Be Excellent To Each Other

That's a long gestation.

mutters elephants aren't that long then decides against it.

I think the stupidest thing I ever did was when I was filling the car boot with loads of music gear. I wasn't sure if the big amp would fit in the boot so I put it in and slowly brought down the boot lid to see if it was going to dodge the glass or not, of course the boot ended up shutting itself under its own weight pushing the amp right through the back window. What a moron.

Shit yeah, I forgot about getting married too.

i am trying hard to forget!!

My guitarist did this after a gig a few years ago, except he slammed his boot without checking, showering us both with glass.

Age 15, rejected advances of gorgeous little goth-type chick, because I thought I could do better.

Age 18, moved to the UK.

Yeah, Myps, I'm sorry he moved to the UK too.

A few years ago I was working in a rubbish job that provided government support for people wanting to start their own business. One day, me and a couple of other guys were asked to help with some admin work from another team.

Basically, they had about 1000 forms that clients had filled in looking for funding. They’d already been assessed and it had been decided which clients would receive funding and which wouldn’t. All that was left was to input the details on our database so that a report could be generated to our funders who would then pay out the money.

The database we had to work with was very convoluted by all accounts but still, we carried on putting all the details on to each clients account. We even made up a little rhyme so we knew which boxes to tick, which pull downs to select and which order to fill the screens in.

We did all the forms (as well as our normal job) in about 4 days and when we checked, we had inputted all the details 100% correct.

A job well done.

A couple of weeks later we overheard the bosses arguing and getting quite angry. It turns out that even though we’d got all the details right, we’d mixed up 2 of the tick boxes. This meant that all the people that had had their funding declined, were paid it and all those that had been approved, had letters saying they weren’t successful. 100% failure rate on our work.. amazing.

+1

I've done a few things in my time, but there is one that I rip my dad for every few years.

When my mum was a teenager her best mate’s dad ran a paper in Liverpool. As such she met a few bands in the 60's including the Beatles and the Hollies.

She had a couple of posters signed by all 4 Beatles and some singles that were signed as well. At the time we lived on a farm, it was a hobby for my dad as he had a day job.

He used the posters to line chicken cages so that he could clean them and chucked out the singles with a lot of other stuff from the same era in fit of spring cleaning.

I reckon he threw out £20,000 worth of stuff as it was all mint, although prices vary. I certainly remember Chris Evens paying £15,000 for a Beatles posters signed by all 4 members and boasting about on TFI Friday in the late 90's

Couple of mine, one of which I think I've mentioned before...

1) Working alone on a twilight shift in IT and I'm trying to copy the main product file (this was at THE who used to supply lots of retailers with books, CDs etc so the file was pretty hefty) and its index away to do some work on it. Unfortunately I cocked up the command and overwrote the index with the dat file. I might have got away with it if the warehouse staff weren't all busy working away. Within 30 seconds of my mistake, the phone started going nuts - I'd pretty much taken the whole warehouse system down.

2) A much simpler case of not looking where I was going.. Out for a drink with a girlfriend one evening. It was pretty dark so I hadn't seen the plastic strapping on the floor (the kind you bundle newspapers with - I forget if there's a proper name for it). I'd put one foot in it and then caught the end with my other foot, sending me falling straight forward. As I'd got my hands in my coat pockets, I couldn't break my fall in time. My girlfriend helped me up, checked I was ok, and then laughed at me for pretty much the duration of the evening.

Being trusting enough to join a startup and ended up getting ripped off for a five figure sum. Still, I console myself with the fact that the idea was still solid, but the guy running it was too much of an idiot to make a success of it.

Asking a bloke at a comedy industry get together whether the Mel and Sue/Trading Places story was actually true and not knowing he was their agent was a good career move.

During a gig, getting my words mixed up and an adlibbed joke coming out racist... at the Comedy Store... in front of the owner and Stephen K Amos was another.

And sending me your home address.

Nice bathroom, btw.

Naturally we must now know the nature of this joke.

Stephen K Amos told a racist joke too?

It was racist in nature.

Naturist.

Shocker.

I want to know the mel and sue story.

I googled it, and the top result was for Plissken mentioning it last time!

Thought I had mentioned that in a similar thread before.

The Mel and Sue thing is that their entire career is the result of a Trading Places style bet between a couple of agents - "I'll take the shittest comedy act at the Fringe and make them famous".

The ad-lib was supposed to be "George W Bush bombing the shit out of a country of what he thinks of as little brown people who he doesn't care about" and came out something like "George W Bush bombing the shit out of little brown people he doesn't care about". Except I also stumbled as I realise I'd fucked up,and the "he" was a bit muffled and easily misconstrued as "we".

If not true, it's certainly highly believable.

It's only their unbelievable good looks that got them where they are.

Has Craster repeated his grenade epiphany here yet...

Not yet.

It was a question. There are no stupid questions.

Why your face?

Actually, there is a stupid question.

"Does your mum?"

Because the answer in your case is always yes.

...hate ginger grenade mongs?

Yes, yes she does.

And that makes the sex better.

I was hanging about with a mate's band a few years ago when they did small gigs in local pubs, there were a few metal bands around at that time and occasionally they would share equipment. So one guy in another band had bought this hyper-fancy amp with all knobs and switches and stuff, about three feet high and im sure it was a good few grand and he agreed to lend it to us...

Just before the doors opened, we were setting up and got round to plugging this amp in. Now im pretty sure I said something like "how hard can it be?" then started plugging likely looking wires into holes where it looked like they went. I confidently switched it on. It went Pffffffffffffffff then there was a loud click noise and a funny smell. Technically speaking we had Fucked It, the owner turned up looking very upset and proceeded to remove it from the venue through the same door that (drunk) people were coming in. The back up amp was about 4 inches square so the whole night was basically just one long drum solo with a shouty bit now and then.

I still feel horrible just thinking about it!

I'm not sure what the stupidest is, but I'm a colossally clumsy person, despite being generally well coordinated. A few years ago, I poured a kettle of boiling water all over my left hand, owing to extreme head-in-clouds absent-mindedness. The top layer of skin was removed entirely, and it took about six months to heal properly. It was also difficult to keep clean, because washing would usually slough off new skin and expose everything again. Bizarrely, though, there's no scarring! You'd think nothing had ever happened to it.

Also, I managed to smash a very heavy sink off a wall whilst brushing my teeth, after my brain seemingly forgot that my physical form includes a pair of fully-functioning legs. The heels of my palms crashed down onto it in a bewildered attempt to keep me upright, cracking the ridiculously large, almost cuboid basin in two, but not before my entire lower body had swung underneath it, my stomach apparently more than happy to receive the full weight of both halves. I would have flooded the place if it wasn't for those cool flexible pipes. The landlady never got around to making me pay for the replacement, either.

Back in my full-bore gambling days I went out one evening after work and got completely hammered around the local pubs, lost all my money over the course of several hours, and got back home in a really, really foul mood. (We're going back to about the year 2000 I would say.)

Upon my return it quickly became apparent that me and Mrs AE weren't going to have any sort of constructive conversation about the evening's events, so in my 'elevated state of emotion' I decided to take out my frustrations on my car, which I proceeded to smash up with a rock, putting through all the windows and cutting myself quite badly in the process.

However, I reached the conclusion that the grim tableau could still be improved upon, so I took out my mobile phone (an early Nokia jobby) and called 999 to report myself, but I did so in the third person. ('There's someone smashing up a car down Auckland Terrace'. The woman asked me for my name and I told her my real name......)

Since there's not much in the way of crime around here, the police were there in no time at all, by which point I was cheerfully jumping up and down on the roof of my car and laying down a fresh sort of Tarzan jungle beat.

Now in all fairness to the police they could (and probably should) have just clubbed me to the ground and chucked me in the back of the van, but instead they engaged me in conversation to try and ascertain what was going on, one of them asked me my name and I gave them the exact same name as the person who had just reported the crime in progress, which gave them some pause for thought and I suspect a kind of 'Oops we got a crazy here' sort of vibe.

Whilst this was going on my in-laws arrived (I'd rate their overall dissatisfaction with me as a pretty solid 10 at this point) and they attempted to enter the negotiations, however I wasn't really in the mood for it so started hitting my car again, which caused one of the police officers to tell me that if I continued to do so I'd be arrested. (I believe my witty retort was along the lines of it was my car on private property so I could smash it up if I wanted to.)

My stupidity knowing no bounds at this point, I then ran over to the police van and started banging my hands against the sides of it whilst yelling 'WHAT DO I HAVE TO DO TO GET ARRESTED?', the police Sergeant came over (a PC and a Sergeant were in attendance), suppressed me somewhat firmly and growled in my ear 'Five more seconds of this and you're in the nick'.

Even in my fucked state I realised I didn't want to get arrested and most likely end up with a criminal record, so I calmed down and thus was released by the Sergeant, at which point I ran off as fast as my legs would carry me, out to the beach and to the end of the stone pier. Thought about chucking myself into the sea for quite some time, but decided against it, and went home - to start the long process of getting better.

Needless to say I had lots of bridges to build with Mrs AE and the in-laws upon my chastened return.

So yeah, pretty stupid.

However, being the anal archivist that I am, I still have the pics that I went out into the back yard and took of the car the next day, before the tow-truck removed it to the scrap yard.

I found that documenting things had a handy way of making them seem less real.

That, of course, is a really good thing, and if this was some sort of trigger for that, then maybe it needed to be done, I dunno.


However...



Yeah, a bit

Err, right then.

Noo! You kilt the chavalier!

I still feel bad about killing that car (less than I feel bad about the rest of the evening, of course, since it's just a car, but even so).....

I bought it for £50 off a mate who was going to scrap it about 18 months earlier, and got solid use out of it without a single penny being spent apart from fuel, a new battery, and lots of cheap oil since it had a pretty bad leak on it (hence the empty oil cartons in the boot in one of those pics). But beyond that, I put around 15000 miles on it and not one single thing went wrong with it.

It just worked, it was a bit crap, an automatic 1.6L with three (!) gears, but you could do that old 1-2-D thing so could properly rev the nuts out of it in 2nd before popping it into D whereby it would gratefully gasp up into third.

In keeping with my quasi-suicidal tendencies of the time I of course had no licence, the car had no tax or insurance, and it was quite the most illegal bag of bolts you could ever have envisaged - but somehow the two of us survived 18 months without incident until I smashed the poor thing up with a rock

Nice work, but you've got to get the wheels off too for a "perfect".

I am surprised you can so easily admit to that. No tax or insurance? Whatever your mental issues were at the time, that's fucking disgraceful.

That's ambitious.

Addiction is a fairly consuming and disgraceful state of mind, it's capable of leading oneself to some very dark places.

With the benefit of hindsight I'm painfully aware that my behaviour at that time could have had horrendous consequences, but it didn't come to pass, and for that I think myself somewhat lucky.

This thread is titled 'the stupidest thing you've ever done' - that phase of my life, the culmination of which I've briefly described, represents the stupidest thing I've ever done, it was a couple of years of incredibly stupid and self-destructive behaviour that I mostly got away with by sheer fluke.

The person I am now can see that it was indeed 'fucking disgraceful', the person I was then, much less so.

But if it's given me the power to do one thing, it's to understand more and judge less, and in that regard, it's made me a better human being.

It was pretty awful, AE, but really good to hear that your life is better and that you have made yourself a better person both for yourself and those that love you.

Mm, good reply 'Tross.

I preferred Yogs...

Seriously though, that does sound somewhat horrendous but it's good that you've come through the other side.

Hello!
Talking to an old school friend last night, I was reminded of by far the stupidest thing I've ever done.

It's quite the tale, though, so ask me at the BB2, otherwise I'll write it here on Monday.

No! Make it BB2 exclusive DLC!