During a post from Fur, PHenry thought of a theme we should do about the times we all have done stupid stuff. You know, the stuff we laugh at when other people do them or you see someone do something stupid on YouTube.
So, I thought that it would make a pretty fun post. I’ll start:
One time, while I was home on vacation, my family was sitting around the kitchen table drinking coffee and talking. I noticed that the pepper was in the salt shaker and salt was in the pepper shaker. You can tell by the size and amount of holes in the caps. So, I got up, put two bowls on the table and proceeded to dump the salt into one bowl. I was taking off the cap to the pepper shaker and was going to dump it in the other bowl to then put the proper spice in the proper container when my sister started to laugh uproariously. I looked at her like she had gone nuts and said, “What”? She said, through the tears of laughter, “Just switch the caps!”
After looking at the mess I had made, and in a moment of clarity, I began laughing and gasping for breath as the rest of the family joined in. I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t seen the simplest solution! That’s one of the many stories we tell at holiday get-togethers.
What have you done that’s stupid?
Too much to enumerate….
“The first stage in the corruption of morals is the banishment of truth …”
Michel de Montaigne
Hopefully there is no statute of limitations on the stupid stuff my best friend and I did the night after we graduated from HS in 1971. If there was we’d be in heap big trouble, God protects drunk young fools from their folly and stupidity.
Witness Protection keeps me from saying anything.
You and me both.
The stupidest thing I ever did was vote for James Earl Carter, that’s was when I was once of those 18 yr old first voters…that generated decades of family input.
When I was in grade school, my mother received a call from my teacher about an event that took place that day in school. The teacher that day was discussing religion (yeah, it wasn’t taboo back then) and was going around the class asking what our denomination was. I remember everyone in class answering Catholic and Lutheran. When she asked me, being a member of the salvation army, I proudly answered “prostitute.” It wasn’t too far away from protestant. Teacher told mom I might need to work on my pronunciation. I still have to hear this story quite often at family get-togethers.
It’s normally around 05:00 a.m. when I wander into the kitchen to make coffee. I can testify to doing the following at least once over the years (in some cases, multiple times):
(1) Put the coffee grounds into the carafe rather than the filter.
(2) Forget to put water in the pot. Mysteriously, no coffee.
(3) Forget to put coffee in the filter. Ditto.
(4) Leave the lid up. Pot just sits there and struggles.
(5) Forget to put the carafe in place. Liquid coffee all over counter, dripping down the sides and puddling on the floor. I hate that.
(6) Dump bag of sugar into my cup rather than sugar bowl.
(7) Commence pouring ground coffee into my cup rather than filter.
(8) Forget to turn pot ON.
Really, coffee is a food group to me.
A lot of us gullible Christians got guilt tripped into voting for Jimmy Carter in 76 including me. My mistake was voting for him twice.
@Jimmy, I identify with all you wrote.
My wife called and told me to pick her up from work. I left in shitty traffic and battled my way there, finally arriving after an hour for a ride that would typically take 20 minutes. I texted to let her know I was waiting for her. A few minutes later she texts back that she doesn’t see me.
Turns out I went to her old place of employment, that she quit FIVE YEARS ago.
No clue where my head was, but after another HOUR of traffic I finally made it to the right place where she proceeded to laugh while saying WTF at the same time.
When your friends Dad hands you a coil wire from his car and says hold this and watch for spark, don’t do it.
I was carded and had a price check over the intercom one time at Walgreens buying rubbers. My wife laughed real hard at that and said only I could screw up something like that.
I’ve never done anything stupid in my entire life.
I’m old, so there is no one living to profess the contrary.
The Shadow knows!
You started it. Or I started it. Sorry.
Put down your beverage for a minute.
I was probably 18 when I got my first rental home in Carson City. It was a nice little duplex across from a doctors office.
About as soon as i moved in my coworker broke up with his wife and pretty much moved in with me and because hw was a wiser and older Viet Nam vet i figured it would work out fine. He was an army medic during the war and had his ass shot off, so he had to repeatedly get silicone pump ups when his ass deflated
He introduced me to an elixir called Tequila one night.
It was fantastic! So i told him at work the next day that i’d have 5 shots before he got home. And, sadly, I fulfilled my promise.
Put on the Allman Brothers Live from Fillmore East. One of the rockingest albums of all time. Started hand washing the dishes, rocking all the while, when the dish drainer became full. I ran to the linen closet to get a towel. But it was during the crescendo of In Memory of Elizabeth Reed and I jumped in pure rock ecstasy while running, at the doorway, splitting my forehead wide open.
When my roommate returned, the Army medic, he advised me that I needed stitches.
OK. There’s a doctor’s office across the street, but they wouldn’t attend to my wounds. It seemed odd and uncomfortable that a doctors office wouldn’t treat me and left this drunken 18 year old in their lobby to suffer.
But I also didn’t know what OB/GYN meant either and that’s the doctors office i was in.
That there is embarrassing.
Dad used to hold up his fist and tell me to run my nose into it. I never would because I wasn’t stupid..
My daughter is sitting in my lap at 3-4 years of age and I tell her to run her nose into my fist.
She did it… OMG. I have a stupid child… She then says, Daddy run your nose into this…
Well, I’ve embarrassed her.. I’ll play along.. As I lean in she swings her fist into my nose…
We found out who was stupid
Late for work one day, I frantically searched for my glasses. I couldn’t find them anywhere! It took a few minutes before I realized I was wearing them.
Does coming back from an extraordinarily smoky test drive to find all the valve guides in a parts dish on the garage floor count?
@Jimmy – I’d had pretty much all the same coffee experiences you’ve had when I figured out the solution. These days, after I’ve had my morning coffee and am fully awake, I set up the percolator (MUCH better than a dripper) for the next day.
Seventh grade, we were asked to fill out a simple form about our parents as to if they were in the ‘service’.
Apparently, the school had to account for any students that had parents in the military.
I dutifully answered that; yes, my father was a serviceman.
I didn’t know being a t.v. serviceman was not what they were looking for.
At some point when we’re young, cleverness sets in. At about 11, I decided to dry out my swim trunks by attaching them to the family sailboat’s main halyard and raising my wet, heavy trunks up the mast.
Um, yeah. I didn’t think about them drying out and becoming too light to come back down.
My father was not impressed. He had to rig the jib halyard with a boat hook, coat hanger, tape and a retrieval line to snag it. This all happened in front of dozens of people at a dock.
And to make things worse, one of Dad’s favorite expressions was, “Think it through.” I flunked the course that day, for sure.
I was flying to Sioux Falls SD with one stop. I’m the kind that falls asleep the minute I’m seated. We take of and I’m sleeping like a baby and then the stewardess’s voice woke my up and all I heard was “Sioux” somethingorother. I grabbed my suit bag and stuff, deplaned and went to the car rental counter. No reservation in my name (odd) but no problem as they have plenty of cars. I get one and leave the airport and drive 1/2 mile and notice a small strip mall with a shop that’s named “Sioux City Cleaners”. Huh… Why would someone name their business Sioux City Cleaners in Sioux Falls..?? OH CRAP !! I make U turn, head back to the airport and make an abrupt park job. Fortunately, it’s a small airport and was able to get back on the plane in time all the while trying to look cool for the crew.
I actually stayed awake for the second leg.
Fresh out of Tech School from Lowry AFB..And at My first Permanent Duty
Station…Nellis AFB…Eager…Gung F*cking Ho and dumb as a rock.
My Crew Chief, climbs into the Cockpit of an F4E Phantom…Yells down
to Me…”Shit…No Keys…go into the Ops Room and tell Them You
need the Keys to Tail #732….”
And I did
I received a gift certificate for a massage, something I always wanted to experience.
With NO clue what to expect, I showed up 10 mins. before the appointment at a building I had NEVER been in before.
I was told I should have been there sooner but to go ahead and find a locker in the men’s room, strip to my shorts, (since I didn’t bring a suit), spend 5 mins. in the spa, go back to the men’s locker room, wrap myself in a towel, (since I didn’t bring a house coat), then go out the back door….cross the court yard and knock on the door and the masseuse will let me in.
I was flustered. After getting out of the spa, which had both men and women in it, I went back to the men’s locker room, dried off, wrapped a towel around myself, went to the back door and begin knocking on it while two other guys stood and watched me.
By the time I realized that I was knocking on a door that merely led to the outside and into the court yard, I decided I had enough.
I got dressed and never went back.
Of course, I grew up and became more judicious in my consumption of adult beverages. Choosing sobriety. At least until the sun went down.
There was that time when i lived on Cape Cod when the outdoor trim needed painting. It was an obnoxious job. Go up the ladder with white trim paint in a bucket and hang it from a hook. Paint as far as you can reach. Then take the bucket down, move the ladder and repeat. Over and over.
I finally realized, through pure genius, that the ladder could be moved over and over without the paint bucket being removed and trim painting sailed through quickly. I was flying.
Until I got to the rake boards.
Here is what you cannot do.
With bucket attached to ladder you cannot adjust the HEIGHT of the ladder downwards while standing directly beneath said bucket because paint bucket grabs a lower rung and inverts itself directly over your head.
Spouse was of little assistance, being more disposed to get a camera than a towel.
I cant say I blame her, but I was in no mood for posing.
I might add that extending the ladder upward was fine. It was only after reaching the peak of the roof line and descending in height that this issue ensued.
Great stories. Getting the keys to tail #732. was awesome. That’s hilarious. It was mean but funny.
It was Hollywood in the eighties. White Russians and New Wave girls in taffeta dresses and late night guitar playin’ and gobs of other fun.
I remember my pal who was a cop (and got called because his business card was in my wallet along with my pants in the alley) climbed up the fire escape to the roof to tell me if I put my clothes on and came down off the roof the other cops said I could go home.
I ain’t sayin. But I ended up with stitches.
My family has provided me with so much laughter from just being themselves. – My daughter while helping me empty the bags from the shopping trip responds to my question about what are you supposed to say when someone holds the door open for you with, “I can’t say thank you, my hands are full.” She’s also the kid who asked years before a febreeze commercial, “Is it possible for someone to be smell deaf?
My favorite Aunt called me frantic one morning, she is of a certain age and so is her dog. She prepared the days medicines for both she and her canine and promptly took the dogs pills. She had to call the vet for herself.
One day while picking up the towel on the bathroom floor I raised up my head I was startled to see my mother standing there. She’s never been one to let a door stop her from entering the house unannounced, so I asked her, “When did you get here?” She didn’t answer. She was here in my reflection. Scary stuff.
I’m sorry, …………..what?
PHenry
SEPTEMBER 28, 2019 AT 8:56 PM
“Great stories. Getting the keys to tail #732. was awesome. That’s hilarious. It was mean but funny.”
…it used to be a tradition with squad probys to send them to the squad captain to request a priaprism.
He didn’t always think it was funny, but WE did.
…far as I know, no one ever came BACK with one…
…side note: this particular squad captain’s first name was “Marlin”. Thing is, the Director of Fire and Life Saftey is said to have looked at him, he was kind of a doughy, butterball sort of chap, and said in front of other people, “You don’t look like a Marlin. You’re more of a tuna”.
…guess what name was on his squad coat, accountability tag, and the back of his helmet for the rest of his tenure…
…also. I was once told they would do something similar on the Police side, where they would go to the county range for the first time and tell the rookie to ask the RSO for the gun report, but I don’t have direct knowledge of that…
When I was 16, I had three separate car accidents in the same company car within 3 hours. Noticed later it was indeed Friday the 13th.
I voted for Ross Perot in my first election. I also voted for John McCain and Mitt Romney.
@Supernight. I had to look up priapism. And then I shot my beverage out of my nose.
You rotten bastige🤬
“And then there was the time…
…I dated Evelyn for a year and a half”
I’ll spare you the details, but I give you this advice:
Never eat an entire pan of unrisen bread dough…
High School graduation night after the prom some friends (boys and girls)and I thought it would be fun to climb the fence and skinny dip in the Stanford University swimming pool. No alcohol involved and just innocent fun. We were drying off in the bathroom with paper towels(!) and in walked a couple of Stanford U. police officers who very kindly did not arrest us for trespassing after someone called about the loud laughing and splashing coming from the pool. About a year or so later I ran into one of the officers at the barn where I had moved my horse; he kept his horse there, too. 😳😳😳 He recognized me. My face. He recognized my face and, oddly enough, where he had seen me. 😁 He was a very nice man!
I lucked out…The Standard Op was to send the Guy to the next AMU
and ask Them…and They’d send You to the next AMU…and on and on.
(Nellis had a lot of AMU’s AIRCRAFT MAINT. UNITs)
They sent a Guy out looking for Flight line…He was gone an Hour.
@jethro. Yeast infection? You poor dear.
Now see what you’ve done, Claudia? Shame on you.
I’ve learned new words. Like priapism. If my wife is lucky i’ll suffer from that affliction some day.
She’s waiting. Impatiently.
Groucho Marxist
SEPTEMBER 28, 2019 AT 8:00 PM
“Dad used to hold up his fist and tell me to run my nose into it. I never would because I wasn’t stupid..”
…I used to train machine operators on the ins and outs of operating highly automated equipment. I would start by opening the control cabinet, revealing the HMI, the PLC, the gantry robot controller and various servo controllers, breifly explain them, then ask “Now, what do you think does the THINKING for this machine?” They would usually ponder this a moment, then pick one of those parts, at which time I would point out that programmed devices cannot think and tell them, “YOU are what does the thinking for this machine”.
Until a guy gave me a reason to DOUBT that…
…I used to go on to explain that by saying, “ok, pretend you’re the machine”. I would hold out an open, folding knife blade-down and say, “Machines follow instructions. Hold your hand one foot over this knife. When I say “GO”, lower your hand to make contact witb the knife, then raise to your HOME starting position. Do this every time I say GO”.
They would do this a few times, then I would turn the blade UP with them watching, and say GO. At this point they would understandibly refuse, an then I would explain that was the difference between “Thinking” and “Programming” and that a programmed device would not hesitate and would proceed to damage itself, over and over, because it does not THINK, it just does what it’s told, and that’s where THEY came in, to make operational decisions for conditions the machine was not programmed to deal with.
All well and good, till they sent me a guy who COULDN’T think.
…after the knife turn, again in plain sight standing right in front of the guy, he proceeded to slap his hand down full-speed towards the clearly exposed knife point. This surprised me very much, but not so much I didn’t react by pulling the knife down so he couldn’t hit it.
I then broke my OWN programmed speech since it didn’t work with stupid, and proceeded to a more frank, abrupt sort of discussion that may or may not have involved the word “moron” that resulted in said moron leaving in a huff, followed by SNS being summoned to the HR dungeon for an equally frank discussion about not using weapons for food machinery training and what sorts of words not to use to reference training operators.
I never saw that young man again. I was still pretty young myself. Don’t know if he ever learned anything about machine operating anywhere else, but it did increase MY education concerning the unplumbable depths of human stupidity and that not EVERYONE has a functioning self-protection circuit…
@PHenry
Nope. But I learned that unrisen dough keeps rising in your stomach.
1986- Newport Beach California, I pulled into the fuel dock which was next to the pavilion with a thousand people standing on. Just before I got to where I wanted to go the motor stalled so I couldn’t put it in reverse to stop. Before I hit I pushed on my floorboard like you would in a car when you are about to wreck, the seat ripped out of the floor and I went flying backwards and landed on my back to the applause of the crowd. We still went fishing to it was all good.
If it can go wrong boating, it will at some point.
PHenry
SEPTEMBER 28, 2019 AT 9:36 PM
“@Supernight. I had to look up priapism. ”
…to save everone some trouble…
“Priapism is a prolonged erection of the penis. The persistent erection continues hours beyond or isn’t caused by sexual stimulation. Priapism is usually painful.”
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/priapism/symptoms-causes/syc-20352005
…looking at the FIRST part, yes, your WIFE may want you to have one, but looking at the LAST part, not sure YOU do…
Conservative cowgirl, I was expecting you to say you married the guy and lived happily ever after. But that would contradict the thread, wouldn’t it? I’m think… I’m being stupid…
When I worked at a county agency i was invited to attend workshops and meetings in Columbus. They were handing out name tags which I hate. I wrote the name of the state agency director on my name tag and wore it around. I received some 1st class treatment and refreshments from a few clueless souls until accosted by the real agency director. Fortunately she had a sense of humor but I had to go back to being a peon with 3rd class treatment.
Or there was the time I was wearing this super outfit and thought I was so damn hot. Went to the women’s room and strutted back to my office only to have my clerk crack up laughing. Yeah part of my skirt was stuck in my panty hose giving my rear quite an airing. Joyce was the only one who saw the accidental streaking.
Toenex
SEPTEMBER 28, 2019 AT 10:01 PM
“…If it can go wrong boating, it will at some point.”
…I was warned away from puchasing a boat by a friend who defined a “boat” as “a hole in the water into which you pour money”.
I had also heard that your two BEST days with a boat are the day you BUY it…and the day you SELL it.
…as a result, all MY boating experience has been on RENTALS.
…which brings us to MORE well-worn advice “If it flies, floats, or fucks…RENT it”.
…not really on board with the LAST one, but gotta agree with the FIRST two….
Bobcat…laughing
SEPTEMBER 28, 2019 AT 9:46 PM
“They sent a Guy out looking for Flight line…He was gone an Hour.”
…seems like I’d heard that a WWII variant of that was to send a guy out for a bucket of prop wash, but I’m not sure that would work in the modern Air Force…
I plead the 100th. That is pleading the 5th times 20. But that probably doesn’t cover it all.
Grew up country on a river. When cousins or other kids visiting from the city we’d send them uptown to buy a spool for the shore line or keys for the oar locks. Hardware store would have always just sold the last one and send them someplace else and so on until they wised up. Sometimes hours before they would return and still not know they’d been had.
@F4UCorsair — I have a similar story.
I had to sit out a noncompete for several months and part of it was during ski season, so I made plans for a two week vacation to some deep powder in Montana. Unlike other trips, this one I really spent some time planning and getting all my gear together, making advance hotel reservations and all the rest. Two or three days before I was to depart, a friend decided she’d like to meet up in Big Sky with me and do some skiing (and apres ski fun). I was very much looking forward to taking the train through the snowy mountains and at a leisurely pace. I’m very glad I had to explain to her how I was getting there because the train tickets I had purchased were to White Fish. There is no train to Big Sky.
White Fish is near the Canadian border and Big Sky is almost on the southern border of Montana, about 250 miles apart as the crow flies, but over several mountain ranges.
(Forcibly Deranged, are you following all this?)
It didn’t happen *to* me, but the dear, dear man should have known better.
My first, late husband and I had a weekend getaway to a charming hotel on the Columbia River with dinner reservations in their 5 star restaurant. Back then people dressed for such occasions but my dear, very dapper husband forgot to pack a pair of black dress socks and there was no hotel store — or any nearby store — to buy a pair at that late hour. After much back and forth and disgusting wheedling from moi, I talk him into wearing a pair of my opaque black pantyhose with oath-taking promises that no one would ever, ever know about his wardrobe substitution.
I should have never told this story to Geoff C. Something like this would have been infinitely funnier in the retelling.
painting the wood soffit on our brick house. up on a ladder with my white paint bucket and brush. proceeding along, i move the ladder to the next section, dip the brush in the paint and get promptly attacked by yellow jackets (stinging wasp or bee thing) which, of course, i fended off with my paint brush, swinging left right up down…. the front of my brick house looked like an extreme jackson pollack painting. geez louise.
my stories always seem to involve cops and high speeds but heres one that doesnt. My close friend and i always played pranks on each other. I had “borrowed” a complete set of mag wheels and tires from him just to see how they look on my 58 chevy. You know, just for a day or so.
One month later i walked out of voc-tech and freaked out to see my chevy up on blocks. He told me later that no one questioned him as he removed each tire, put a block under the hub and put them in his car and drove off.
Charlie WalksonWater
SEPTEMBER 28, 2019 AT 11:54 PM
“One month later i walked out of voc-tech…”
…seems like stories like these abound at voc-tech schools. A faculty member drove a VW Bug to ours, the original kind with the flat little engine in back, and those things didn’t weigh much. Seems that, if you put a couple guys on each corner, it wasn’t hard to turn it sideways in the parking lot so it was nose and tail to normally parked cars on either side when they were done, but impossible to drive OUT of without those guys on the corners, unless he waited for the vehicle owners on one side or the other to leave…
…and seeing a classroom full of guys rotating a VeeWee in full daylight in the early ’80s didn’t bother anyone, either….
I was the radiant well dressed wife of the boss going to a company dinner dance. I walked into the lobby while DH parked the car.
A group of wives of DH’s people were also waiting in the lobby for their husbands. I was gorgeous, perfectly attired with the addition of a double kleenex loaded with chewed bubblegum stuck to my black sequined stilettos.
God taught me a bit of humility that night.
Supernightshade, later that year at the voc-tech, some class was selling fire extinguishers for a fund raiser. I got in line and when i got to the front I picked one up. It was an aerosol can. I made a good pretext of reading the directions and i declared “What? This says to shake 5 minutes before using?”
could of heard a pin drop
Super Night Shades. AKA, Blind as a bat. Right?
Lunatic Fringe
SEPTEMBER 29, 2019 AT 1:29 AM
“Super Night Shades. AKA, Blind as a bat. Right?”
…uh, no, a bit more complicated than that.
…if you REALLY want to know why my handle here and many, many others, here’s a resource for you…
https://iotwreport.com/explain-your-name/
Uncle Al
SEPTEMBER 28, 2019 AT 8:05 PM
“Does coming back from an extraordinarily smoky test drive to find all the valve guides in a parts dish on the garage floor count?”
…the first time I did a head gasket on my Slant-6 Dodge, I used THICK beads of sealant around EVERYTHING. RTV sealants were kind of new then, and we didn’t cover them in vocational school.
…then I wondered why, when I drove it next, I was leaving an oily smoke screen behind that James Bond would have envied….
We also a sent a newbie down to get the keys to an F4 in my fighter squadron. And I’ve heard of guys being sent to get 50 yards of chow line or to secure some waterline and some prop wash. But the best were fooling newly commissioned Navy Officers into falling for the old sea bat trick where someone would put a box out and tell the newbie that that there was a sea bat under it and when he looked to see it they’d kick him in the ass. The Captain said if he was dumb enough to fall for that old prank he deserved it and no enlisted guys were written up on report.
I had this foreign guy fired for doin his job – an I shoulda kept my fukkin mouth shut about it.
Trying to get rid of a mattress from the third floor at night. Pushed it over the balcony, and didn’t see all the black wires crisscrossing below. The mattress hit them all and probably pulled everyone’s cable cords and televisions right into their wall.