What's a bright idea you've had which turned out not so hot after all?

First thing that comes to mind was December of 2012.

There was a NY style pizza place that actually made really good pizza in the same plaza as the office where I worked. They were doing some Facebook promotion and if they got 1000 likes by Friday, then on Tuesday (their slowest day) they’d give a free medium one-topping to anyone who was on the “likes” list that came in to pick one up.

Eleven people working in my office at the time. Eight of us brought in medium pizzas for lunch. After the lactose intolerant and the “I’m on a diet” crowd donated and walked away, eight medium pizzas were split between five of us. They did not survive the afternoon.

That night I ended up in the hospital with gallstones. Oops.

Those diet bastards should have contributed. Weaklings. Seriously though that must have sucked.

Getting married

I thought it would be nice to shag an old girlfriend’s sister while I was still dating her, turns out she has a bit of a temper. Confronted me at her parents house, threw her slippers at me & pushed me into the kitchen, ranting abuse as she went.
I had no choice but to place her head in the sink & turn the tap on, I then chose to run away like a cowardly bastard.
Live by the sword, die by the sword :(

@ucme Well…it’s a code of honor. XD

@Symbeline Haha, I would like to point out that this was done strictly in self defence & I in no way condone domestic violence against females.
You must understand though that my life was in grave danger, or at least my sight, those slippers were the fwuffy bunny kind & the ears nearly took my eye out :D

Hey man I ain’t arguing with no bunny slippers yo. :)

I wish I was joking about that incident, coz it looks so bad written down, I feel shame.
Although to be fair I was young, dumb & full of cum :D

My best fluther Q’s always get modd-ed. All that wasted thought. All those wasted keystrokes. All that… wait… what was I talking about?

Sometimes I come up with a good question/answer here, but it turns out to be crap.

Well, maybe this answer will be one too now ~

In my defense…I was fourteen.

It was an icy day in the middle of winter. Three friends and I went out to walk my Labrador – Nerina – who was, at that point, barely an adult. We headed to a nearby river. The river is not particularly dangerous…unless you happen to swim out too far. There are strong currents in the middle, but both people and dogs swim in the shallow parts in the summer. Not on that day – it was, as mentioned, icy cold. Cold enough that the edges of the river were frozen solid.

For reasons unclear to me, I thought it would be a good idea for Nerina to walk out on the ice. I did consider the possibility of her falling in, but simply assumed she would swim to the shore, as she usually did in the summer.

Kudos to the dog – despite my urging, she didn’t get on the ice. She just stared at me. Finally, being unbelievably dumb, I tossed some kibble onto the frozen river. Typical Labrador, Nerina was happy to do everything to get to these treats. She trotted out onto the ice, sniffed around for the kibble – and then, there was a crack, as the dog disappeared in the water. My friends and I were mildly worried, thinking that the water must be chilly…so we called to her. This was totally unnecessary – already, Nerina was scrambling to get out of there. To no avail. Slippery ice and deep water are not a good combination.

Well, we were finally saved by a brave man, who approached Nerina, crawling on his belly. The man coaxed her, and she leapt out somehow. She had been in the water for about ten minutes at that point.

We rushed home, covered the dog in blankets and hot-water-bottles, and cuddled her for ages. I couldn’t stop crying for ages. She was unharmed but…a stupid idea, for sure.

I performed the word’s first scab transplant. I used myself as the subject. (Ex skate rat).

I submitted my findings to JAMA.

They didn’t publish.

I once thought that climbing around on the balkony would be fun.
Then I slipped and almost crushed my wind pipe when I fell on the clothesline.

Applying for, and getting a job at the Family Dollar. I thought it would be an easy job and it was close to where I lived. I couldn’t have been more wrong. It was hell. 10 hour days, crap pay, terrible customers and the worst boss you could imagine. Having to stock shelves and wait on customers. We had a busy store so I would have to keep running back and forth from stocking to register and the terrible boss would do nothing to help. She never went on a register, would go outside with the phone and smoke as soon as I got a line. Would have to wait 6 to 7 hours before I could take my only break. Hated that miserable place. It’s a mistake I will never repeat.

@ragingloli *balcony.
I hope you’re ashamed.

Balkkkony.

This is @ragingloli after all.

While at a restaurant talking about sugar addiction, I opened a small packet of sugar on the table, chopped it up like cocaine, and snorted it (for the laugh). It really tore up my sinuses.

^ That is the best goddamn thing I’ve heard in a long time. I would have paid to see that. LOL!

^^ The difference between granules and sweet sweet powder.

It seemed like a really good idea at the time I’m still waiting for the one that really works.

Ordering frozen margaritas in Mexico. Who would have thought the ice was made from the water? Three days of being in a Mexican hospital later, I was flown home so drugged I have no memory, apparently puking profusely the whole way.

Also, betting it all on red to quickly double my money.

Trying to get along and form a nice relationship with my future in-laws. I achieved nothing except issuing a Let’s-Bully-Lori invitation.

This is going to make me sound like a graduate of the Bergen Belsen School of Business, but here goes:

When I was about nine, I had a friend who’s grandfather raised chinchillas. We would visit the farm and I would think what an easy, fun way to make money. The man told me that it was very expensive to buy the first pair and then feed all the succeeding chinchillas until they were mature enough to skin. So, I figured that I could start with rabbits and knew where I could get a couple. Their pelts were soft, so people might want to buy them, and they multiplied even faster than chinchillas. But feeding them would be a problem. So, I needed to raise an animal with soft fur that would be cheap to feed.

Cats. Cats and rats. Cats eat rats and rats will eat anything, including cats.

So, I thought I’d come up with the perfect perpetual income stream at the age of nine. I would go out and catch a bunch of cats and trap a bunch of rats, put them in cages that I would build myself, raise the cats on the rats until they were ready for skinning, then feed the cat carcasses to the rats. This wouldn’t cost me a penny. Great!

And that’s where it ended. I took one look at Old Snowball, our seven year-old white Persian, and all thoughts of becoming a millionaire at ten evaporated. No way. long after I’d dropped the idea, I told my big brother about it. Dude just backed away. I mean, I never actually did anything. It was just an idea. But years later when we worked on the railroad together, he reminded me of it. He said I was the strangest little brother anyone could ever have. He really worried about me sometimes.

I married a woman I should have just kept dating. Ugh!

Back in 2006–7 when I was landscaping the ‘Goose Corral” for my birds.
They had a big, shady Oak tree over their barn but I wanted to create a super cool habitat for them. I planted bamboos and smoke trees, filled in the sloping hillside below their swimming pools with Irish moss and had all sorts of cool potted plants surrounding their split level pool zone. I then had the bright idea of laying sod to create a little lawn area for them for the days they could not come out to hang on my big lawn.

I prepped an area about 8×8 and layed sod.
Everything looked great for about 2 weeks then the geese began to tear up the sod and within weeks it was down to the netting. So much for that idea. Worked my ass off, all for naught. lol

@Espiritus_Corvus – I think I love you.

I had just seen the movie Vanishing Point and owned a similar car – a Barracuda. The movie inspired me to start thinking of riskier driving moves.
At the time I worked at a McDonalds that was located near a shopping plaza. The Plaza’s parking lot was about 2 ft lower than the McD lot and was separated by a fence. Someone (not me) had cut a large hole in the chain link fence so there was a shortcut to the plaza. Trash and refuse was piled along the edge for about 15 ft past the fence. I figured if I made the hole wider and went fast enough, I could fly over the trash
Using high school physics I figured s= ½ a*t^2 for the flight time and D=RT for the distance and decided if I accelerated to 40 mph and shot through the fence I would fly for 21 ft, comfortably clearing the piles of junk . What could go wrong? They did it in the movie. Right?
In view of my coworkers, I got back across the lot, accelerated, got up to speed, zipped through the fence, cleared the junk and promptly landed on the front two wheels which bent the front end parts leaving me stranded in the lot. Doh!

Ummmm… Hello. AAA Emergency Road Service?

What is the idea which you thought would be cool but was actually crap? Marriage: 50%

@Pachy or married a man?

Pet waste (dog poop) clean-up service as a business. Looked like a boon, wasn’t. Could be if you are selling franchises for such!

Side note: “Unharmed”, of course, refers only to physical harm. It’s been nine years, and that dog still doesn’t trust my judgement where water is concerned:

Whenever I go for a swim, she is right by my side, whining and scratching to herd me back to the shore. If I dare to dive, she grabs a mouthful of hair and pulls me back up. It’s comforting to know that, in the event of sudden unconsciousness, she’d try to save me. My hair would be ruined, though… ~

@longgone Wow…lucky you and lucky dog. I had an experience years ago, riding my horse around a lake with a low water line and she sank in the mud up to her shoulder. I was all alone in the middle of nowhere, to make a long story short after much thrashing and exhaustion a guy on a boat helped me pull her out. So. Damn. SCARY!

Wow haha, thanks for all the stories you guys. Very interesting…some a bit freaky. and yeah lol @getting married. XD

Oh, I just thought of another one. The time I thought that burning through a heavy nylon rope would be easier than trying to cut it with the crappy scissors I had. A big, molten blob of plastic rope fell on my shin bone. OMG!

I still have a crater in my shin bone from that brilliant little Lucy moment. lol
It hurt SO bad…just sizzling a hole into my leg.

And then there was a time where I tried to literally smoke a chocolate cigarette.

A buddy and I tried smoking some nutmeg in high school. We had heard that it gave you a hallucinatory high.

It does not.

When I was a kid few friends and I stole a few parking meters and tried to sell them to a scrap metal dealer, as it turned out the scrap dealer was a under cover cop.

@Blondesjon Haha I saw something like that in a movie called Idle Hands where some guy smokes nutmeg by accident and gets all sick after.

Eating the nutmeg will. But it’s hard as hell to swallow and the headache afterward is NOT worth it. Just get some ‘shrooms.

@Symbeline . . . Great movie. I wish it would have come in ‘86 so I could have saved myself from an incredibly horrible night.

@LuckyGuy: That was hilarious. I laughed out loud!

@antimatter: Wow! What happened after that?

I have to think of something. I am sure there is at least one thing I did that I will remember.

@Espiritus_Corvus, you scoundrel, you made me pee! I laughed so hard at your scheme, my eyes watered, and so did I. I must say, you are certainly a think outside of the box kind of guy.

When I was a kid, I looked down a flight of stairs and thought it would be much faster to just take a big jump and land at the bottom. It seemed logical in my head. When I did jump, I smacked my head into the ceiling of the lower floor, landed on the middle of the staircase and fell down the rest of the stairs.

^ Ow.

Sneaking down to the pond with my little brother. We thought we were on an adventure. We went to the spill tube, which, during very rainy times could suck a cow rapidly down the twenty foot drop to a creek below. On this day things were calm, so far. We saw a wood tool handle sticking out of the water. It was broken. We decided pirates had buried treasure there, broke the shovel, and left it, then rains came and filled the pond higher, so their dig site was submerged slightly. We gripped the short handle together, and lifted at an angle, to begin the dig. What we came up with was a pitchfork with water grasses and at least seven snakes woven in the tines! My dad had this expression, “Shittin’ and a gettin’.” On that day I understood what it meant, because both me and my brother did just that. I NEVER saw that broken wood handle again.

@Espiritus_Corvus

At least conventional wisdom tell us you have many options in the cat skinning department.

Had to do one year community service, I was still a minor back than. Another good thing about small country towns everybody were fishing buddies…

I still remember the day this happened. In my twenties my mom insisted that no way could I remember when I was three, but I swear I still remember that day. That was a bad, bad day.

Then there was this

And this

Oh, how could I forget this. Warning: Tragic story to follow.

Sooo…when my daughter was about 5 we got a little baby pet rat and named her “Hazel.”
I had pet rats before and adored them so was excited to get one for my daughter.
Poor little Hazel had the ratty sniffles, so I had this brilliant idea to pour some boiling water in a bowl and put it on the bottom shelf of the microwave with Hazel on a towel on the top rack and close the door, not all the way, but closed with a crack to keep the steam in.
I calculated that she would sit on the towel above the boiling water and inhale the steam for her rat cold.

This SHOULD have worked just fine, but, something called me out of the kitchen and the microwave door swung open after I let go of keeping it mostly closed. Yes..you guessed it. :-(
Poor little thing jumped/fell off the towel on the top rack right into the steaming bowl of water. It was baaad!

She pretty much died instantly and my daughter was banging on the front door that I ran and locked, when I realized Hazel was a goner. I ran to the door with the poor rat steam rising off her body in the towel and told my daughter to wait just a minute. I had to break the news to her later that Hazel died. Worst. Thing. Ever.