A brand new multi thousand dollar video camera that my pops had saved up for. I disassembled it entirely, just trying to figure out how it worked. He wasn’t even mad at me. I grew up and now can fix just about any electronic down to the component level. I like to think he saw the curiosity in me and was more proud than anything.

I also put our phone in a bucket of water. My dad asked me to hold it but I was already carrying a bucket of water so I just put it in the bucket.

I set the majority of my mother’s finest dresses on fire. I was very young. We had a powercut one night so we were using candles. It came back soon after, but i was still a curious boy with a candle in my hand. I wanted to go somewhere dark again so i went inside my closet and closed the door. My mom ran out of space in her room for her dresses so she put them on my closet. Only the stuff she didn’t use often so it had the worst and the best. They were wrapped plastic and i was fascinated by how the plastic shrunk when the flame got close. But eventually I got too close and actually set it on fire. How did i react? Got out, shut the closet doors and went to watch tv. It’s a miracle i didn’t torch my whole house

My sister and I figured out that we could draw. On the windshield of our neighbours car. Using stones.

…

In grade 2 I burnt down a shed causing $2000 damage in the 1970’s. (Around $10,000 in todays money)

I was playing in the shed and decided I wanted to build a fireplace… out of wood. (In my defense it was a type of laminate, so I didn’t know it was wood at the time.)

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.

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 🤷🏻‍♂️

Crashed the family car on my first day driving. Into our house. Our driveway is a mini hill with a turn to get in and then loop to the side with the corner of the house being at the corner. Accelerating up the little hill meant the house jumped in front of the car! As it was my first time driving, the blame was placed. Firmly on dad, as teacher.

Luckily the damage wasn’t too bad to repair, but still the two most expensive things were broken on one day.

My grandparent’s desktop computer. I didn’t break the hardware, but i set the default font size in windows 98 to some ludicrously high value. That made it so large the OS became unusable and the dialog to change it back was also unusable. Probably a quick terminal command would have fixed it within a couple seconds but I wasn’t old enough to understand that and my parents weren’t very tech-savvy.

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

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…

Our barnstable. I burned it accidentally. About half a million damage. Though the new barnstable was an upgrade.

An antique crystal vase my parents received as a wedding gift.
I was maybe in my tweens and bought flowers for some occasion (a birthday or anniversary maybe) and the florist said I should use boiling water to keep them fresh (yes, it is a thing), but obviously I misunderstood, and not knowing any better I added the boiling water directly in to the vase (which I chose because it was my favourite) and of course it exploded in my hand. Lucky I wasn’t hurt, and I did manage to glue some of it back together, but I was not getting away with it. My mother was furious.

Kitchen window. About 2x3 metres if I remember right.

We had a trampoline in our backyard, outside the kitchen so mum could watch us while cooking or whatever. There was a huge hill (our house was in a bit of a mountainous area), and we decided to throw some rocks down the hill and bounce them off the trampoline… but we were uncoordinated 10 year olds so we missed every time. And it was just a bunch of little stones gathering in our backyard.

Then I found one rock. Pretty big, had to lift it with two hands and shot-put it down the hill. That was the one that we finally landed on the trampoline. And it bounced right through the kitchen window.

When I was around 12, I was learning about overclocking, and accidentally killed my dad’s graphic card, an Nvidia FX 5900.

I vividly remember launching The Sims 2 to test my overclock, when suddenly the screen started turning on and off (the video driver was probably crashing and restarting), and after I reset the PC, there were 2 green lines on the screen and XP was stuck in 640x480 16 colors because not even the basic display driver was able to load.

My dad was mad obviously because it was an expensive card, the damage wasn’t covered by the warranty, and he was into gaming too at the time. I was stuck with integrated graphics for about a month while we waited for the geforce 6000 series to come out.

I was so scared of overclocking after this happened, I didn’t try it again until a few years later years later when I had my own computer (and killed another card, a 9800GX2).