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”

  • gradyp@awful.systems
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    7 months ago

    the garage. I was 6 or 7, my mom was undergoing a major health situation and the medication wasn’t doing her mental processes any favors. One morning she was running late and so asked me to start her car. I’d never started a car in my life, I had no idea what to do and I couldn’t reach the pedals so I asked my younger sibling to help out. I stayed on the floor and operated the pedals, my sibling was in charge of the key.

    mind you, this was a stickshift and it was parked in the driveway, facing the garage door.

    I have no idea what we actually did, I only remember the crashes as we went through the garage door and through the back wall. The front of the car now blocking the alley, we yanked the key ran to hide because we had just taken down a fucking building ruined mom’s new car, and thought we were going to be killed. Of course she instantly realized what happened and knew that she was at fault so when she found us we were of course in no trouble; but man, what a ride that was…

    • Mrs_deWinter@feddit.de
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      7 months ago

      Your mom broke the garage. That was absolutely irresponsible of her, not you, you were trying to help out which is really sweet.

      And I mean what was the goal here anyway? Even when running late the 3 seconds it takes to start a car will hardly make any difference.

      • gradyp@awful.systems
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        7 months ago

        She takes full responsibility but in her defense, the meds she was on really did a number on her, especially as a single mom.

  • Suck_on_my_Presence@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    I’m not sure about “expensive”, but it was priceless.

    My mom had a really gorgeous piece of petrified wood about the size of a cup coaster and as a young kid I was obsessed with it. So one day I broke into her jewelry box where she kept it and stole it to bring to school for show and tell. Everything was fine until I was getting on the bus to go home and I tripped with it in my hand. It shattered like glass and so did my poor little heart.

    I remember crying all the way home where I tearfully confessed to my thievery and apologized up and down to my mom. She honestly wasn’t very angry, and was a lot more understanding than I thought she might be. I don’t remember what happened to the wood afterwards but I don’t remember seeing it ever again so I wonder if she trashed it? It was so beautiful, so that would be a total shame.

  • MIDItheKID@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    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?

  • Skunk@jlai.lu
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    7 months ago

    An arcade center VR headset.

    This was in the 90s or early 2000 when VR was non existent to consumers. During holidays visiting the US we ended up in this arcade center, probably in LA, where they had circled booths with an old FPS VR game that you play standing up. The headset looked like a helmet and was plugged from the top.

    During my game, I turned on myself (360 no scope style) so much and always in the same direction that the cables got tangled and finally broke, probably with a little spark and some electrical sound. Game over.

    As a French preteen, my English was bad and all I remember is the “shiiiiiiit” the worker said when he looked at the headset and cables.

    Sorry buddy 🤷🏻‍♂️

    • MoonMelon@lemmy.ml
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      7 months ago

      Was it this thing? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuality_(product)

      I paid $5 USD as a kid to play this thing at the mall, which was a fortune to me, but I loved stuff like this so much I thought it was worth it. The game was so shitty I couldn’t even tell wtf was going on or what I was supposed to do. Just randomly floating through a sea of polygons until the guy said time was up.

      • Skunk@jlai.lu
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        7 months ago

        Yeah it looked a lot like the first picture in the Wikipedia article.

        I don’t remember the game but I couldn’t understand shit as well nor the graphic style.

  • A1kmm@lemmy.amxl.com
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    7 months ago

    My grandparents had a lot of antiques, some probably which they inherited. My grandfather was particular proud of his clockwork wind-up clock (which was an antique even back then). I disassembled it to find out how it worked, but couldn’t figure out how to reassemble it (and my granddad couldn’t either).

  • ReluctantMuskrat@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    I suspect i might be the winner here. My friend had an alley behind his house along with a nice strip of open land near a busy road. Eventually a strip mall was built and then another large commercial building started to go up. Being basically behind my friends house we walked over to this new building on weekend to check out the construction site.

    The building was being built with cement block and had lots of scaffolding and yet-unused block scattered around. I found a pipe-bender - a very heavy tool made out of high quality steel - and found you could just tap on of these cement blocks and it would shatter to pieces. I was fascinated, as were my friends. I have no idea how many cement blocks we destroyed over the next couple of days, but it was a huge number. Then we decided to see if we could go through a wall with the pipe bender… we could indeed, making a hole in the side of the building we could walk through. Looking around we eventually realized what we’d done was awful… we had decimated this construction site. We finally slinked away and come Monday when the crew returned, police were called and neighbors interrogated but thankfully with privacy fences all around, none of the neighbors saw anything. 11 and 12 yr olds are stupid.

  • johnhamelink@lemmy.ml
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    7 months ago

    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

  • HEXN3T@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    7 months ago

    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.

  • iliketurtles@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    My dumbass was shooting marbles out of my paintball gun. Worked great, but I nailed a few windows on our neighbor’s car!

    • tetris11@lemmy.ml
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      7 months ago

      My ex’s brother released the hand break when he was a kid left alone in the car for 5 minutes. Rolled into the wall of store his parents were buying groceries

      • cosmicrookie@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        I just turned on the car while it was in gear. No clutch or anything. It more or less jumped into the tree and died. I thought i had killed it!

  • Zahille7@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    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.

  • Veticia@lemmy.ml
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    7 months ago

    An electric keyboard imported from outside of soviet block. I was too young and stupid to understand the power brick and conected it directly to mains. A shower of sparks tought me an important lesson about electricity and voltage.

    • MIDItheKID@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Oh man, that reminds me of the time that I was trying to record a demo for my friends band. They had a PA system, and apparently the 1/4 cable that went from the main speaker to the other carried power. I didn’t know this. I plugged it into the sound card on my PC. I’m super lucky that all it did was fry my sound card. It died so fast.

  • froh42@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    When I was a teenager my dad got a beautiful marble chess board. It was leaning on a wall, and when I picked it up it broke into two halves.

    My dad was really sad and angry at me, that board meant quite a deal to him. He always thought I mishandled it, regardless how I said I was careful.

    He died last November.

    I got sent a few boxes with his belongings, and when I opened one of them I found that chessboard. It is glued with epoxy.

    It sits in my apartment now, and I still don’t know if I want to keep it or get rid of it. One one hand it meant a lot to him, on the other hand it is one of the very rare things where I felt treated unfairly.

    • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      7 months ago

      I’d say that you should keep it.

      Except if you have anything of similar value already in posession in which case I can’t argue against or in favor.

  • FireWire400@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    As a kid, I kinda had anger issues and would get frustrated easily. I broke the screen of my GBA SP by throwing it against a wall after not being able to solve a room in Mario vs. Donkey Kong. Similarly, I threw my iPod Touch on the floor after losing in a game called Bad Apples which broke the glass but the iPod itself still worked afterwards.

    I really wish I still had that SP, as replacing the screen isn’t that hard. It even was a limited edition one as well…