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 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”
Xmas ornament my parents got of QVC or something. I fell into(onto?) the mantelpiece because I’m clumsy and I was much younger at the time and I knocked it off. It was actually my favourite ornament too.
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I worked briefly at dominoes. One day I parked my bike a little too close to the others and didn’t put the kickstand properly. It tipped over and dominoed five other bikes.
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.
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)!
ITT: kids with wayyyy too much time on their hands
- Latchkey kid
I know it’s not as expensive as some others here, but a basement window. I was a latchkey kid, and one afternoon I’d come home from school and taken the dog out for a walk. When we got home, some neighborhood kids showed up and we were playing in the backyard with the dog, and I didn’t get around to unlocking the house. And then somehow I lost my keys. I knew my folks would be furious with me for goofing off and losing my keys rather than doing my homework, so I was laser focused on getting inside the house. I took a pipe and broke a basement window, planning to climb inside, let the dog in, and then find a way to fix the window without my parents knowing. (I don’t remember what I was planning to do about the lost keys.) And of course, the minute I broke the window, they pulled into the driveway and saw what was going on, and I was grounded for like an eon after that. I’m in my 40s and they still bring it up now and then. My dad replaced the windowpane himself but he was too grumpy to show me how, lol.
Overall, it’s a pretty stupid story!
I know it was different times, but if my kid was so afraid of not doing homework to the point of breaking into the house through the basement window, I would consider it a huge failure on my side.
Oh yeah, I hear ya - my mother had no chill. She flew off the handle over the smallest things. I moved out as soon as I could and was estranged from them for several years.
I pushed the largest TV off a window ledge at an electricals store because I wanted to watch the TV, so I put myself between the TV and the window. Obviously I’d never lifted a TV before and had no idea about their centre of balance. Because it wasn’t tied down properly the store was reprimanded and my poor mother didn’t have to fork out. I think I was around 4 or 5
I once broke my neighbor’s sliding glass doors with rocks.
A neighbor kid and I were really stupid when we were 9-10 years old, and my next door neighbor’s house had been empty for a while because they rented it out. So we thought it would be a good of fun idea to go through the broken fence between our yards, and chuck the decorative rocks (pretty big ones, not pebbles) at the glass and make it shatter. We broke one open, and then another, then went inside to check out the empty place. We started to go at the third one when my brother came outside and heard the loud smashing.
Cops were called, in the end both of us were very apologetic and told them everything.
I broke the screen on my laptop, but that was only after having it for like five or six years. And even after that, I still used it as a closet web server for years after that with SSH.
Edit: I think I was about 16 when that happened.
Sigh…
When I was in the 3rd grade, our class had to do reports on countries around the world and we were all assigned a country. I got Egypt. Coincidentally, some friends of my parents had recently gotten back from a trip to Egypt. My parents asked their friends if there was anything I could bring in to use for my presentation. They let me borrow this little statue they got. It was an eagle with a hat, I think it was a depiction of Horus. It was carved out of some really nice white stone, maybe marble or something? I brought it into school, put it on my desk, and waited patiently to stand up and do my report. When I stood up, I bumped my desk, and the statue fell to the ground and broke in half.
Now monetarily this may not have been the most “expensive” thing, but it was the souvineer that this family brought back from Egypt that they had on their mantle to always remember the trip. It was priceless.
Why the fuck would you let a 7 year old bring your breakable souvineer to school for a class project?
Anyway, those people stopped being friends with my parents after that, so I have a feeling it was either expensive or meant a lot.
This hurts me to think about. Why did you have to ask this question?
:(
I didn’t break something expensive in terms of dollar amount, but my Mom knits. In high school she asked me to do the laundry for her while she was out of town. I knew sweaters went in the delicate cycle, but what I DIDN’T know is even the delicate cycle was too much for her very nice, hand knit, cashmere sweater that fit her perfectly.
It came out felted and 2 sizes smaller. And I felt HORRIBLE then. Now, I’m all grown up and I’ve learned how to knit myself. Now I think back on that and marvel that I’m still alive and she didn’t come home and just bury me in the backyard. That’s how I know she loves me. <3
I feel like, depending on your age at the time, this is more on her than you. I’m an adult, and I don’t buy myself clothes that can’t handle the normal setting on my washer and dryer. I know it would be a case of when, not if, I’d forget. No way I’d trust a child to pay attention to something like that.
So in her defense (and another aspect of why she didn’t murder me I’m sure.) Is that she’d forgotten entirely that she even wore that sweater. Apparently it always sits on the edge of her hamper so she visually sees it and removes it to her special wash bag for extremely fancy clothes. But she’d left town in a bit of a hurry for family matters and I’d even volunteered to do laundry. I didn’t realize that sweater was extra special on my own.
That “on the side of the hamper” method is what I use for my extremely delicate stuff now, and so far I haven’t shrunk anything. yet
Have you hand-knitted her a cashmere sweater that fit her perfectly? What am I saying, that was probably why you learned knitting.
Sadly I was never able to perfectly recreate that cashmere sweater, though I came close. Getting perfect gauge is really hard to do on fitted garments for knitting. Mom had wanted me to learn to knit since I was really little but it never caught my interest until I was an adult. Through the pandemic we did work together to knit a modular blanket and sewed it together once we could meet up in person again! https://imgur.com/a/u4M4ynb
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
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When I was 6 I microwaved a metal measuring cup full of water, which ended up arcing and burning out the transformer. Apparently it fucked up my parents’ finances for a while at the time
Apparently it fucked up my parents’ finances for a while at the time
What year was this?
Early 2000s. My dad is a farmer and it was a rough year for the harvest. It didn’t help that my parents were pretty poor for a long time, and didn’t seem to recover until after their divorce during the 2008-9 financial crises
I don’t mean to pry, but… their divorce made them more financially stable?
Eventually. My dad saw an improvement with corn and soybean yields for multiple years in a row in a very strong market, as well as getting his crane operator license so he could move grain bins and paying off several debts. My mom moved to the same town as her job, got some promotions, picked up a couple weekend gigs bartending at the local bar, and heavily subsidized groceries by going to meat raffles.
Damn. Good for them, that’s fucking hard
I have a similar story, when I was young I had this weekly science magazine that would come in the mail.
The one page showed a match lit in a microwave with a glass measuring cup to catch the hot plasma. I obviously tried it because it looked cool. When my mother heard the microwave making all kinds of noises she opened it up and pulled out the measuring cup not realising that its really hot, she dropped it and it shattered all over.
I destroyed the microwave and the measuring cup.
