Things You've Broken at Home and Got Away With

[londonblue]

Years ago, when I was still at school I had an 18th birthday party in my parents' house. My parents were very sensible and booked into a hotel for the night. That was partly to do with noise, and partly to do with the fact that about 20-30 people stayed over because they had travelled long distances.

Before the party started my brother and I emptied all the furniture and ornaments from the downstairs and locked them all away in the dining room. That room was off limits. We left out one wooden coffee table to put drinks on.

During the party one rather drunk girl decided to sit on said coffee table, and it promptly collapsed. It was quite a long table with two legs, one at either end. Each leg split half way down into three, so that in effect the table had 6 legs. It turns out that one of the legs on one end had snapped.

In my drunken state I managed to use super glue to glue the table back together. (I even remembered to wet both bits of wood before gluing to ensure the glue didn't just get absorbed into the wood.) For the rest of the party I left the table legs up to dry.

In the morning I turned the table over, and, hey presto, it stood up! I had fixed it.

Roll on 5-6 years after I had returned home from studying and was working for a firm of accountants in Southend. I went home for lunch and my mum said to me. "A strange thing happened today. I was upstairs and I heard a crash in the lounge. When I went downstairs the coffee table had collapsed and everything was on the floor. You don't know anything about it do you?"

I nearly choked on my lunch, but managed to say I wasn't even at home when it happened!

About 10 years after that I fessed up, and my parents actually laughed it off.

Anyone else got any near misses they want to share?

 

[MK Shrimper]

Sorry mate, thought and thought but like my thread I don't think I have. :smile:

 

[Mad Cyril]

As a youth I once threw a massive block of ice down the garden thinking I could easily get it into the field at the end.

Turned out it went straight through the greenhouse roof.

Luckily the evidence melted and I was able to deny all knowledge.

I also managed to throw a dart through a double glazed window pane when I tried to hit the board from 40ft away.

 

[Ron Manager]

When we were kids my parents bought their first ever video recorder from Nobles, a huge big Betamax thing. Shortly after they bought it my brother and I were playing football with a balloon and managed to knock a vase over, with all the water pouring into the video.

We tried to dry it off as best we could, the thing was working but it wasn't right. So we confessed.

My parents (well my Dad) decided to take it back to Nobles. He told the bloke that he didn't know what was wrong but it just working properly. So the bloke in the shop plugged it in, played the video in the machine to see and hear Trevor McDonald read the news sounding like he was under water! My old man just shrugged, said "I don't know what went wrong" and came home with a replacement video recorder.

 

[MK Shrimper]

Thinking about in now, my ZX Spectrum used to overheat, so this young engineer thought it needed bit of airflow so I stuck the lids of felt tip pens onto the base with superglue. However the glue ate through the Spectrum plastic, exposing the internals..... My parents must have sent it back to Sinclair, 'cos in a matter of days I got a brand new Speccy through the post that didn't overheat and didn't need my Heath Robinson approach to cooling :smile:

Still upgraded to a C64 soon after however!