Reptile & Amphibian Forums

This week's burning question is:
What is the stupidest thing you've ever done?
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Smile, it will make them wonder what you are up to!

I was in junior high and my mother wanted me to take the bus home. Unfortunately the bus didn't come for an hour. I hated school because I was unpopular and waiting so much was a torture because the bullies found me right away. Anyhow I figured I could walk home and still get there in a timely fashion and not have to sit and listen to the taunts and teasings of the other kids. We lived several miles out of town and you had to walk through several orange groves to get where I lived. I started out and got lost and was really afraid. A young child who was playing saw me crying and invited me home after I said I was lost. I called my mom and played with his pet rats until she came for me, but now I realize how dangerous it was to just set off on my own through such a rural, unpopulated area.
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Smile, it will make them wonder what you are up to!

I have a stupidest thing I almost did... Saved by sheer luck.

When I first started my job in my current oranization (about 12 years ago), I didn't realize so many people were related to each other on staff.

I helped a lady in the office... She'd needed some very basic help on the computer, things she should have known for her position and salary level. Basic, basic stuff, and it wasn't sinking in with her. Went over it more than once. I was very nice and pleasant, but internally frustrated that she wasn't getting this and how did she ever make it to the level she was at by not getting it...

Anyway, I went into another section in another part of the building where I got along well with the couple of ladies in it and said, "Do you know Susie Chapstick?" (name changed to protect the innocent) Thank goodness one of the ladies said, "Yes, she's my Mother..." Saved by sheer dumb luck. If she hadn't of said that, I'd have launched into... "You can't believe how frustrated I am..." Instead, I talked of what a joy she was, LOL.

I learned a hard lesson that day. Look before you leap. LOL
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Tammy
Stanley and Pookey

i had to drive to tok (a dinky town in the middle of nowhere; pronounced like 'tow-kk' [toke]). finished my assignment then decided instead of spending the night there i'd drive to fairbanks and visit a friend (the one who recently passed away). it was late and i'd been up a long, long time. well as i was hitting some flatter areas i fell asleep at the wheel of my truck. well luck was on my side and i drifted off the highway (at 2 in the morning noone else was on it). i wound up driving off into the alders, berry patches and devils club. well i decided it would be safer to stay there and sleep before going on, then joined my friend in fairbanks. in hindsight i should have taken the motel room in tok. everything worked out though, i didn't get stuck or anything.

>>This week's burning question is:
>>What is the stupidest thing you've ever done?
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Late July, 1959. It was just about a month before I was to start my senior year in high school. I loved school and got great grades and I so looked forward to my senior year. I was 17.

My dad wanted us all to take a family trip to the lake for the weekend but I didn't want to go because I had a date with the latest 'steady - love of my life'. My dad told me to break the date and that I should really get rid of him anyway because he was a loser and would never amount to anything. Many harsh words were spoken and my tears were flowing.

On an impulse, I decided to run away from home and marry the loser. Worst mistake of my life! I wasn't even pregnant and married the loser because "I loved him!". It only took me a week or two to see how much of a mistake I made.

My dad wouldn't even speak to me for 6 months. He said that 'she made her bed, now she can lie in it'. And 'lie in it', I did. Because I didn't want to admit to my father that he was right, I silently lived through 10 years of physical and mental abuse.

Three kids and ten years later, I got a job that paid 3 times the amount that he made (when he worked), and found that I could support myself and my 3 kids much better than he ever did. I didn't even need the loser and divorced him.

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Ruby and the Kitties
Simba, Samantha, Katrina & KatyKatt
Meow!! Meow!! Meow!! Meow!!

How wonderful to do nothing and then rest afterwards. Meow!

Well, this was a dumb stupid thing. I had just gotten my first car, a '76 Chevy Monza (went 55 with the gas pedal all the way down), and came the fall, time to change to snow tires. My grandmother lived at the top of a huge hill, and offered her garage as a place to put my summer tires. After carefully rolling 2 or 3 tires down her driveway, dumb-dumb thought, "why not roll it:", as there was a curb at the bottom. My college graduate brain thought the tire would hit the curb and fall...
Instead, it leaped in the air about 5 feet and rolled straight down to the next road down the hill. Grandma almost had a coronary laughing at me, tearing down the hill. Finally it came to rest 2 streets down, and with my tail beneath my legs, and the tire, I climbed up the hill. She never let me forget that day. God I miss her.

Since my original answer was the stupidest thing I almost did, another just hit me that really happened.

In the Air Force, I was electronic maintenance. Trained in NASA standards in circuit chip soldering/repair, etc...

Well, a friend of mine had a bike that had a broken part on it that needed soldering. She rolled it into the shop and put it near the front door. Several of us were gabbing. I heated up the soldering iron on the bench and ran it over to the bike to make the repair. Had to do it a couple times as the iron was cooling fast being unplugged so I could reach the bike...

Well after about three trips, I smacked myself in the head. Why didn't I just roll the bike over to the bench, LOL. No one else thought of it, either, so not too bad, but very funny...
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Tammy
Stanley and Pookey

At the age of 18, I decided I was going skydiving. I had never been in a plane before!

The center my frineds and I went to was well known at the time, they had done jump master training for the army and those newly minted instuctors in turn returned home to teach the grunts. So our instructor was really good at bellowing, he scared me a little.

Our first jump went fine. Out the door at 3,000 feet, climb on to the strut under the wing of the plane, he'd scream to let go, hands off, we'd drop until we hit the end of the static line which pulled the parachute for us. It was great!

It was so great we went back for another jump. Only this time we got the owner of the place, a quiet, pleasant man in his late 30's. Up the plane went, the door opened, I was first so out the door I went to hang on the stut of the plane under the wing...the guy smiled and nodded at me. I smiled and nodded back. He nodded. I smiled. Then the pilot got into it, yelling something about why didn't I let go? I had missed the jump zone.

So there I am, literally flapping in the breeze under the wing of the plane like a streamer from an air conditioner while they had to vey carefully circle back keeping the plane banked because if he leveled out, the door would swing shut and hit me. Then they had to check the winds by dropping rolls of streamers. Finally the guy smiled at me and yelled "GO!!"

Smiling, I let go.

On my jump card, the instuctor wrote, "nice smile"

Purrs,
Elizabeth

Meeheehee,well I've done plenty of stupid things but i guess the funniest one was when i was a kid. We had a wrought iron fence at the time and one of my favorite things to do was beat on it with a stick..that is until the day my mother noticed that the "stick" i was using was a big ole black snake. Then there was the time my brother dared me to jump off the porch roof and I did, luckily I didn't break anything. Or maybe the time I went fishing and landed my ownself. Word of honor, landed that hook right on the inside of my bottom lip....
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PHTessie

Gee, trying to think of only one stupidest thing I've done isn't easy!

I guess the stupidest thing I did as a kid was when my friend and I were about 10 years old, and my sister was 7. We were alone in our house, while my parents were away. My friend and I decided to start a game of tag or chase with my little sister, and we ran while she chased after us. My friend and I darted out the back door, quickly turning and holding it shut behind us. We assumed that she'd stop or push against the wooden part of the door.

Wrong ... 7-year-old sister came full barrel, bursting straight ahead, arms out, through the glass door window. She pulled back again, and ended up with two 6-inch long gashes down to the bone in her upper arm. Talk about freaking out ... A neighbor heard our screams, and called an ambulance. My parents were a mile away working on our new house at the time, so I ran as fast as I could to go tell them.

Sister had a gazillion stitches and recovered fine, but still has huge scars 35 years later. My parents never blamed my friend and I, but I still felt guilty and stupid for a long time for playing a game of tag in the house.

Snow
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Flying softly on butterfly wings,
they have found the rainbow ...

* Sam * Ted * CindeLu * Darci * Molli *

I think the dumbest thing I ever did was continuing to date a man that my cats didn't approve of.......I should have listened to them, he turned out to be a real loser!

PHKitkat

I think the dumbest thing I ever did was continuing to date a man that my cats didn't approve of.......I should have listened to them, he turned out to be a real loser!

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Amen to that. I would like to retract and change my prevoius answer to the above. I was caught up in that mess for about 3 years...
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Tammy
Stanley and Pookey

Well, gee, there could be a whole long list! Probably the one that could have resulted in a terrible outcome was when I was about 21 (back in the olden days) and went to Juarez with the guy who'd eventually become first husband (another mistake story). Anyway, I agreed to go with him around to some of the blue bars and out of town a ways to some other seamier places, just assuming that since I was a nice, naive girl from the US and he was a strong, athletic guy, I was safe. Actually, we had no problems and it was an enlightening evening but as I've looked back on that night, realized it would have been so very easy for me (or both of us) to disappear with no trace since we were booked into a hotel on the US side and had just crossed the border for a shopping day. Typical instance of youth seeing itself as invincible!