were'nt enough). So... I'm set to lite this sucker and drop it down the key way one inserts to pull the cover up. Now, one more thing... this was not one of those plain-jane man-hole covers you see on top of the curb--- NOPE! This was one of the tripple thickness type that sits in the middle of the road that has to handle the weight of cement trucks and the like. Because of the size and thickness of the cover, we were thinking that the sound might be a tad muffled and actually not very loud.

I light that sucker, drop in in the keyway... then back-up about 4-6 ft to gaulk at my splendor and bask in my new found sound-maker. Gosh, was I wrong! Me only being about 4-6 feet back, I suddenly become deafened with what sounded like an artillery shell going off next to me with a flame-like geyser shoting straight-up in front of me!! The heat singed my t-shirt, the power of the blast sent the tripple thick man-hole cover as high as any tree in the neighborhood!! When the man-hole cover hits the asphault, it leaves a 6" inch deep gouge.

In an instant, I turn around and all I can see is the bottom's of Larry's shoes-- it knocked him on his arse. About this time, I glance over and now notice there is a car coming down the street. Well, the monster sized man-hole cover has embeded itself into the black-top street and there was absolutely no way we were gong to be able to pick it up.

I did wave the car to the other side of the road so the driver would not drive into the now open hole created by a couple of dolts. We both ran like hell to the store and told the store owner what had happened. He gave us a good smile and evil smerk and said... Yep, that would explain a few things.

Gil: "That would explain why some of the cereal just jumped off the back shelf and why the gas company called earlier and told us they would have to shut off our gas utility because they had to repair a leak!!"

Larry and I looked at each other, and noticed that the other had turned white as a sheet.

After that day, I never carried firecrackers in my pocket anymore.

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"If con is the opposite of pro, is Congress the opposite of progress?"
Richard Rushing, HCRI
Duncanville, Tx.

Like Rich, I was also a pyromaniac growing up. When one of our friends told us about how one could make a pipe bomb using match tips, we ventured into a whole new world of delinquency. I graduated to buying blackpowder from the Army/Navy store, model rocket fuse from a hobby shop, and galvanized pipe sections with threaded ends for screw on caps. Nothing was safe - buckets, mailboxes, anything we could slip one of those into. We once rendered a talking Coke machine inoperable with one.

Sometimes when I got bored, I would just light up the gunpowder by pouring it into a dixie cup, stuffing a tissue partially into it, light the end of the tissue, and let it burn down to ignite the power. POOOOOFFF!!!! It was like a huge flash bomb with no explosion since the container was wide open. Well one time, as soon as I lit the tissue, the sparks fell right down into the gunpowder filled dixie cup with me hovering a few feet above the cup. At the time, I wore glasses and lucky for me because they probably saved my eyes. The flash burned my hair, covered my glasses and face with smoke soot, and lit my sweatpants on fire in the groin region. My brothers quickly alerted me my glowing groin predicament and I stripped my pants off. However, the exposed skin on the underside of my right forearm took the brunt of the fireball and was burned pretty badly. The skin turned bright red and I laid in bed in agony that night keeping a ziploc bag filled with cool water on top of it to stem the searing pain. I couldn't tell my parents and I never went to a doctor for it either. Over the next week, the skin on that arm would just peel off in chunks whenever I brushed up against something in the supermarket where I worked. It was summer and I had to wear long sleeves to spare everybody the sight of my lepresy-like condition.

Just about any of my various pyrotechnic endeavors would qualify...perhaps the one involving 5 lbs of carbide, a 55gal cardboard drum, and a sewer-lid...or one of the home-made recoilless rifles...?

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Was out to dinner a few years back with a three other coupes - all "professionals", CPA,s lawyers - the kinda' guys who never grow up - and they were talking about *potato guns* whey were building for some sort of contest. Someone asked me if I was interested, and I said no, "But.. if I was going to build one I'd start with some sort of discarding sabot in a stepped charge barrel, something pretty long, maybe 30-35/1 ...are you allowed to jacket the potato...

When they realized I was serious, for some reason they appeared to find this disturbing...

When I was about 16 I cooked smoke bombs in our kitchen. Very simple process of cooking sugar and saltpeter (50/50 mix) until it melts and turns a tan color. Trick is that when it turns brown it will catch on fire. It burns a flame a few inches high but produces a massive amount of white smoke. Oh, and it takes about 15 seconds to go from tan to brown!

Yep, I smoked up our entire home just about caught the kitchen on fire! Needless to say the words, of wait until your father gets home still ring in my mind.

I also built linear amplifiers for CB radios. I had one that would put out 1500 watts. That one had a minor problem, it would dim the lights in our house and I could broadcast over everyone's TV set if they were within 1000 feet of our home. I only used it a few times. I found that the 300 watt size would work just fine, considering that the legal output was only 3 watts!! From time to time I would see a black van with all types of antennas driving around the area. I wonder who or what they were looking for?

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Scott Patterson
Spring Hill, TN
http://www.traceinspections.com

Michael, three potato guns in my family. I have one, my brother has one and still has mine, and he made one for our nephew. It's made entirely of PVC pipe. Hairspray for propellant. You can crank some of those suckers out to about 200 yards.

Seeing about 300 plus acres on fire still haunts me to this day.

Thought we could just build a little fire to be able to save our matches that Fourth of July weekend.

The grass was so green about a month latter though when it started coming back.

I could fill up Brians bandwith with stories.

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Rick Hurst_Home Works Inspection Co_Rockwall TX
In the words of Mike Tyson.... "Everyone has a plan until they get hit inda mouf"

It's comforting to know that all guys are knuckleheads.

My brother was 15 and I was 13 when he had to have surgery to fuse his shoulder. He was a polio victim and the difference in sizes of his arms was beginning to curve his spine. They rebalanced and aligned him to stop the curvature. He was in a half body cast for about a year. It went from his neck to his waist and one arm was splinted from his waist, sticking out perpendicularly from his body and bent at the elbow,

Several months into it, his best friend, my best friend, and I decided he needed to get out and have some fun. So when my parents took my three little sisters to go see my grandmother, we took Jim tobogganing. We planned it out perfectly. John and Bob would be in the front, then Jim, then me. He would have two bodies in front to protect him. If it looked bad, I was to fall backward and take him harmlessly with me. We hadn't calculated how QUICKLY things can go bad. We hit the only tree in a fifty yard radius. The cast broke. The splint broke. We spent the rest of the day trying to fix it so nobody would know. Didn't work.

It was one of the only times I remember my father almost speechless. He would just look at me and shake his head. When he was finally able to speak (after the emergency room visit) it was to tell me that I was no more stupid than my brother, but that since Jim was in no condition to take his licking, I would take it for both of us. Until the day he died, every once in a while he would just look at me and shake his head.

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The only reason some people get lost in thought is because it's unfamiliar territory.
- Paul Fix

Thom, that is a laugh-out-loud story. Great stuff.

I often say to my wife that as our son gets older, he's going to do some dumb things. He's going to know what he does is wrong before, during, and after the fact but he's going to do it anyway and he'll be able to offer no explanation for his actions. Just part of being a boy.

My parents' house is on a hill. At night, we would take empty 2 liter soda bottles, fill them up with water, and roll them down the hill so they would go out onto a major road that has a lot of traffic. Somehow, we never caused an accident but I'm sure we gave a few drivers heart attacks when they hit those water filled bottles.

Nick,

That reminds me of another stupid one...

Back in 1966, a couple of friends (crazy bass-turds) and I used to play Billy Bad-ass with our BB guns (I know... I know... we all did).

Anyway, think back to the old movies with German Pill-boxes with machine-guns completely enclosed (sides, top and bottom). This is how we used to use the storm drains. We would open the man-hole covers, crawl down there and have our guns at the ready for an unsuspecting passer by and shoot their hub caps. Boy, those suckers would really sing when hit too.

Well, one time, Bobby Sikes shot at a hub cap and hit the tire right when the car was in-front of him. The BB riccochet'd off the rubber tire and embedded into his forehead!! ! That S.O.B yelled and screamed for 15 minutes-- FUNNY AS HELL!!

We Laughed at him til our sides hurt-- too much to laugh anymore...

Good times.

Rich

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"If con is the opposite of pro, is Congress the opposite of progress?"
Richard Rushing, HCRI
Duncanville, Tx.

The stupidest thing that I've done was 5 years ago. I payed $ 289.00 to become a "certified" inspector,
I really believed I knew as much as the vetern inspectors, and honestly felt that was a good way to get their customers .
I did see my error after a few months, and changed my ways..
Hope you all will forgive me.

Back in the day when liter coke's came to the south we'd tie an empty to a couple of bricks. Add a bit of dry ice and and water then chunk tha sucker into a pool. Leaks away!

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Charlie Sessums www.alphainspection.com
The greatest ideas are often met with violent opposition from mediocre minds. Albert Einstein

When I was twelve, me and a couple of buddies jumped on a slow moving train in Mesquite, TX. and actually got off of it in Shreveport, Louisiana after a State Trooper saw us all hanging on when it crossed a major intersection.

That was not a fun ride back home with the parents.

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Rick Hurst_Home Works Inspection Co_Rockwall TX
In the words of Mike Tyson.... "Everyone has a plan until they get hit inda mouf"

Let's see ...

There was the time when my younger brother, myself, and about four or five friends blocked off US 1 going into Ft. Pierce just before the bridge, routed the traffic into an endless-no-way-out-circle.

Kept US 1 shut down until the next day when DOT could come out and inspect the bridge to make sure it was not unsafe. Just to see how well it worked out, we had to take the traffic circle too (except we knew a way to get out of that endless-no-way-out-circle that we could take of the after a couple of times around it with every one else).

That was the result of about 2-3 months planning, what with scavenging those traffic kerosene pots (this was during the phase-in of the barricades with blinking lights), a few barricades with blinking lights, a few dozen traffic cones, etc.

Then there was the time (multiple times) we held gun fights outside the city jail at night with starter pistols, leaving 'dead bodies' behind ... only to have another car come screeching up, a couple of guys jump out and throw the dead body into their trunk, then peel off in a cloud of burned rubber. Would do the same thing at 'Lover's Lane' (except leave the body), then watch the cop cars to come out searching for the body (who crawled off after all the cars in Lover's Lane quickly started up and left). We could always count on at least one of those surprised couples to stop by a pay phone and call the cops.

And ...

... Never mind.

Too many stupid things done for the same reason people climb Mt. Everest - "because it's there".

Like I've said many times, I've taken the Darwin Award test many times, and flunked ... so I'm still here.

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Jerry Peck, Construction / Litigation Consultant
Construction Litigation Consultants, LLC ( www.ConstructionLitigationConsultants.com )

Anyone ever wet down a hill in your subdivision during a winter snow storm (and nightly) so that the snow plows could not get in and you did not have to go to school for about a week?

Anyone ever thread a needle and thread through an egg and then tie it to a larger string and toss the string over an overhead line in the middle of a street?

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Scott Patterson
Spring Hill, TN
http://www.traceinspections.com

Scott,

We never the egg thing, we used a take a buddy shoes and tie the laces together and throw them over the lines. We always did that on the last day of school.

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Rick Hurst_Home Works Inspection Co_Rockwall TX
In the words of Mike Tyson.... "Everyone has a plan until they get hit inda mouf"