Teachers
I have a fuzzy memory of two seperate incidents when i was younger.

First one, back when video recorders at home were quite new. My father (and mother) are teachers, and would often set the recorder to record late night educational shows for later use at school.
Around this time I had a plasma ball. One with blue glowy strands that jump about and concentrate on your hand when you touch it.
Well one evening i was bored. I was playing with the plasma ball listening to trippy music, when i started touchingt he ball with just about anything i could find.
I used a 2p coin and got quite a spark. ooo... how pretty i thought. I kept playing with a coupld of coins and the plasma ball for some time, seeing how far / big a spark i could create.
Only a couple of days later did I discover that my father had been recording something that night, and that when ever i created a spark it fucked up the video recorder and essentially made the picture he was recording fuzzy and unwatcheable.
I think the show he was recording was the middle of the series, wasnt repeated for AGES and was completely unwatcheable!

Second one, horrible electronics class at school (i must have been 14 or so). We were split into pairs and given a board and plug and play components and a workbook. The idea was to use the plug and play components to create the most basic of electronic devices.

By accident I discoverd that if I shorted out my board, it made the group opposites short as well, or to them just go dead. I did this a couple of times to confirm my suspicion and the correlation between the two. By teh time I was certain they had called 'teacher', and for a good five minutes I managed to completely befuddle the teacher AND not burst out in huge fits of laughter, as tehy all got gradually more and more confused about what was going on.
(Wankle-Rotary-Engine -pronounced 'Throat Wobbler Mangrove', Fri 21 Aug 2009, 17:29, Reply)