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This is a question Bodge Jobs

If you can't fix it with a hammer and a roll of duck tape, it's not worth fixing at all, my old mate said minutes before that nasty business with the hammer and a roll of duck tape. Tell us of McGyver-like repairs and whether they were a brilliant success or a health and safety nightmare.

(, Thu 10 Mar 2011, 11:58)
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Chaos Theory
I think I was about 14 at he time when there was a bit of a mini craze for CB radios in my school, in that I knew about about 5 other people that had them, so I thought I should get one too. The problem was they were quite expensive and I had very little money.
However, fortune shone on me one day when I heard a guy in one of my classes was selling one for £5 or £10, which if I just scrounged cigs behind the bike sheds, rather than buying them, I could probably scrape together in short order

It turns out that he was selling it cheap as he didn’t have the ac adaptor for it, so it sat around in my room while he was supposedly searching for it. I got tired of waiting for him to find it, so in a moment of what can only be desribed as pure genius, I decided to wire it directly to a plug, sans adaptor, figuring that if I didn’t work, or on the slight chance that I blew it up, I could return it, saying it was useless without the adaptor.

You’re probably thinking, I know how this is going to end and/or what a silly twat, but wait, it gets better.

Already resigned to the fact that it wouldn’t work but forging ahead anyway, I figured I’d save myself the very few seconds it would’ve taken me to screw the back of the plug on, because I was only going to have to take it back off again, so I left it off.

I should mention that the power sockets in my room didn’t have switches, so they were always live. So, when the fateful moment came when I pushed the plug into the socket, the palm of my hand touching pretty much everything inside the plug, I was met by a big blue flash, quite a sizeable bang and a pain in my arm never experienced before. I’m not sure how far I was thrown, but given the size of my room, it couldn’t have been far.

The pain, disorientation and the fact that my watch was showing a few minutes later had me convinced I had discovered the secrets of time travel.
Despite this knowledge I never persued quantum physics, worm holes and chaos theory, deciding it was best to leave that to the “other” men in white coats.

I’m pretty sure I havn’t done anything that stupid since, but I’m sure I’ve come close.
(, Fri 11 Mar 2011, 0:08, 2 replies)
I winced
As soon as I read the line "I didn't bother to screw the back of the plug in".
(, Fri 11 Mar 2011, 11:24, closed)
Ken Barlow's first wife
died because she did that.
(, Sat 12 Mar 2011, 14:54, closed)

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