I destroyed the World Trade Centre.
I think I should win the compo
(Hulk Hogan Champion of belt title match "King of QOTW", Thu 8 Nov 2012, 13:46, 1 reply)

We're rockstars right?
So we find ourselves, a bit drunk, with an old tv. We gotta smash this thing up right?
"we totally have to throw it out a window!"
Now, when I say an old TV, it was a large early widescreen, I forget the size, but it wasn't your fancy flat screen, it weighed a ton. So we drag it up the stairs, open the window, and quickly realise there is no way this tv is fitting out of that window.
"fuck, alright, well, we must have a hammer somewhere."
Cue long search for any sort of blunt instrument to kill this TV. We find, in the bottom of a cupboard, a lump hammer. Perfect. Right, step one, smash the screen. Pow. Bang. Pop. Perfect, quite a satisfying moment.
Step 2, DECIMATE.
Hammer raised high, Dan brings the weighty head down in a strong arc and connects solidly with the well moulded Japanese (i think) plastic. Pang, thud...and then the world seems to stop, he's let go of the hammer, it spins effortlessly in the air, straight towards me, and cracks me right between the eyes. Making a fucking good mess of my nose, and a small dent in the TV.
Rock and roll destruction 0, TV plastic 1.
( Windy Pig I'm naturally quite suspicious about the moon., Tue 13 Nov 2012, 2:15, 2 replies)

Slightly embellished tale of love nest destruction
In the part of the world where I grew up, it had across the road a large bushland reserve. This reserve had never been developed or part of an ancient civilizations development plans or anything like and so other than being completely natural had, no defining features.

But, for a kid, it was paradise. Bush and tree’s and waterholes and lizards and snakes and spiders but, most importantly it had caves. Some were just over hangs and rather exposed but, if you knew where to look there was a couple that had the full darkness, hard to access appeal. One in particular had a very small low entrance and at the back and high in the cave roof, where the stone had split a gap about a hand span wide and 30cm long. It worked like a small skylight when you where in the cave.

Also in our street we had the resident bully, Chris. He was the stereotypical bully, a few years older than his victims, not that bright, no mates his own age due to him being a complete dick and a coward with capacity for nothing more than inflicting pain and torture on things smaller than him. One of his favourite tricks was to pin a small kids arms back, kick their legs out from under them and then let go, so that you would land chin first and bight your tongue (I still have a tongue scar from this one). He loved to tease dogs, kick kittens, and pull the wings off cicadas. All the good stuff that goes into making a high calibre bully.

(Tales of when he stopped growing at 5ft 9 and had the physique of someone who did no exercise or sport with a love of cream cakes and beer and I grew to 6ft 4 played a lot of sport and more importantly was considering the purchase of a Honda Accord for another time).

When Chris reached his teenage years, he discovered girls but, being the dick he was, he only really hooked up with the girls no one else wanted anything to do with. You know the sort, 13 years old boob tube wearing, smoking, foul mouthed, 40kg overweight, tonnes of badly applied make up covering the meat lovers pizza that was their complexion.

What Chris did work out was that these type of girls generally have very low self esteem and are quite open to manipulation and suggestion and as they are morally quite deficient, they usually have very few limits and for those with limits, a little forced action and reminding them that no one else would have them and they should appreciate the attention OR ELSE, dealt with the complaints.

Chris was quite open about this with the younger kids and seeing him and one of the swamp donkeys he hung about with coming out of the bushes you knew you were going to be put in a head lock and have his fingers shoved in front of you face, while he encouraged you to “smell me fingers, smell me fingers, smell me fingers, you know what that is? It’s cunt! You will never smell it cause you’re a fag”. His partners in seafood saucing his hands never seemed to mind when he did this in front of them, in fact they found it quite funny. One of his girls, Michelle, took offence when one of the younger girls in the street (probably 9 at the time) claimed she couldn’t smell anything and while Chris held her arms behind her back Michelle held her face up against her manky minge and ground her crutch against nose and mouth while shouting, “Can you smell it now you cunt, can you smell it now?”

Chris and Michelle’s relationship flowered and they became girlfriend and boyfriend in an exclusive relationship. It was not long after this that the fun began. It was common knowledge that most afternoons, Chris would take Michelle into the small cave with the small entrance and natural skylight and give her what she deserved. We know he was doing this from the way he would seduce Michelle, usually along the lines of “fuck these kids” (that was us) “let’s go up the cave and have a root”.

When, my mate Adam returned from a holiday in France, during which he and his older brother had accidently packed into their luggage a bunch of French fire crackers, named, “Quarter Stick of Dynamite” that a plan was hatched. For those who have not encountered this prince of fireworks, it is essentially, a red tube, packed with exploding stuff, that has one effect when detonated, it goes bang really fucking loud.

And so it was, one warm spring afternoon, that as soon as Chris made his romantic overtures to his beloved and they disappeared into the scrub, that we swung into action. Firstly, four of the crackers and a cigarette lighter where gathered up and then Adam, myself, Dana (girl subjected crotch in face grinding) and a couple of the other kids made our way the long way to the area outside the cave where the skylight hole was. We knew we had a small amount of time from our previous recognisance (aka perving) that for the first 10 or so minutes, they did the impression of two pale overweight octopuses wrestling as they pawed at each other’s flabby bits followed by a quick act of sex.

We arrived at the skylight at just the right time and could hear the two of them grunting away like a couple of pigs who had found a fresh mud hole. A quick whispered conversation and it was agreed to light all four bungers at once and drop them through the hole to the back of the cave.

Adam held the crackers in a bunch, while I sparked them up and then (which I though incredibly brave) held them for a few seconds to let the wicks burn down, then deposited them through the skylight hole.
As they bounced off the back wall and on to the cave floor, I hear Chris ask, “what the fuck was that” followed by 4 extremely loud explosions (loud outside the cave). What we had neglected in the planning of the revenge prank was the copious amounts of smoke these type of crackers generate when they explode, being that mostly they are used outside and one at a time.

The skylight began to billow smoke like someone was burning green branches on a coal fire, the entrance to the cave looked like Puff the Magic Dragon was about to crawl out and there was screams and shouts and swearing coming from inside the cave. First Chris, then Michelle, crawled out of the opening into the light and stood, gasping for air, squinting into the light, looking a little shell shocked, totally nude with Chris’s rapidly reducing love flute glistening in the afternoon sun. The sound of us pissing ourselves with laughter above them, gave us away, and although they yelled threats of violence and murder at us, they stood there covering the less than enticing genitalia roughly attached to their pudgy bodies.

We made a clean get away that afternoon but, it did result in Adam and I having to remain on permanent alert for Chris and Michelle’s presence for the next few years and making ourselves scarce should they appear. Failing to notice them, particularly Chris, resulted in many punches to the arms and guts but, who didn’t get pleasure from wailing on 11 year olds when you where 15, so we sort of understood.

There are many more takes of dealing with Chris but, unexpectedly he didn’t grow up to go to gaol and wasn’t murdered by an army of wingless cicadas. After an uninspiring 18 month career as a pool cleaner, he retired permanently to his parents home, where as far as I know, he still resides today.

Length? Just less than 4 1/2 glistening inches.
(bad_advice QOTW survivor from the first trollocost!, Tue 13 Nov 2012, 0:02, 20 replies)

Have a marrowfat pearoast
One morning our headmaster interrupts his normal assembly address to ask for volunteers. Myself and a couple of chums slung up our arms, and were duly chosen for a special task - smashing up the sixth-form pool table, which was being replaced.

Given a selection of hammers and axes, we were told that we could do as we pleased, provided that the valuable slate came off in one piece. We merrily chopped, hacked, stomped, splintered, crunched and smashed our way through the next two school periods until we were left with a pile of woody bits, the coin mechanism (which I took home as a trophy) and the pool balls. The school groundsman came and set light to our pile of achievement, congratulated us (swore), and sauntered off.

Now, given that this great big blaze was on the same day as PE, half-empty deoderant cans were lobbed on the fire as soon as the groundsman turned his back. We were treated to a rippling CRACKcrackCRACKCRACKcrack as they went off in quick succession - broad grins were exchanged. We eyed the faux-ivory pool balls.

On the fire they went.

As we legged it to the safety of a hedge, we spotted the school badboi (innit) saunter up and add his deoderant can to the pile. He must have got the shock of his life – instead of one measly 'crack', he was treated to a juddering calamity of explosions as several of the plastic balls went at once. The other balls went off shortly after - neatly drowning out the headmaster's vitriolic ravings as he raced up to Mr Badboi and accused him of trying to level the school.

This was fun for, ooh, all of thirty seconds, before I discovered that my warm glow of satisfaction was, in fact, a slightly on-fire jumper.
(SimianKid internet faffer, Thu 8 Nov 2012, 17:25, 1 reply)

My old school had a piano they wanted rid of
But they were too tight to pay for someone to take it away. One afternoon they rounded up some of the bigger students and herded them into the room with the piano.

"Now then lads, for legal reasons we can't actually ask you to destroy this piano. Back in five minutes."


Matchwood.
( MatJ LOOK, Thu 8 Nov 2012, 14:31, Reply)

Death of a shed. SHED!
My ex Brother-in-law bought a house on a steep slope

It had previously belonged to some old dear who had obviously run out of the energy, time, or money to maintain the garden, which was south facing and potentially gorgeous but was badly overgrown and untended.

We had a working party one weekend to clear a lot of shite but on one side was a SHED. Quite a nice one at one point, I expect. It had a little sun patio on the front but it was badly rotten. SHED had to go.

We all praise SHEDS - they've become a significant part of QOTW legend even if most of the regular contributors or iconoclasts can only aspire to one, but let me tell you about the death of a SHED.

It had to go. If it was a pet we'd have taken it to the vet. If it was our granny we'd have got a one way Easy-Jet ticket to Zurich and checked the will, or booked her into a care home in Bristol.

How do you put a SHED out of it's misery? But quickly,like? Demolishing it bit by bit would have been good but time consuming and, for the shed, undignified. The old way might have been a gallon of petrol but that wasn't really a practical option but petrol and fuel and chin scratching and...DIESEL!

I had a Diesel Citroen ZX at the time. Say what you wish about Citroens but it'd pull a thick elephant backwards out of a swamp. So we attached a rope to the shed, and attached the other end to my car.

Sorry if you've read this far and expected a link. Just go back as far as you can and imagine the spectacle of a car at high revs, wheels spinning, and a huge lurch as the car took up off the drive with bits of shed collapsing onto it.

The moral of this story is - car pulls shed down. But we enjoyed it.

EDIT - for the AB archive - man tells dull anecdote about tying car to shed but man enjoyed relating the memory.
( The Disappointed Caravanner of the year, Thu 8 Nov 2012, 20:42, 4 replies)

The Chicken Ranch
A few years back I had the job of demolishing a 60 foot mobile home on a hobby farm in Trail BC, using a Bobcat 331 mini excavator. The homeowner had been living in it for several years while building his house on another part of the property. When the house was done they just walked away from the trailer and turned it over to the livestock. They blocked off the living room and made it part of the hog run, leaving the curtains, pictures on the wall, all the furniture, cupboards full of dishes & clothes and a stand up piano for the hogs to entertain themselves with. The rest of the trailer was turned into a chicken coup. Fast forward 9 years...

I arrive on site to find 6 300 lb. hogs, 8 Goats, half a dozen dogs, geese, ducks and bunnies running around the yard. Oh yeah there were two horses in the back, all on a 3/4 acre plot. The neighbors had circulated a petition to demolish the trailer because it stank so badly in the summer. I was taken on a tour of the building starting in the kitchen, which was also the entrance for the chickens. As we moved down the hallway, closer to the master bedroom at the sunny end of the trailer, the accumulated chicken shit got deeper and deeper until the door handles were covered up. Four feet deep. Gnarly.

Back in my machine, I started peeling the outer skin off the trailer on the master bed end. once the walls were off there was a vertical column of dried chicken poo which reeked of ammonia. In this column was embedded chests of drawers still full of photo albums, socks and underwear. I had to wear a dust mask smeared with Tiger Balm to counteract the stench. The only way to get the shit out at this time was to close all the windows on the hoe and pull the whole stinking mess down into my lap. Once cleared, there appeared an orange shag carpet covering the floor which was in surprisingly good shape, probably because of the anaerobic environment under shit mountain. Looked like I could have just given it a rub with the vacuum and it was good as new.

The rest of the trailer was embedded in about two feet of pig shit laced with loading pallets and bailing twine which Farmer Bob had been using as fencing. When part of the fence would fall down he'd just stand up another pallet. Two weeks of wallowing in slime later and I had managed to demolish and burn the structure and most of it's contents.

I've never been back...
(gdtredmtn, Tue 13 Nov 2012, 1:08, 1 reply)

The perfect crime!
In 1987, my brother and I discovered that a certain type of weed killer was extremely flammable. So we tried mixing it with sugar but didn’t get the results we were hoping for. Two days and many a singed finger later I had a better idea , we dissolved the weed killer in water, dipped cotton wool in it and let it dry. We lit it and it went up with a very pleasing FWOOSH! We were pleased!
So, the next thing we did was cut down an old steel hoover tube and fill it with as much of the cotton wool as possible. After ramming a lump or wood in each end and inserting a homemade fuse we were good to go and off to the greenhouse we went. We lit the fuse and ran for it, there was a little smoke but that was it. Back we went and tried again… and again… and again… so giving up on the fuse idea we lit a tiny fire in the greenhouse and placed the HooverBomb© on top.
With fuck all warning, there was an almighty bang (I’m assuming that there was a bang, all I heard was “BA-eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee” and continued to hear that high pitched noise for two days!) My Brother and I then had to rapidly escape a greenhouse full of smoke whilst we were completely disorientated. The smoke cleared surprisingly quickly, this was due to the newly created 2 foot hole in the roof.
My dad ran into the garden shouting “WHAT THE FUCKING HELL HAVE YOU TWO DONE NOW???” at the top of his lungs This is where my brother the criminal genius attempted to shine. “Deny everything” He said.
This might have worked if we hadn’t been stumbling round the garden, singed and stunned and had come up with a better answer than a shaky “Err.. Nuffin!”
How I survived to the grand old age of 40 is a complete mystery!
( JamHamster My eyes, my beautiful eyes!, Thu 8 Nov 2012, 23:17, 2 replies)

Sledgehammer: Man versus MEGASHED
I bought a house a few years ago, where the previous owner had an obsession with two things: Leylandia trees and garden buildings. The back yard was a forest of Leylandia, which were pulled out of the ground and chopped up over a period of several months, and there were no fewer than four sheds.

Thanks to a slash-and-burn policy, we soon ended up with a pretty acceptable garden, and I was set to work on demolishing the fourth shed at the top of the garden, which we had christened MEGASHED. It was huge. Previous Irish Owner had built it himself out of huge sheets of plywood and it stood well over ten feet tall and might have doubled up as a squash court if it were not such a bloody craphole.

After getting the doors and a few of the side panels off through brute force and a crowbar, I wondered if there might be a quicker way to finish the job, all the time eyeing up one of the huge lengths of four-by-four holding the thing up.

I selected my biggest sledgehammer, and with main strength, knocked out one of the corner supports with a single blow. Then, a couple of hefty swings took out another, as nails and other low-quality fixings pinged about me.

In retrospect, I should have stopped there, taken the roof off and perhaps a couple of now unsupported walls. But I did not. Instead, I lined up with a third corner support, felt rather satisfied with the thunk as it fell ago, almost immediately taken over by fear, darkness and agony as the entire structure folded in on itself like the final scene from Poltergeist.

I lay there for some time on the concrete floor, considering my folly. Then, shouted for help, and it came. Eventually.
( Scaryduck LIKES EGG, Thu 8 Nov 2012, 13:54, 11 replies)

A noise like approaching armageddon...
When I was a wee nipper, we used to play in an old abandoned plastics factory*. Much fun was had, lobbing plastic duck-heads at each other, sword fighting with plastic rods, pouring sacks of plastic chips on each other's heads from the dangling wreckage of upper floors, and attempting not to fall down gaping holes into the basement.

But the fun had to end eventually, and one day we heard that they'd started to demolish our fun palace. So that evening we headed over to have a look. This was the 1970s, when life was cheaper than it is now, so there was nothing to stop us wandering over the demolition site. The building was about half gone; the main part we could see still standing was an inner wall, which had only been half pulled down. On top we spied a loose block of masonry, maybe a metre square, which had been cracked loose but still stood, balanced on top of the wall. Naturally we started to rock it back and forward, hoping for a satisfactory crash when it fell, and entirely failing to consider that it might fall back onto us, rather than forwards over the wall.

But we managed to avoid getting squashed like Bernard Manning's wife, and the block teetered, wobbled, then finally dropped out of sight over the wall.

We were expecting something like CRAAASHHhhhh .... What we got was CRAAAASHHHhhhhhHHHSHHRRRRRROOOOOAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR... It seemed to go on for ages; we instinctively did the "Awoooga Two Step", and were several streets away before the ungodly noise faded away. Ten minutes or so later, having hidden behind some bins, we cautiously headed back to the site.

A police car was there, the coppers looking rather puzzled. It seemed that, entirely spontaneously, about half of the remaining building - in fact, everything the other side of the wall, which turned out to have been one side of the central stairwell - had collapsed about three metres down a bank into what had been the basement.

I often wondered what the demolition workers made of it, the next day, when they found that most of their work had been done for them.

* The phrase "old abandoned" generates a strong compulsion to do a Scooby Doo joke, but I'll attempt to restrain myself.
(moon monkey is busy making memories worth repressing, Fri 9 Nov 2012, 16:21, 2 replies)

Comedy Cliche
I was sorting the attic out, and carrying a large box of books from one pile to another. So large that I couldn't see my feet and, inevitably, managed to miss the flooring boards, and plunge one foot down between the joists. Large chunks of plaster plus the collected dust and debris of about 80 years showered down into the room below, closely followed by the random contents of the boxes and jars I'd knocked over, and a stream of swearing.

Naturally, because the universe has a sense of humour, my wife's mother, an elderly lady with a heart condition, happened to be directly underneath at the time.

.
(moon monkey is busy making memories worth repressing, Mon 12 Nov 2012, 11:51, Reply)

My wee birdie of an aunt got this superhuman bust of strength and stamina to take out all of the contents from her soon to be ex-husband's shed and burn it on the lawn. Bit of family lore this burning - not even the shotgun shells exploding out of the flames seemed to put her off. We ran for cover; she just tore the double wooden doors of the shed with a crowbar and burnt them and then burnt the crowbar for good measure.

G & T's all round after that effort. The lawn didn't grow back for a very long time and the lumpen metally/plastic remains were broken down and some scattered through the garden like alien gnomes.

She even made us sing along to Dame Edna Everage's "The night we burnt mother's things". Good times.
(boozehound is drinking your bar dry, Fri 9 Nov 2012, 9:02, 1 reply)

when my parents bought our house, the builder was a total workshy cunt
he did many things Wrong, but perhaps the most heinous was that the house, which was a newbuild, was sold with a big patch of land at the front. my mother planned a rockery and my father planned extra parking.

until the day we arrived home from various works/schools to find a mahoosive fence running right down the side of the house. with the plot of land on the Wrong side of it. a quick word with one of the neighbours who had been speaking to the purchaser of the new house on the Wrong side earlier in the day, and yes, the builder had also sold it to him, wasn't it awful, typical builder, we had all his support etc etc.

i think the fence lasted about 10 minutes after my father got home and set about it with a hammer. the builder was deeply unimpressed, but he had to accept that he had been a dodgepot, and his threats of suing went away.

the most memorable thing, apart from the sight of my dad swinging a hammer like peter sutcliffe on speed, was that the supportive neighbour was at a dinner party a few weeks later, with people who were unbeknown to him mutual friends. he spent about an hour slagging my dad off as this awful beast who had flattened a perfectly good fence. my parents never let on that they knew about his two-facedness; not sure i could have swallowed that.

look, i didn't say it was interesting, blame yourself for reading it. and blame the question. you can't polish a turd!
( rachelswipe with a fork, Thu 8 Nov 2012, 18:48, 4 replies)

It wasn't my fault
Now my neighbour had a massive leylandii which must have been forty foot tall. I hated the thing, and plotted to sneak out at night, drill a hole in the trunk, and squirt weedkiller into it with a syringe. But I'm nice, so I didn't.

But by coincidence, the bit on my side of the fence was where I'd pile up grass cuttings. This heap was getting out of control, so one day I took the liberty of setting this dry pile of grass and vegetation on fire. I watched it for a while, and it burnt nicely, and then I went indoors.

Hours later, I was asleep in bed, went I smelt burning (this was an old house with sash windows which were a little drafty). I pulled open the curtains and saw the entire garden bathed in an orange glow. The tree on my neighbour's side of the fence had caught fire, and the whole thing was ablaze with orange sparks flying into the night air.

I put on some clothes and rushed down to the bottom of the garden. The tree was well alight - there was clearly nothing that could be done to save it. It wasn't near any structures, so I shrugged and went back to bed.

The following morning I surveyed the damage - the tree was now an ugly blackened skeleton.

Now my neighbour was blind in one eye, with very limited vision in the other. So I reckoned my best bet was to keep quiet and hope he didn't notice.

He did. He asked me what I knew, and I confessed it was my fault. And luckily he wasn't fussed. The end.
(Bob the Builder killed Captain Alex, Fri 9 Nov 2012, 20:39, 1 reply)

Man v tree
At my old flat we had a small garden that was rather nice to sit in apart from the fact that a lot of the light was blocked by two (cypress, I think) trees that had been there for decades and were now far taller than the (four-storey) block that we lived in. At the time my German flatmate was trying to rig up his TV decoder to the old satellite dish on the back of the building and he was convinced that one of the trees was blocking his signal, so one weekend he climbed up the tree and cut a big chunk out of the side of it. I can't remember if it solved his problem or not, but the tree looked ridiculous and as we wanted more light in the garden we started to plan its demise.

The main problem was that we had no power tools or safety equipment of any kind, nor any real experience of tree felling, but we did have a good saw. So over three weekends we took it in turns to climb the tree to about a metre from the top, cut off all the side branches, saw through the trunk and then climb down another metre or so and repeat the process.

The secondary problem is that a massive tree produces massive amounts of wood and foliage. The entire garden was thigh-deep in green stuff with great huge logs lurking beneath the surface. It sat there for a few weeks before some men from the council arrived to trim the trees in the street and I heard the distinctive sound of a wood chipper. I asked them if it was possible to dump some of the tree in there and one guy pondered the question, replying "Milk, two sugars." Before long I was ferrying pots of tea and dustbins full of branches out into the street but all too soon they had to move on and I still had about three quarters of a tree to get rid of.

Now that it was at least possible to get into the garden again I set about the rest of the tree with saw and secateurs and reduced it down still further into piles of logs of varying sizes, from sticks to the last section of the trunk we cut out, which was about 2' across and 5' long. For a whole year we ate nothing but wood-fired barbeques - we even filled the boot with it and took our own firewood to Glastonbury. I used some of it to make attractive little borders for the rest of the garden which was starting to flourish now that one of the huge trees had stopped blocking out all the light.

We donated the last bits - the really big bits of trunk - to the local estate's communal bonfire that November, about 18 months after we first started cutting it down. The biggest bit took four men to carry and burned for a day.

About a year later, the letting agents sent someone round to do an inventory of the flat and I'd arranged to be in while they were there in case any awkward questions came up. Which they did, as he looked out of one of the first-floor windows...
"Didn't there used to be two trees in the garden?"
At this point the second tree was now nothing but a 4' stump with a birdhouse on top, which I was training ivy to grow over.
"Um...yeah."
"What happened?"
"That one, uh, died."
"But what happened to it?"
"Er...some men from the council took it away?"
"Oh, right then."

I went past the old flat the other day and while the ivy has grown rather nicely over the old stump the surviving tree has taken full advantage of the space, expanding to block out almost as much of the light as two trees had.

TLDR: Men cut down tree, dispose of wood in various ways and don't quite have to lie about it.
( emvee cruor deo cruoris, Fri 9 Nov 2012, 9:57, Reply)

common sense fail.
Sheffield forge masters c2004..
This place had a 30 tonne crane inside the forge building for shifting large buckets of molten metal around.
The crane and control gear was built in the late 70s or early eighties by some cutting edge Chinese or Japanese company at the time. Needless to say, they ceased trading at around 1990. It worked with minimal maintenance and breakdowns until 2004, when a fresh from college whizz kid was sent there to do the yearly service. Numpty bollocks as he shall forever be known, did the tasks expected of him, and then decided to act on his curiosity.. He looked at the ancient PCB's and logic circuits, un plugging them and reconnecting them into their sockets WITHOUT TURNING OFF THE POWER. He plugs the last one in, and is granted with a small puff of smoke.

Tl;Dr - the replacement crane cost quarter of a million pounds.
(bangthedrum, Thu 8 Nov 2012, 17:40, 1 reply)

Brick wall
My brother-in-law was a National Trust warden, with a large estate. One summer a mate of mine went to visit for a free holiday in lieu of a few odd jobs. The first job was an unsightly brick wall across a garden. So here's a lump hammer, a cold chisel, a 3 foot wrecking bar and a sledgehammer, do your best. I took one look at my mate Darren and we pushed the wall over into a pile of dust and went to the pub, leaving fuzz face to clear the debris. Shoddy building.
(etchi, Tue 13 Nov 2012, 19:08, 1 reply)

I kicked a small child's sandcastle over once.
The little fucker deserved it though, he was well giving me evils.
( drimble he'd been white, he'd been black, Tue 13 Nov 2012, 12:00, 21 replies)

A bit virtual this one
but I typed del *.* to remove my files from the LAN when I left university.

Turned out that the cretinous sysadmin had put all students' work in the root folder of the same drive and (this being ancient MS-DOS) there were no access permissions, so everyone could read or write to everyone else's folders.

And, having zero computer knowledge except a smattering of BBC Basic, I'd typed del *.* on the root folder.

And it did what it's supposed to do. Poof! went everyone's design projects.

And knowing the cretinous sysadmin, he never had any backups.

They never found out it was me, though.
(rogerzilla, Fri 9 Nov 2012, 18:22, 19 replies)

The true reason the twin towers fell.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTc88oBazEg

Not really.
Fred Dibnah - on ropes, ladders, and the fun things you can do with fire.
(speedevil, Fri 9 Nov 2012, 15:44, 4 replies)

The Last Straw
A colleague at work came in on Monday looking like he'd had a tough weekend. Turns out he'd had to dispose of his shed.

"It's annoying," he said, "Because it was in fairly good nick. But I went to put something in it, and it... burst."

A lovely comedy image, a bulging, creakingly overfull shed that just can't take one more item.
(moon monkey is busy making memories worth repressing, Fri 9 Nov 2012, 11:25, 1 reply)

I agreed to deconstruct six pianos in a church.
They were located on the third floor of the building. As near as the caretaker and I could figure, they had been muscled up the stairs sometime in the 1920s, then the staircases had been reconstructed so there was no way of removing them whole. Then the roof leaked and they got damaged- so the church wanted them out of there.

A friend of mine volunteered to help in exchange for the ivory from the keys. I could think of no use for it- I was mainly after the bigger pieces of wood, which appeared to be mahogany (it was a veneer, dammit), so I agreed. We quickly figured out the most efficient way of dismantling it to pieces that could be carried down, and I laid claim to the hammer boards as well as they were wooden linkages and therefore pretty cool.

We completed the job and Charlie carried home the keys. "Only a couple of pianos had ivory, though," he told me. "The rest were acetate."

"Oh. So why do you want them?"

He gave me an odd grin. "There are things you can do with acetate if you know how."*

Some time later there were reports of explosions around the city. I guess he was deconstructing other things himself...



*No, I had no idea what he meant by that. I should have known.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Thu 8 Nov 2012, 14:03, 3 replies)

Jimmy Saville's legacy.

( Maffers I flow kinda strange like Spina Bifida footprints, Thu 8 Nov 2012, 13:29, Reply)