• nutlink@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Do I have to pick only one? I wasn’t a very bright kid.

    • Willingly let someone taze my testicles in exchange for a beer
    • Regularly jumped off the garage roof to demonstrate it was possible to roll and transition into running while keeping your momentum in exchange for Mike and Ike’s
    • Chased black bears off the trail behind our house for no reason, usually with nothing more than a nearby stick
    • Skinny dipping in a river known to be filled with leeches
    • Got in a drunk argument with a raccoon, which led to my first underage drinking ticket because I refused to be spoken to in that tone
    • Became friends with said raccoon and even met its kits once over stale day old bread I brought home from my high school job at Jimmy John’s
    • Made a potato gun and accidentally fired it backwards, breaking the glass window in the garage
    • Threw M80’s into the water near my uncle every Fourth of July when our families would to the lake
    • Believed a girl I barely knew when she said she was on the pill

    I think that covers most of my mid to late teens back in the 90’s. Can you believe I’m a systems engineer now?

  • TheElectroness@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    I was 11, and handled the ‘samples’ at a BNFL booth (at an airshow) where a geiger counter was set up, it wasn’t til the demonstration guy returned and demonstrated to someone else how the coin-sized samples set off the counter that I realised it wasn’t a ‘self service’ type demonstration. The samples were labelled with their atomic symbol, and the most reactive samples were labelled as uranium (about 20mm diameter) and plutonium (about 5mm diameter). At the time I told myself they were likely fake, since leaving a plutonium sample lying around wouldn’t be very likely.

    I’ve not died of radiation poisoning or cancer yet, but it’s only been 41 years.

  • raccoona_nongrata@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Evaded the police in a '91 Caprice wagon just to get out of a speeding ticket -_-

    I successfully pulled it off but it was so incredibly stupid.

    • Ilikemoney@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Just got to get to a blind curve or hill and hope there’s a turn off, not that I’ve ever done this of course, but it works

      • raccoona_nongrata@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        Yes, the only reason I even had the thought to do it was I passed him going the other way on a country road that I knew very well and saw him doing a k-turn in my rearview just as I went around a bend. So I sped up ahead and cut into a little deadend until he’d past.

  • Thalestr@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Wasn’t quite a teenager, maybe around 10 or 11. I wanted to make a “weed killer” concoction with my sister one day when we were home alone. So we hoarded together every cleaning solution we could find in the house and poured it into a bucket. I have no idea how we didn’t end up in a hospital.

    The test patch of grass we used it on never grew grass ever again.

    • plactagonic@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      I made explosives with friends. We took it seriously and nobody got hurt. But sinthesis of HMTD is pretty dangerous (this is the thing you hear about when someone loses fingers in news).

  • jennifilm@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Not a teen, but when I would have been 10 or so we lived out in the country, with a big eucalyptus tree in the back yard. I used to climb it a lot, and was real into building things like platforms and little (shoddy) tree houses. We also had a great trampoline, which I often used to get down out of the tree.

    You might be able to see where this is going.

    One day, I was up in the tree building a little ladder with the trampoline below me. I went to get down, dropped my hammer to the trampoline, and immediately followed it.

    Time slowed, i witnessed it all happening in slow motion as I was thought “oh fuck, that was dumb” as the hammer hit the trampoline, i landed, and the hammer flew in a perfect arc and hit me in the forehead with the head of the hammer.

    I stood there, stunned still for a second, and then immediately went “oh god, that could have been so much worse”. Thankfully I was completely fine!

  • Thurgo@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Ate some acid in the freshman dorms at university. Dorm room was like 250 sq ft. Ended up walking around town for hours while out of my fucking mind and somehow did not get lost or robbed and made it home for a hot shower.

    Great experience looking back on it, but probably not one of my better choices.

  • OneDimensionPrinter@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Recently a video tape surfaced of my friends and I tazing each other for fun.

    Yes, I lived in bumfuck Florida at the time.

    Edit: typo

    • jrubal1462@vlemmy.net
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      1 year ago

      I’ve met some men from Florida before, but this is the first time I’m getting to meet the esteemed “Florida Man”

      It’s truly an honor.

      (My apologies if I’ve incorrectly assumed your gender, but I have a hunch about this one.)

      • OneDimensionPrinter@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Ah shit. No I can’t go by that moniker. It was the weirdest there. Now I’m crying alligator tears. I escaped to the west coast for a reason.

  • Snart@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Got head behind a semi truck and got caught by their dad and asked if he could drive me home 💀

  • Bubble Water@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    when I was 14 I spent the night at my bff’s house and snuck out with her. took a taxi to the next town over to this guy’s house (he was probably in his 20s) to smoke weed. this was back before it was legal and he answered the door with a gun. neither of us knew him at all but despite all this we went in and partied with him without incident. dude was paranoid as hell tho

  • pohart@lemmyrs.org
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    1 year ago

    You can’t ask this and not give us yours.

    But, I rode with drivers who had been smoking pot. Never did it myself, though.

    • alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgOPM
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      1 year ago

      You can’t ask this and not give us yours.

      unfortunately i literally don’t have an interesting story like this (for a variety of reasons); the dumbest thing i probably ever did was technically trespass on an abandoned property in my neighborhood… but all the kids in the neighborhood did it without fanfare and eventually it got demolished and replaced by new development. not that interesting tbh

    • jennifilm@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      A few years ago I was playing a gig in an adjoining town and after, everyone (we’d all had more than a few) piled into a car to drive back home. I just assumed the driver was all good - it wasn’t until a few hours later I realised he was pissed out of his mind and had a moment of “oh thank god we made it home”

  • ffmike@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    So many, many choices.

    I think my all-time dumbest came when I was about 22, so it doesn’t fit here. In my teens…probably driving drunk at speeds up to 100mph on the mountain roads up above Pasadena with the headlights off at night.

  • Vodulas [they/them]@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    I had a car with a removable sunroof. In the summer my friends and I would drive around throwing water balloons at passing cars. I am super surprised we never caused an accident. The only time we ever almost saw consequences was hitting someone in a convertable and then chasing us. Never caught us though.

    Honorable mention was not something I did. My friends and I were skating in a city park after dark, and the cops saw us. My friend decided to run, while the rest of walked back to another friend’s car. Since my friend ran, they searched the car. They managed to not find the .22 in the trunk because the owner of the car did not keep it any kind of tidy.

  • sparky@lemmy.federate.cc@lemmy.federate.cc
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    1 year ago

    We’d pour out a few bottles of rubbing alcohol somewhere with a “streak” back to where we were standing and then light it on fire. Basically catches ablaze for 5-10 seconds and then it’s gone, with minimal to no burning to stuff underneath. So obviously it’s not safe exactly. But we’d pull pranks with it. “Bro your bike is on fire, look!!”