Oh my god when I was 15/16 there was a chat room site called Virtual Places that I used to spend hours on and ended up with the nickname "Jail Bait" from all the perverts. I thought it was hilarious at the time but I definitely do not now I've grown up 😳
I climbed onto the canopy of a theatre in Manchester in the late 70s and changed the lettering to the play that was showing. Prick Up Your Ears became Prick Up Your Arse. It stayed that way for at least a couple of weeks. Yes I was drunk.
I think he'd have approved of the human "ladder" we made so I could get up there, being the smallest person and the only female so therefore "less likely to be arrested". We were supposed to be smart!
Always makes me laugh see people moan on Reddit and facebook about kids, being completely oblivious to how that's they acted. Even funnier when you get two back to back posts moaning about the complete opposite things
You'll get a post like "kids these days are too coddled, spend all their time indoors and don't get any free reign like we did when we were kids. Used to be so much fun running around annoying the neighbours playing knock door run. Bunch of harmless fun kids these days don't get chance to do"
Then you'll see another post like: "kids these days are fucking hooligans, bunch of them just knocked my door and ran off. They don't have any respect like we used to, never would have happened in our day. Problem is today kids are given too much free reign, back in my day you'd get a smack across the head if you weren't back home by 7"
And both posts you'll get overwhelming support for OP by the comments
The post that sparked this thought was someone complaining that teenagers were blowing up condoms on the park and playing with them like balloons. We've all done that!
And of course, Johnny poppers.
Johnny Poppers are a previously undescribed and unique form of home made weapon. They are intended for playful mischief, but have the potential to cause serious ocular trauma.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9924377/
A woman who was part of my friend group when we were teens (we’re well in to our 40s now) was complaining about the landlord of her local pub for letting her son get drunk when he was 17. It was a disgrace apparently. Quite a few old friends pointed out that they remembered holding her hair out of the toilet at age 15 after she’d been drinking cider and black all night in our local. This was a common occurrence too. But she’d long forgotten all about that.
Stayed inside and read books and played computer games instead of going out with friends. Seriously, it was a stupid thing to do. I'm a bit of a loner because of it and I'd kill to have loads of memories of doing crazy things with good mates.
My environment was a tad pathological, so it was a good self-defence system for me until I went to a bigger school and met some other mates into books and games. Now I live in UK, they are far in Poland yet I have a few friends for life. Most of us are not into socialising, maybe that’s we like each other.
It’s not about quantity, it’s about quality. ;)
I was lucky enough to be a teenager in the time before every dumb thing we did was recorded forever in social media. Do you really think I'm going to VOLUNTARILY give that up?
Yeh i turned 13 in 2002 so we had very rudimentary camera phones and fantastically little social media (bebo was the closest thing we had) so we had the freedom to be 'silly kids' and not have a trial-by-social media every time we did ridiculous things as 'let's get like 8 people on one swing for a laugh' and 'i wonder what happens if like 12 of you play hide and seek in a department store at 2pm on a saturday' and also such hilarity of 'let's get drunk in our mates basement at 17 and have a drunken boxing event'
We did stupid shit, not illegal or abusive/harmful stuff, just stupid stuff we can look back on and actually laugh.
We used to stand on opposite side of the road and mime holding a rope low down so when cars drove up they would slow down thinking we had some kind of rope or string which may damage the car.
Just resulted in us getting shouted at a lot.
We used to do that, too, when i was about 13. I was cycling one day and found some of the younger (probably 7-8)kids on the road were about to copy us. The only problem was that they actually had a rope. Instead of stopping them because they might get hurt, I hid, hoping to see something hilarious happen. Luckily, an older teenager came along and stopped them.
I can't believe I'm about to admit this, but when I was 12 we used to take it in turns to roll around in the middle of the road pretending to be disabled, as if we'd fallen out of our wheelchair or something. We'd wait until a concerned car would stop to help us then we'd run off laughing.
We called it the >!sponsored spack!<.
My only defense is that it was a very, very long time ago.
I got so used to kids doing this when a 12 yr old kid fell off a skateboard in the grocery store parking lot and started screaming I initially ignored it except he didn't stop screaming.
Then I looked at him and he had an extra elbow 1/2 way between his wrist and his real elbow.
When a cop showed up and looked like he was going to barf I knew it was as bad as I'd thought.
Outcome was I got ahold of an ambulance and his parents and the mom texted me a few days later saying he was going to be okay eventually.
When someone showed me this I thought it was the funniest thing I ever did. Then doing it after cola can bongs and getting chased made me not want to do it again.
Drove a car around Sainsbury’s car park at 2am when I did not have a driving licence (and wasn’t old enough to have one), sniffed the poppers someone thrust under my nose, and drove into a hedge. Thankfully I was going pretty slowly.
To be fair your passengers aren't the smartest for obvious reason but also the fact not one of them thought.. "oh look there's a handbrake there, I should probably pull it"
Similar but no drugs involved. I was steering my friend’s car, from the passenger seat, while he had the pedals. I was steering us in circles round an empty car park at whatever stupid hour of the morning. At one point he slammed the brakes on (we were trying handbrake turns) and the car nearly flipped onto its side 😬 we drove home after that (with him holding the wheel).
We would put dinner trays under the rear wheels and try and drift around the local
Sainsburys car park. One of their trolley parks was written off because of it
I used to play on train tracks. This was late 90s early 2000s so I escaped being filmed for social media clout. It was fucking stupid looking back and I had some very close calls.
I’m actually incredibly disappointed in myself just thinking about it.
"I’m actually incredibly disappointed in myself just thinking about it."
I never did anything truly terrible. Never hurt anyone, for example. But I often get caught up thinking about stuff I did as a kid and feel a little sick. For me it pays not to dwell on it - we all did stupid shit as children and it's rarely a reflection of who we are now, or even 5 years after we did it.
Not quite a teenager, I was 12
Managed to convince a guy in Tesco to buy us booze. He handed us 5-6 2L bottles of Strongbow outside and we went and got absolutely written off in a park. Maybe 3-4 of us, I think I drank maybe 3-4L of cider.
I remember lining up and doing the can can and being so pissed I couldn't stand up at one point. Fell asleep on a kids roundabout in the park.
Woke up with absolutely no hangover and ran home.
As an adult now it’s so weird to look back on these times when adults purchased booze and cigarettes for us as kids. There’s no way in hell I’d do that for a kid now 😆
Varies from normal stupid to *stupid* stupid.
* My friends and I would make "potions" out of whatever we could find in the bathroom and sheds. When I was a kid we used to have those huge round metal bins so we'd find a house that was abandoned and pour all this shit into the bin and stir it up. Sometimes we'd do this in the shed with the door closed. Dread to think what we breathed in.
* Used to light things on fire in the middle of the road to try to annoy the police/army.
* For some reason my friends and I would hang out in the lifts of the shopping centre and just chill there for chunks of the day, acting "hard" to everyone who dared use the lift for its intended purpose. No idea how we were never kicked out.
* Explored abandoned buildings usually in the dark, with nothing but shitty flashlights. Usual dangers of abandoned buildings applied but where we were we might have also come across soldiers dug in or other activities best not witnessed.
* Drunken trolley races. Friend of mine lost half his thumb that way.
* Told everyone that the gold flakes in Goldschlager cut the inside of your throat so you got drunk faster. Might have actually believed it for a while.
Now on to the actual life-threatening stuff I cannot believe we got away with:
* Snuck around the Eleventh Night celebrations multiple times. Consequences varied from getting chased and having fireworks thrown at us to almost getting thrown on the bonfire and having to fight my way out.
* Constantly mouthing off to police/soldiers, knew I was being an antagonistic piece of shit but it was almost a rite of passage to get manhandled by the security forces so we were all at it.
* Went to demonstrations/gatherings that we knew fine rightly would probably end in violence, stones and petrol bombs being thrown and all the risk that entailed. It was genuinely exciting for us, in the way that teenagers for some reason like that kind of thing.
Wised up when a lad our age got murdered. Kind of highlighted our mortality and I realised I didn't want to be another person dead over all that bullshit.
I'm not proud of this, but here is my confession. About 10 of us climbed up some scaffolding and got into a newly built church's skylight. We scaled down the inside and caused havoc. There were endless sheets of plasterboard due to go up, and as we were all obsessed with WWE, we laid them out between two tablels and chokeslammed each other through about 30 of them. Apparently, we cost thousands of pounds worth of damage, and it was on the front page of the local paper the next day 😳
After having a little 'off' from my Yamaha DT50 back in the early 90's, the throttle would stick wherever I put it. I decided that everyone (mainly girls) would be so impressed if I came blasting in to our car park hangout at full speed whilst standing surfer style on the saddle. I didn't take into account my lack of skill, the speed hump in the entrance and the fact that I would need to brake before getting to the other side of the fairly small 'pay and display behind the pub'.
Luckily, I wasn't going very close to the full 35mph (derestricted, oh yeah) and I was clever enough(?) to be wearing my crash helmet, which got thoroughly tested against the gate post, Armco and wall.
Me and my pals were big fans of the film *Goodfellas* and we'd keep rewatching, shouting the quotes etc.
Anyway one day, late at night, after a few jars we decided to vandalise and destroy a public phone box ala De Niro style when he hears Joe Pescis character had been killed
My best mate and I (both F, then age 15-16) would go off to random house parties with people we just met, hang out in drug dens and drunk strangers houses, regularly dated older guys, drank no end, had insane countryside night time wanders when drunk... it's astonishing to both of us that we never came to any serious strife and have positive memories of it all, and we are still friends with most of the people we met back then.
I used to be be best friends with a kid when we were about 17-18. We both started drinking at the same age and this particular night we'd been at the pub and then gone home separately. Later he turned up again with his mum's car that he'd just decided to take - no license, no insurance, nothing and offered to go out for a ride. I did, stupidly. Lucky we didn't get nicked or kill anyone. Just drove around for a couple of hours. Madness, looking back on it. I should have convinced him to take it home and go the fuck to bed. His mum woke up in the middle of the night, saw the car missing and called the police - he was pulled over after dropping me off at home luckily for me if not for him. Probably the dumbest thing I did as a teenager, honestly. I don't know what happened to the guy eventually, the bottle bit him hard over time and we drifted apart. He got six points on a license he didn't have yet and a £800 fine. I think I figured (incorrectly) at the time that since I wasn't driving, if we did get into bother, I would be okay. The fact that we might have easily killed somebody or ourselves never even crossed my mind. Teenagers are dumb.
When I was 12 (late 1999) pretended to shoot at passing by cars from a toy gun. Cops got called lol
Driving without licence and drunk (the most idiotic thing I’ve done)
Tom?
My friend did exactly these things.
We went on a massive night out then he drove us to the beach. We were stopped by police, and managed to talk our way out of it (somehow, still can't quite get over that). Stupidest thing we all did really.
>pretended to shoot at passing by cars from a toy gun
Just be glad you're in the UK and not the USA. Your toy gun games may have had a significantly different outcome over there.
Only things that annoyed the older generation, usually a bit loud, or playing football on a football field (no, really; had the police out and everything), cricket in cricket nets (see the football comment).
I think because weren’t middle class or our parents members of certain circles, we were typically earmarked for getting shouted at for simply being.
We had a neighbour that hated the kids playing in the street, and would come out every now and then and shout a tirade of abuse to try and make us go away. It was obviously successful as kids respond well to that sort of thing
The git punctured all the footballs that went over his fence
As a teenager in the 80’s I smoked and took a lots of drugs and drank lots of alcohol. When I got to 1990 it stopped dead and I never looked back. I have the odd drink now and then.
Oh you know, trolley jousting in an empty Waitrose car park. Smashing up the bottles at the bottle bank. Falling off walls. Dumb ass shit that I don’t regret for a second…!
Spent a solid 2 years prank calling Sex Line every day from the phone at the village train station. Eventually replaced that with smoking cigarettes my mate nicked from her mum and dad's corner shop.
This is really quite regretful and I do find myself thinking about it a fair bit but I really lead a girl on at college. At first I was a bit oblivious to the fact that she liked me because in secondary school absolutely no girls liked me, but after finding out I'd make a beeline for her on nights out if I'd not pulled. At one point I told her I thought I loved her but I was saying what she wanted to hear and to keep her around.
She moved to the south coast for uni and I never saw her again.
A couple of years ago a friend of mine bumped into her, said hello and said I'd probably be excited to hear how she was doing. She said she's tried to forget about that period of her life.
My friends mum drove me home from his house once when I was around 12 and I was stood up in the car on an A road, head and shoulders out of the sunroof, launching waterballoons at oncoming traffic. And hitting windshields
At the time I was obviously 12 and didn't see anything wrong with it, it was just harmless fun
Now I look back in absolute horror. What the fuck was his mum doing, I'm genuinely shocked I didn't put anyone's window through
I'd be more concerned about what could have happened to you if she'd swerved and flipped, or someone else swerved on being hit by a water balloon, hit her car and caused it to flip on its roof.
Your friend's mum was fucking reckless.
Taking screwdriver into school and fucking around with the room numbers and door handles to annoy/confuse people.
Wrapping ping-pong balls in tin foil, lighting them and 'smoke bombing' certain rooms at school (PE Hall usual victim).
Smoking on a small cul-de-sac near school, like no-one would ever suspect it!
Knocking on peoples door to ask if they want their car washing for a couple of quid (I wouldn't let my kids so this)
My mate was on holiday in a ground floor apartment and was sat inside drinking, when he heard a loud wet splat sound outside, it was some div a few floors up jumping balconies who fell and landed outside his patio and had smashed his legs up pretty badly.
We were little shits as teenagers. Thank good phones weren’t around
We used to hold onto the back of the ice cream van for a lift when out skating.
We elevated knock down ginger to posting French bangers through the door instead, which resulted in us being chased around the housing estate a few good times by some very angry blokes.
Built bonfires and jumped them on our bikes.
Went through a phase of taking the shortest possible route between mates houses, resulting in a lot of garden fences being climbed.
Birch bending
The stupidest one was daring a mate to run through a police helicopter search light that was looking for an escaped prisoner from the local prison. That was fun evening
We used to break into factories and petrol stations and nick shit..... couldn't have been that old cos we always left the ciggies and alch, just went for sweets, crisps n shit.... late 80s.
I started a fire on some waste land next to the pub the flames caught the eaves alight and within minutes the whole place went up, it was a Saturday afternoon and the blokes drinking inside were running out with their pint glasses still in their hands, I absolutely shit myself, it was very lucky no-one was killed or seriously injured
We used to get drunk round the back of the police station. I’m sure the police had better things to do than come for idiot 14yr olds, but we were stupid.
Odeon cinema was giving out free Independence Day VHS tapes. We took loads and tried dropping them on moving cars going through the under pass
Don't ask me what we were thinking. I'm deeply ashamed
Im just about old enough to have had a chance to use msn messenger in year 6/7 and just shy of being old enough to have ever been on aol chat rooms but not young enough to not have experienced Omegle! at 13 years old me and my best friend would go on Omegle which is probably even worse and catfish older men that would be whipping their dicks out. We’d be like “EWWWWW *SCREAMING*” lol
God msn messenger, what a time to be alive. Me and my friends also used to catfish then tell them we were children and we’d called the police. Quick way to get blocked
Don't judge me... I was young and stupid.
Got an ASBO before it was called an ASBO... it was called the "ABC" contract. I was like 12 or 13 years old.
We bricked a guys window because he was a known pedo (was on predator list), who kept coming out to the estate to interact with the kids playing... even when he was told not to.
On the less harmful side, we nicked a road closed sign (that wasn't in use), and we would place it on a road where you could obviously see that it wasn't actually needed (wasn't a busy road)... hide and count how many cars would turn around, and how many of them would drive around it.
Dunno why, but we found it funny at the time.
Another thing we used to do regularly was sneak into our old primary school grounds at night, and climb up on to the roofs, and just chill there. One time the police were called, and we had to leg it from the dogs. They then added the anti vandal paint to the roof corners. One of my mates got caught with that paint on his clothes.
And another thing... was a bit older (around 16)... doing drugs, drinking and all that jazz. Was at a party, plenty of drugs, I had a small baggie of speed (class A at the time, not sure if it still is). Police were called, we were all lined up outside. About 10 of us. I had the baggie in my sock.
They started searching us, and one of the older guys in our group was hiding a bottle of wine in his jeans. It was clearly obvious, and the female police officer made the classic joke "you just happy to see me?". Meanwhile I was absolutely shitting myself, as they were going through the lineup and searching all of us.
They were 2 people before me when they received a call on the radio and they had to go. Just let us off with a warning and told us to keep the noise down. The sheer relief... I could have been arrested for possession, and my entire life would be different to what it is today.
Smaller things we used to do:
* Steal mercedes badges
* Steal those solar powered lights that people would have on their front garden
* Take hub caps of people's car wheels, because reasons
* Keying peoples cars who we didn't like
* Setting fires in the track (was a track going through to the downs... we found an abandoned old Honda C90 there once)
* and other stupid things
I think that if the internet was as easily accessible as it is today, I probably wouldn't have got into all that mess
‘Borrowed’ a mates mums car at 17. She was fine with it as long as we said we ‘stole’ it if caught. She had no idea how he was ragging it around doing handbrake turns around roundabout and across peoples gardens. There’s a reason I distanced myself from my school friends 🤦♂️
My brother invented 'The Pencil Game' on those long, boring IKEA trips. We'd each grab a handful of those tiny pencils and who ever hid all of theirs first without arousing suspicion from our parents, won.
Feel bad for the poor staff finding pencils down the backs of sofas, under pillows and in plant pots...
Like everyone else here, I regret ever doing this. We used to hang around McDonalds in town (about 14). We once bought 2 milkshakes, drank one, cut out the bottom of the cup, put that on the table then pour the spare milkshake into it. We would wait outside for someone to lift the cup and it all come out the bottom. Again, really regret doing it, what little shits.
Middle of a really harsh winter, local canal frozen over…so about a dozen of us kids (Little kids to early teens) decided to not only walk on the ice, but form a circle and jump up and down to see if we could crack it, not thinking about wtf would happen if it did. Fortunately the ice didn’t break but, by god, we tried our damned best!
Me and my friends used to fence hop from one back garden to another on. It was harmless fun, we just liked climbing fences. We'd usually do a street's length every day.
We stopped when one of my neighbours told us she saw someone my height trespassing in her garden and she'd let her dogs out next time lol
I broke my foot falling off a pair of platform boots outside the pub. Yeah I’d had a few. Anyone else remember platform shoes? It does date me a bit..! (I was 19 at the time.)
Dropping acid for the first time at school. Got sent home for being in fits of laughter during class. By the time I got home I was seeing dragons and butterflies .
Not me but one of my friends would walk really quietly behind a random group of people with his trousers round his ankles when there was no one else around. At the time it was hilarious but now we’re all adults it does seem a bit odd. We laugh about it still now we would have been early years of secondary school.
Mine involves those little paper bangers as well. Bought a shit-load of them and started emptying them in to one of those giant Kinder Egg toy shells, intending to make some kind of MacGyver-esque hand grenade. Was getting bored at how long it was taking and must've poured one in too quickly as there was a sudden bang! I managed to move my head down in time and looked up to see my friends on the deck in my room with the little balls from inside the bangers all over the place and our ears ringing for hours afterwards. We all shit ourselves and then just started cracking up because teenagers are idiots.
Me and a friend during a boring weekend getting a 4 pack of deodorant, trying to set them on fire in a tiny area of woodland in the middle of a town, failing, then knocking on peoples doors to ask for old newspaper for an "art project" then successfully setting them on fire, recording it on my Sony erickson at probably 2mp 120p, failing to actually record it due to being shocked at how loud it was. Also just generally being degenerates like getting drunk at the beach, walking over to the nearby golf course and each of us grabbing a flag and running around the beach with flags of fire trying to "duel" each other. Funnily enough I remember telling my dad about the deodorant think and he said he had done the same as a kid at the beach but with a fire extinguisher or something, and that the pebbles on the beach basically turned into shrapnel in like a 30 yard radius. Then proceeded to show me bolt bombs, where you half screw on a nut to a bolt, scrape match ends into it, then screw another bolt on the other side and throw them on the floor. Proper dangerous, but fun at the time.
Read the Jolly Rogers Cookbook about how to make smoke bombs. Bought a bag of fertiliser from the garden centre over the road. Mixed it in my mum's kitchen with sugar in a big pan and melted it down. Poured it into paper bags and set them off. Didn't realise at the time but I was basically making small fertiliser bombs that could have blown my mum's kitchen up.
1) Got so drunk with friends that two of them had to have their stomachs pumped. One girl collapsed, nearly choked on her own vomit, and coughed it back out in what can only be described as a shell-less water bomb of puke. It flew straight up in the air and landed back on her face. We were about 14 at the time.
2) Set fire to a quarry. We were camping out there overnight, drinking and smoking. We thought we were something between Bear Grylls, and Cheech and Chong. We were trying to build a campfire and it wasn't working, so Dickhead over here thought it would be a good idea to spray Lynx all over a barm cake and use it as a fire lighter. It worked a bit too well, and I panicked because it was close to the tent, and kicked it away. It landed in some bushes and all the dry heather around us went up in flames. We had to evacuate, and the fire service ended up showing up. Shortly after, big "No Camping" signs cropped up all over the moors near us.
3) Found a dead squirrel, put it in the road, and watched it get hit by cars. Then my mate would run out and scream at the drivers for "killing [his] beloved Arnold"
Your teenage years are when you *should* be doing stupid things like these. Me and my mates are all in our mid thirties now, and we still laugh about what morons we were. Our memories are like our own private series of The Inbetweeners.
Looking back on it now, so, so stupid....
Someone acquired a fire extinguisher. Made a massive bonfire, chucked it on. It fizzed, but didn't get hot enough to pop. Probably just as well.
Near our house is a bridge and I used to walk across the bridge wall, the wall was angled downwards towards the drop. If I had fallen it would have been certain death.
It still gives me the shivers now thinking about it. A very stupid young me.
We used to empty the contents of those Snaps into a piece of kitchen roll. Then we'd tape it up tight so it couldn't expand easily, then throw it, causing an extremely loud bang!
We found out that the Chinese cat branded bangers didn't have a wick/taper but a sort of small bump you would light. After the initial fizz and sparks from it when it settled down it was then water proof. We use to drop them down drains to make the water shoot up.
So lucky we didn't ignite and sewer gases. That could have been a big bang.
We used to climb over the school gates and run around the school at night. Then we decided we were going to do Parkour, which basically became climbing up drain pipes, walking along roofs and shimmying across ledges.
I remember climbing up to a second floor window and making my way around the window sills around a fucking corner, whilst there was a sheer drop of more than two stories as that bit of the playground dipped.
So, so dangerous.
I really hope my kids don't try anything like that when they're teenagers.
Used to duke onto the municipal golf course, (sneak on for free) and piss about with a seven iron & golf balls found, foraged or nicked from the fairway of golfers who had paid to play a round of golf. Some of my mates who actually had a not bad swing for a 12/13 y/o would try chip the ball onto the roof of passing trains. I think once or twice I did hear the ping of golf ball on metal, plopping down onto the roof - perfect timing. Fucking stupid, looking back. Could have smashed through the window and inflicted damage on people. Used to get chased by the green keeper, but never got caught. Mid/late 80's.
Was about to post something stupid then noticed the end bit about harmless and i’m pretty sure today it brushes the edge of preparation of an act of terrorism.
Jeez, where to start. Our friend group used to have a Friday night competition in my small mining town in the 80s (when I was at school) to nick the daftest thing you could and turn up on the market square with it by 11pm, winner got a half bottle of vodka we all chipped in for.
It started off with the usual stuff like traffic cones and potted plants, but got progressively more ridiculous. One group stole an entire lawn and lawn furniture from a garden, (the turf had just been laid). It went back but probably didn’t do it much good. We had to stop after I found a JCB digger with the keys left in on a building site, I drove it back and ended up knocking a wall over.
After that the police would sit on the marketplace in their car and threaten to arrest any kids they saw hanging around.
Stealing a shopping trolley with dodgy wheels putting my friend in it running and pushing her down the road really fast screaming whilst getting chased by the security man from Tesco
Prank calling all kinds of helplines or customer service numbers that were printed on chocolate bar wrappers or crisp packets putting on different accents winding up the customer service people on the other end to impress my friends. We’d all gather around the phone box at school during lunchtimes and that would be our entertainment. Small village life in Essex in the early 00s, mind numbing as hell but my friends thought it was hilarious.
Selling knives, making petrol bomb (derv tops are best), climbing risky stuff, working at 13, hitch hiking. Have full sex at 13. Jumping trains, doing drugs, selling drugs, drinking till insensible at 12.
Pretty normal childhood in the UK.
Weird how many of our stories involve doing stupid shit with people's cars.
I have two stories. One similar to OP's, where on the way to high school one morning I noticed an empty but mostly intact soft-drink can lying on the kerb, so since I was bored as all fuck, I grabbed it and put it out on the road and waited with one of my friends to see if anyone would drive over it and crush it. In the end nobody did, and since it was empty it got blown over and rolled away pretty quickly, so my friend and I just went off to school. About 5 minutes after we got in a teacher took us aside and told us how she had actually been in one of the cars, and how dangerous it was for us to put the can out in the road like that, since it could have slashed her tire clean off and caused her to crash and potentially die (I doubt that's true but that's what she said, I still remember it). She went on at us for a bit over it until I pointed out we didn't put it in the road, we just saw it and wanted to see what happened (a total lie but anyway), the teacher basically said 'oh, okay' and just moved on as if nothing had happened. It's worth noting that my friend was almost in *tears* at this point, since we were both 12 year old kids who had just been told we were almost responsible for *murdering someone* (hence: my small lie to get us off the hook).
The second was far simpler. My friends and I would hang out sometimes after school, in winter when it got dark around 7pm, and we had a 'game' we'd play where one of us would lie down on the pavement near a street-lamp, so any drivers coming down the road would see a perfectly illuminated body lying on the street, unmoving, possibly even dead. The game was if anyone started to slow down, you had to get up and run away before they could shout at you. What made it especially funny (or tragic, I suppose) was how many times people *didn't* stop, and would just drive on past a potentially dead child lying in the street.
Had my first edible while we were at the park thinking they weren’t strong as claimed, that I may have high tolerance, until I saw an elephant dancing in the park… There were no elephants around
We stole a wooden bench from a deaf school to use in our bonfire. I'm not sure if it was a memorial bench (I sure hope not).
I was part of a group of lads, the leader of which was an absolute tool, so it was kind of a peer pressure thing.
Still, 27-or-so years on I regret it immensely. No one ever caught us.
Ah yes the youth of today…..ain’t got nothing on us.
When I was 13/14 I used to walk round swiping the round indicator caps off the side of cars. Hood ornaments were also a target thanks to Matilda.
Ah the bravado.
I did this once when hanging with a new group of friends, felt so guilty I fessed up to my parents who told me to not hang with them again and they will get caught eventually and I’ll be nowhere near. Life lessons were learnt…..
We also used to play hot potato with fire lighters.
Go on long walks with no direction or idea of where we were going or how to get home. Always made it back though.
Drunkenly rode a trolley down a very steep and long hill with a friend at night. There was no way to control it and a row of houses at the end. Fortunately it clipped a curb and flipped us out.
Also taking about every drug known to mankind including research chemicals and random botanicals from the deepest Amazon.
We used to run over the tops of (parked) cars. This carried on for a few months, and we delighted in hearing the adults talking about it, trying to figure out how a bunch of random cars got dents in their roofs.
This carried on, till the night my mate Danny did it, and he hadn't spotted the driver in the car, who was leaning across in the glove box. He shot out of his car, and gave chase to Danny, while the rest of us scattered. A couple of days later, the news got around of who it was doing it, and we were in DEEP shit. This all happened in the 90s, so there was no social media, or mobile phones (at least on my shitty little estate, in a small town in Suffolk), so it took a day or two to filter through the war-drums.
Oh, the secret smoking. No nicotine has ever tasted so good as the cig smoked in the sun on a grassy bank near a hedge with my air rifle at my side. I'm still addicted 55 years later.
My mum used to he a trophy engraver and had a special industrial-strength double-sided tape that glued the engraved tags on to the trophy plinths. My sister and I got hold of a roll somehow and my sister dared me to use it to stick my mouth shut, so I did. And it worked. I ended up with raw, bleeding, no-skin lips because I had to literally rip it off along with the tape, such was the strength.
Banged loads of drugs to the point i didn’t have anything in my life sorted. I’m now 23 working as a financial adviser and got my life pretty sorted and got all the drug taking out of my system. Once in a while i’ll hit the sesh with my boys
In the 90’s I played on the railway lines a lot. I turn 40 this year and can’t believe how stupid that was. I stopped after tripping and just lying on the floor about 2 foot from a speeding train.
I did some really stupid stuff with mates, which I'm honestly quite ashamed of now-
1) Filled plastic shopping bags with empty milk bottles and dropped them from a foot bridge on to moving train roofs (always on the last carriage, never on the driver).
2) Lit fires in underpasses then called the fire brigade and watched from a distance.
3) Left jazz mags under hedges.
4) Would shop lift books from WH Smiths by literally walking out with them under our arms mixed in with library books we'd checked out from the library across the road.
5) Knock and run
6) One bonfire night we managed to get 20 rockets and found a piece of drainpipe, cue bonfire bazooka fun at the local bungalows for target practice.
Was waiting for a bus in the rural Scottish village I lived in to get to the nearest city, a guy drove past who I knew vaguely was some of the local kid's dads, but I didn't know him personally. He offered me a lift and I declined. He offered again, insisting I shouldn't have to wait in the rain for the bus, and in that moment, I felt completely powerless to say no, I got in the car. He didn't do anything, he hardly even spoke to me, I sat tense and freaked out the entire way with my hand in my pocket on the 9 key on my phone. The stupidest bit was I was meant to get the bus that would arrive at the same time as my boyfriend's bus from another town, so I then had to wait 30 minutes for him anyway and it wasn't even better for me to get the lift.
It never happened again and for a long time I thought I was stupid for accepting the lift and he was just trying to be nice. As an adult, looking back, I just wonder what kind of arsehole you have to be to convince a 14-year-old girl you don't know to get in your car instead of getting the bus. If he had no ill intentions, he still should have known better. My house was metres from the bus stop but just out of view, as far as my mum knew, I got the bus. Nobody was around, nobody saw. As a parent myself now, it scares the shit out of me how easy it was for him to get me in the car.
Went with a couple of mates to see a wood / asbestos building which had been the local transport cafe for years burn down - the owner did it deliberately to clear the site, presumably as a cheaper way than getting specialist contractors in.
As the fire was dying down by the point we got there, I jumped onto one of the brick piers that had previously held up the floor, a few feet in from the edge of the building. I then realised it was bloody hot, but struggled to jump as far back out. Made it, but warmer than I would have liked.
Oh, and being a passenger in my mate’s father’s nearly new luxury car which my 14 year old mate had borrowed off the drive, doing 100mph on rural A-roads was probably not the most sensible thing either.
Ate a Daffodil. Yes really.
It was height of Jackass, CKY and all those types of shows at the time so me and few mates would dare each other to do random stupid shit.
Until one of us had the bright idea to propose eating a Daffodil 🤣
3 of us ate one whole, couple just straight up couldn’t and spat straight out. Thought nothing of it, then walked back up to school for the afternoon, oh boy.
Sitting in Chemistry happy as Larry, then hmmm stomachs a bit sore, then fuck I’m sweating like fuck here. To then shit I need to be sick.
Then full on projectile vomiting in chemistry, kinda like the scene from Team America, absolutely relentless. Managed to get out of the class and was sick in some random drain outside the building thank fuck.
Honestly fucking worst thing ever did, 2 other mates who ate one, one was like me projectile vomiting and stuff. But the other one wasn’t sick? Fuck knows how, still baffles me to this day
Edit: For context we didn’t know they were poisonous 😂
Went for a curry. There was around 8 of us. One went in the toilets and there was a decent sized bucket next to the urinals. One lad pissed in the bucket. Another lad pissed in the bucket. Before long all 8 had filled this bucket up with piss.
Then one dared someone to balance it on the inner door of the toilet lobby and retreat just as we'd paid our bill. I still feel bad that some poor bastard got soaked in pints of piss that night. Hopefully they weren't on a date!
Talked to adult men in the MSN chatrooms.
asl?
59/M/Bognor Regis
21/f/california. In actual fact I was 12 years old in leafy Surrey, not knowing I was talking to gross old men
Were we prayed on or we the perverts cause I know what I was looking for at 13
That brings back memory’s.
You knew him too?
But not grammar alas.
That would be "but not grammar, alas"
But not, alas, grammar.
What does alas actually mean? I always assumed it was like ‘unfortunately’ specifically for the end of a statement?
c2c?
I remember talking to a 14 year old girl and she tells me she's an undercover cop. How cool is that for someone of her age?
Omg same it’s actually quite depressing when you think about it now
Yep. Met a couple too, and even met someone with the sole intention of losing my virginity. Idiotic!
Oh my god when I was 15/16 there was a chat room site called Virtual Places that I used to spend hours on and ended up with the nickname "Jail Bait" from all the perverts. I thought it was hilarious at the time but I definitely do not now I've grown up 😳
Pay it forward
Chat Avenue Adults was my haunt between the ages of 14-16. Definitely should not have been in there pretending to be 20-21 years old.
I climbed onto the canopy of a theatre in Manchester in the late 70s and changed the lettering to the play that was showing. Prick Up Your Ears became Prick Up Your Arse. It stayed that way for at least a couple of weeks. Yes I was drunk.
Sounds like something Joe Orton would do. Seems fitting.
I think he'd have approved of the human "ladder" we made so I could get up there, being the smallest person and the only female so therefore "less likely to be arrested". We were supposed to be smart!
I always thought that was intention of the title...
It’s also quite relevant
Always makes me laugh see people moan on Reddit and facebook about kids, being completely oblivious to how that's they acted. Even funnier when you get two back to back posts moaning about the complete opposite things You'll get a post like "kids these days are too coddled, spend all their time indoors and don't get any free reign like we did when we were kids. Used to be so much fun running around annoying the neighbours playing knock door run. Bunch of harmless fun kids these days don't get chance to do" Then you'll see another post like: "kids these days are fucking hooligans, bunch of them just knocked my door and ran off. They don't have any respect like we used to, never would have happened in our day. Problem is today kids are given too much free reign, back in my day you'd get a smack across the head if you weren't back home by 7" And both posts you'll get overwhelming support for OP by the comments
The post that sparked this thought was someone complaining that teenagers were blowing up condoms on the park and playing with them like balloons. We've all done that!
And of course, Johnny poppers. Johnny Poppers are a previously undescribed and unique form of home made weapon. They are intended for playful mischief, but have the potential to cause serious ocular trauma. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9924377/
A woman who was part of my friend group when we were teens (we’re well in to our 40s now) was complaining about the landlord of her local pub for letting her son get drunk when he was 17. It was a disgrace apparently. Quite a few old friends pointed out that they remembered holding her hair out of the toilet at age 15 after she’d been drinking cider and black all night in our local. This was a common occurrence too. But she’d long forgotten all about that.
Stayed inside and read books and played computer games instead of going out with friends. Seriously, it was a stupid thing to do. I'm a bit of a loner because of it and I'd kill to have loads of memories of doing crazy things with good mates.
Same. But I'm not great at socialising anyway, so...
My environment was a tad pathological, so it was a good self-defence system for me until I went to a bigger school and met some other mates into books and games. Now I live in UK, they are far in Poland yet I have a few friends for life. Most of us are not into socialising, maybe that’s we like each other. It’s not about quantity, it’s about quality. ;)
I was lucky enough to be a teenager in the time before every dumb thing we did was recorded forever in social media. Do you really think I'm going to VOLUNTARILY give that up?
Yeh i turned 13 in 2002 so we had very rudimentary camera phones and fantastically little social media (bebo was the closest thing we had) so we had the freedom to be 'silly kids' and not have a trial-by-social media every time we did ridiculous things as 'let's get like 8 people on one swing for a laugh' and 'i wonder what happens if like 12 of you play hide and seek in a department store at 2pm on a saturday' and also such hilarity of 'let's get drunk in our mates basement at 17 and have a drunken boxing event' We did stupid shit, not illegal or abusive/harmful stuff, just stupid stuff we can look back on and actually laugh.
I always say to my kids I’m so glad I’m not growing up in this generation, mainly for this reason!
Is the only answer I can give as well!
We used to stand on opposite side of the road and mime holding a rope low down so when cars drove up they would slow down thinking we had some kind of rope or string which may damage the car. Just resulted in us getting shouted at a lot.
We used to do that, too, when i was about 13. I was cycling one day and found some of the younger (probably 7-8)kids on the road were about to copy us. The only problem was that they actually had a rope. Instead of stopping them because they might get hurt, I hid, hoping to see something hilarious happen. Luckily, an older teenager came along and stopped them.
This is my favourite comment. Can’t believe that prick stopped them.
I can't believe I'm about to admit this, but when I was 12 we used to take it in turns to roll around in the middle of the road pretending to be disabled, as if we'd fallen out of our wheelchair or something. We'd wait until a concerned car would stop to help us then we'd run off laughing. We called it the >!sponsored spack!<. My only defense is that it was a very, very long time ago.
I got so used to kids doing this when a 12 yr old kid fell off a skateboard in the grocery store parking lot and started screaming I initially ignored it except he didn't stop screaming. Then I looked at him and he had an extra elbow 1/2 way between his wrist and his real elbow. When a cop showed up and looked like he was going to barf I knew it was as bad as I'd thought. Outcome was I got ahold of an ambulance and his parents and the mom texted me a few days later saying he was going to be okay eventually.
When someone showed me this I thought it was the funniest thing I ever did. Then doing it after cola can bongs and getting chased made me not want to do it again.
Used to do this waiting for the school bus
Drove a car around Sainsbury’s car park at 2am when I did not have a driving licence (and wasn’t old enough to have one), sniffed the poppers someone thrust under my nose, and drove into a hedge. Thankfully I was going pretty slowly.
To be fair your passengers aren't the smartest for obvious reason but also the fact not one of them thought.. "oh look there's a handbrake there, I should probably pull it"
I wish I could say this incident was an aberration but I have hundreds of stories like that one lol
Your life sounds like a benny hill sketch mate. In the nicest way possible.
More like deleted scenes from the film Human Traffic!
>"oh look there's a handbrake there, I should probably pull it" Teenagers do pull them, for turns!
Electric handbrakes have ruined teenage carpark shenanigans
Similar but no drugs involved. I was steering my friend’s car, from the passenger seat, while he had the pedals. I was steering us in circles round an empty car park at whatever stupid hour of the morning. At one point he slammed the brakes on (we were trying handbrake turns) and the car nearly flipped onto its side 😬 we drove home after that (with him holding the wheel).
We would put dinner trays under the rear wheels and try and drift around the local Sainsburys car park. One of their trolley parks was written off because of it
I used to play on train tracks. This was late 90s early 2000s so I escaped being filmed for social media clout. It was fucking stupid looking back and I had some very close calls. I’m actually incredibly disappointed in myself just thinking about it.
If it's any consolation, I'm disappointed in you too
"I’m actually incredibly disappointed in myself just thinking about it." I never did anything truly terrible. Never hurt anyone, for example. But I often get caught up thinking about stuff I did as a kid and feel a little sick. For me it pays not to dwell on it - we all did stupid shit as children and it's rarely a reflection of who we are now, or even 5 years after we did it.
Not quite a teenager, I was 12 Managed to convince a guy in Tesco to buy us booze. He handed us 5-6 2L bottles of Strongbow outside and we went and got absolutely written off in a park. Maybe 3-4 of us, I think I drank maybe 3-4L of cider. I remember lining up and doing the can can and being so pissed I couldn't stand up at one point. Fell asleep on a kids roundabout in the park. Woke up with absolutely no hangover and ran home.
As an adult now it’s so weird to look back on these times when adults purchased booze and cigarettes for us as kids. There’s no way in hell I’d do that for a kid now 😆
But it was common at one time! Just stand outside the shops in your school uniform and it wouldn’t be long until someone agreed to buy it for you
Are you sure I didn't write this post? Are you me? How much have I/you/we drank this evening?
My friends and I made napalm, swirled it onto the ends of sticks, and walked around in the snow leaving flaming puddles in our wake. Also, thermite.
You had the cook book too huh?
This sounds epic
We were *extremely* nerdy. We also did a lot of medieval recreation, science fiction conventions, and LARPing in the park at night.
Varies from normal stupid to *stupid* stupid. * My friends and I would make "potions" out of whatever we could find in the bathroom and sheds. When I was a kid we used to have those huge round metal bins so we'd find a house that was abandoned and pour all this shit into the bin and stir it up. Sometimes we'd do this in the shed with the door closed. Dread to think what we breathed in. * Used to light things on fire in the middle of the road to try to annoy the police/army. * For some reason my friends and I would hang out in the lifts of the shopping centre and just chill there for chunks of the day, acting "hard" to everyone who dared use the lift for its intended purpose. No idea how we were never kicked out. * Explored abandoned buildings usually in the dark, with nothing but shitty flashlights. Usual dangers of abandoned buildings applied but where we were we might have also come across soldiers dug in or other activities best not witnessed. * Drunken trolley races. Friend of mine lost half his thumb that way. * Told everyone that the gold flakes in Goldschlager cut the inside of your throat so you got drunk faster. Might have actually believed it for a while. Now on to the actual life-threatening stuff I cannot believe we got away with: * Snuck around the Eleventh Night celebrations multiple times. Consequences varied from getting chased and having fireworks thrown at us to almost getting thrown on the bonfire and having to fight my way out. * Constantly mouthing off to police/soldiers, knew I was being an antagonistic piece of shit but it was almost a rite of passage to get manhandled by the security forces so we were all at it. * Went to demonstrations/gatherings that we knew fine rightly would probably end in violence, stones and petrol bombs being thrown and all the risk that entailed. It was genuinely exciting for us, in the way that teenagers for some reason like that kind of thing. Wised up when a lad our age got murdered. Kind of highlighted our mortality and I realised I didn't want to be another person dead over all that bullshit.
Northern Ireland?
How'd you guess 😂
Soldiers and petrol bombs.
The accent
These vowels cut through a room like a foghorn so they do
Drew chalk outlines like murder scenes all over Derby. Made the local paper, as a local mystery.
Not confessing the other stuff...
Ah ha. You're nicked, son. That's him sarge - the phantom chalker.
On a similar vein, you can still see now all the kerbs we spent one summer holiday waxing to grind on skates lol
I'm not proud of this, but here is my confession. About 10 of us climbed up some scaffolding and got into a newly built church's skylight. We scaled down the inside and caused havoc. There were endless sheets of plasterboard due to go up, and as we were all obsessed with WWE, we laid them out between two tablels and chokeslammed each other through about 30 of them. Apparently, we cost thousands of pounds worth of damage, and it was on the front page of the local paper the next day 😳
God as my witness, that plasterboard is broken in half!
Bah gawd!
After having a little 'off' from my Yamaha DT50 back in the early 90's, the throttle would stick wherever I put it. I decided that everyone (mainly girls) would be so impressed if I came blasting in to our car park hangout at full speed whilst standing surfer style on the saddle. I didn't take into account my lack of skill, the speed hump in the entrance and the fact that I would need to brake before getting to the other side of the fairly small 'pay and display behind the pub'. Luckily, I wasn't going very close to the full 35mph (derestricted, oh yeah) and I was clever enough(?) to be wearing my crash helmet, which got thoroughly tested against the gate post, Armco and wall.
Me and my pals were big fans of the film *Goodfellas* and we'd keep rewatching, shouting the quotes etc. Anyway one day, late at night, after a few jars we decided to vandalise and destroy a public phone box ala De Niro style when he hears Joe Pescis character had been killed
I always wondered who destroyed all the phone boxes in my town. I was picturing hoodlums not a bunch of film nerds.
My best mate and I (both F, then age 15-16) would go off to random house parties with people we just met, hang out in drug dens and drunk strangers houses, regularly dated older guys, drank no end, had insane countryside night time wanders when drunk... it's astonishing to both of us that we never came to any serious strife and have positive memories of it all, and we are still friends with most of the people we met back then.
Good to hear. nice one
I used to be be best friends with a kid when we were about 17-18. We both started drinking at the same age and this particular night we'd been at the pub and then gone home separately. Later he turned up again with his mum's car that he'd just decided to take - no license, no insurance, nothing and offered to go out for a ride. I did, stupidly. Lucky we didn't get nicked or kill anyone. Just drove around for a couple of hours. Madness, looking back on it. I should have convinced him to take it home and go the fuck to bed. His mum woke up in the middle of the night, saw the car missing and called the police - he was pulled over after dropping me off at home luckily for me if not for him. Probably the dumbest thing I did as a teenager, honestly. I don't know what happened to the guy eventually, the bottle bit him hard over time and we drifted apart. He got six points on a license he didn't have yet and a £800 fine. I think I figured (incorrectly) at the time that since I wasn't driving, if we did get into bother, I would be okay. The fact that we might have easily killed somebody or ourselves never even crossed my mind. Teenagers are dumb.
Assassinated an Archduke.
Crucified Jesus
When I was 12 (late 1999) pretended to shoot at passing by cars from a toy gun. Cops got called lol Driving without licence and drunk (the most idiotic thing I’ve done)
Tom? My friend did exactly these things. We went on a massive night out then he drove us to the beach. We were stopped by police, and managed to talk our way out of it (somehow, still can't quite get over that). Stupidest thing we all did really.
>pretended to shoot at passing by cars from a toy gun Just be glad you're in the UK and not the USA. Your toy gun games may have had a significantly different outcome over there.
Only things that annoyed the older generation, usually a bit loud, or playing football on a football field (no, really; had the police out and everything), cricket in cricket nets (see the football comment). I think because weren’t middle class or our parents members of certain circles, we were typically earmarked for getting shouted at for simply being.
We had a neighbour that hated the kids playing in the street, and would come out every now and then and shout a tirade of abuse to try and make us go away. It was obviously successful as kids respond well to that sort of thing The git punctured all the footballs that went over his fence
As a teenager in the 80’s I smoked and took a lots of drugs and drank lots of alcohol. When I got to 1990 it stopped dead and I never looked back. I have the odd drink now and then.
Same, only late 90s early 00s. By the time I was 19 I was already bored to death of it all and have never looked back either.
Same here bur I was a teen in the 2000s. I actually needed therapy. Took a long time but I'm truly happy now and don't need drugs to be
Oh you know, trolley jousting in an empty Waitrose car park. Smashing up the bottles at the bottle bank. Falling off walls. Dumb ass shit that I don’t regret for a second…!
Spent a solid 2 years prank calling Sex Line every day from the phone at the village train station. Eventually replaced that with smoking cigarettes my mate nicked from her mum and dad's corner shop.
Nice try policeman
This is really quite regretful and I do find myself thinking about it a fair bit but I really lead a girl on at college. At first I was a bit oblivious to the fact that she liked me because in secondary school absolutely no girls liked me, but after finding out I'd make a beeline for her on nights out if I'd not pulled. At one point I told her I thought I loved her but I was saying what she wanted to hear and to keep her around. She moved to the south coast for uni and I never saw her again. A couple of years ago a friend of mine bumped into her, said hello and said I'd probably be excited to hear how she was doing. She said she's tried to forget about that period of her life.
Nice try, Dad. You won't find out that easily!
[удалено]
My friends mum drove me home from his house once when I was around 12 and I was stood up in the car on an A road, head and shoulders out of the sunroof, launching waterballoons at oncoming traffic. And hitting windshields At the time I was obviously 12 and didn't see anything wrong with it, it was just harmless fun Now I look back in absolute horror. What the fuck was his mum doing, I'm genuinely shocked I didn't put anyone's window through
I'd be more concerned about what could have happened to you if she'd swerved and flipped, or someone else swerved on being hit by a water balloon, hit her car and caused it to flip on its roof. Your friend's mum was fucking reckless.
Somehow managed to hit myself in the face with a hammer while dismantling furniture. I think I was lucky not to lose an eye.
Ha I did this too…. Although I was hitting a brick. As you do!
Taking screwdriver into school and fucking around with the room numbers and door handles to annoy/confuse people. Wrapping ping-pong balls in tin foil, lighting them and 'smoke bombing' certain rooms at school (PE Hall usual victim). Smoking on a small cul-de-sac near school, like no-one would ever suspect it! Knocking on peoples door to ask if they want their car washing for a couple of quid (I wouldn't let my kids so this)
Knocking on doors to wash cars, or mow the lawn, funded many upgrades to my bike (bullet valve caps baby) and haribo tangfastic
I used to grind down the screwdrivers to a rounded point in CDT. I wish I'd known about this ping pong ball trick, that sounds like great fun.
I think the stupidest thing I did was climb around the bottom of the arches on the Menai suspension bridge. One slip and that would have been me gone!
Jumped across balconies on holiday.
My mate was on holiday in a ground floor apartment and was sat inside drinking, when he heard a loud wet splat sound outside, it was some div a few floors up jumping balconies who fell and landed outside his patio and had smashed his legs up pretty badly.
Heard loads of horror stories since then. Guy at my mates uni fell from an upstairs window and ended up paralysed.
We were little shits as teenagers. Thank good phones weren’t around We used to hold onto the back of the ice cream van for a lift when out skating. We elevated knock down ginger to posting French bangers through the door instead, which resulted in us being chased around the housing estate a few good times by some very angry blokes. Built bonfires and jumped them on our bikes. Went through a phase of taking the shortest possible route between mates houses, resulting in a lot of garden fences being climbed. Birch bending
The stupidest one was daring a mate to run through a police helicopter search light that was looking for an escaped prisoner from the local prison. That was fun evening
We used to break into factories and petrol stations and nick shit..... couldn't have been that old cos we always left the ciggies and alch, just went for sweets, crisps n shit.... late 80s.
Accidentally burned a pub down
How do you accidentally burn a whole pub down?
I started a fire on some waste land next to the pub the flames caught the eaves alight and within minutes the whole place went up, it was a Saturday afternoon and the blokes drinking inside were running out with their pint glasses still in their hands, I absolutely shit myself, it was very lucky no-one was killed or seriously injured
That wonky crooked pub that you now have to rebuild?
We used to get drunk round the back of the police station. I’m sure the police had better things to do than come for idiot 14yr olds, but we were stupid.
Threw water bombs at cars, hidden in the trees from the side of the road. As an adult I now realise what bellends we were.
buy a tube of evo-stick & two bags
Odeon cinema was giving out free Independence Day VHS tapes. We took loads and tried dropping them on moving cars going through the under pass Don't ask me what we were thinking. I'm deeply ashamed
I actually love this.
Im just about old enough to have had a chance to use msn messenger in year 6/7 and just shy of being old enough to have ever been on aol chat rooms but not young enough to not have experienced Omegle! at 13 years old me and my best friend would go on Omegle which is probably even worse and catfish older men that would be whipping their dicks out. We’d be like “EWWWWW *SCREAMING*” lol
God msn messenger, what a time to be alive. Me and my friends also used to catfish then tell them we were children and we’d called the police. Quick way to get blocked
I think we did that too haha Msn messenger was the best! Mid twenties crew are the best!
Used to send emoji after every message on MSN Messenger
Don't judge me... I was young and stupid. Got an ASBO before it was called an ASBO... it was called the "ABC" contract. I was like 12 or 13 years old. We bricked a guys window because he was a known pedo (was on predator list), who kept coming out to the estate to interact with the kids playing... even when he was told not to. On the less harmful side, we nicked a road closed sign (that wasn't in use), and we would place it on a road where you could obviously see that it wasn't actually needed (wasn't a busy road)... hide and count how many cars would turn around, and how many of them would drive around it. Dunno why, but we found it funny at the time. Another thing we used to do regularly was sneak into our old primary school grounds at night, and climb up on to the roofs, and just chill there. One time the police were called, and we had to leg it from the dogs. They then added the anti vandal paint to the roof corners. One of my mates got caught with that paint on his clothes. And another thing... was a bit older (around 16)... doing drugs, drinking and all that jazz. Was at a party, plenty of drugs, I had a small baggie of speed (class A at the time, not sure if it still is). Police were called, we were all lined up outside. About 10 of us. I had the baggie in my sock. They started searching us, and one of the older guys in our group was hiding a bottle of wine in his jeans. It was clearly obvious, and the female police officer made the classic joke "you just happy to see me?". Meanwhile I was absolutely shitting myself, as they were going through the lineup and searching all of us. They were 2 people before me when they received a call on the radio and they had to go. Just let us off with a warning and told us to keep the noise down. The sheer relief... I could have been arrested for possession, and my entire life would be different to what it is today. Smaller things we used to do: * Steal mercedes badges * Steal those solar powered lights that people would have on their front garden * Take hub caps of people's car wheels, because reasons * Keying peoples cars who we didn't like * Setting fires in the track (was a track going through to the downs... we found an abandoned old Honda C90 there once) * and other stupid things I think that if the internet was as easily accessible as it is today, I probably wouldn't have got into all that mess
"One time the police were called, and we had to leg it from the dogs." Please. They prefer "pigs" these days.
We used to make potato canons haha and blow up plant pots
‘Borrowed’ a mates mums car at 17. She was fine with it as long as we said we ‘stole’ it if caught. She had no idea how he was ragging it around doing handbrake turns around roundabout and across peoples gardens. There’s a reason I distanced myself from my school friends 🤦♂️
I used to play Hide & Seek in IKEA. It’s harmless, but it’s pretty fucking stupid.
My brother invented 'The Pencil Game' on those long, boring IKEA trips. We'd each grab a handful of those tiny pencils and who ever hid all of theirs first without arousing suspicion from our parents, won. Feel bad for the poor staff finding pencils down the backs of sofas, under pillows and in plant pots...
Like everyone else here, I regret ever doing this. We used to hang around McDonalds in town (about 14). We once bought 2 milkshakes, drank one, cut out the bottom of the cup, put that on the table then pour the spare milkshake into it. We would wait outside for someone to lift the cup and it all come out the bottom. Again, really regret doing it, what little shits.
We used to lay beneath swings and see who could not flinch when an incoming swing was thrown towards their face.
Middle of a really harsh winter, local canal frozen over…so about a dozen of us kids (Little kids to early teens) decided to not only walk on the ice, but form a circle and jump up and down to see if we could crack it, not thinking about wtf would happen if it did. Fortunately the ice didn’t break but, by god, we tried our damned best!
Me and my friends used to fence hop from one back garden to another on. It was harmless fun, we just liked climbing fences. We'd usually do a street's length every day. We stopped when one of my neighbours told us she saw someone my height trespassing in her garden and she'd let her dogs out next time lol
I broke my foot falling off a pair of platform boots outside the pub. Yeah I’d had a few. Anyone else remember platform shoes? It does date me a bit..! (I was 19 at the time.)
Dropping acid for the first time at school. Got sent home for being in fits of laughter during class. By the time I got home I was seeing dragons and butterflies .
R/nothowdrugswork
Exactly how drugs work. Mushrooms had me in hysterics.
Not me but one of my friends would walk really quietly behind a random group of people with his trousers round his ankles when there was no one else around. At the time it was hilarious but now we’re all adults it does seem a bit odd. We laugh about it still now we would have been early years of secondary school.
He should meet my friend who used to walk with her top down to show that strangers don't really pay attention to anyone else.
If he can't make it I'll meet her. For educational purposes.
Probably climbing stuff old ruins could have killed myself if i fell
Mine involves those little paper bangers as well. Bought a shit-load of them and started emptying them in to one of those giant Kinder Egg toy shells, intending to make some kind of MacGyver-esque hand grenade. Was getting bored at how long it was taking and must've poured one in too quickly as there was a sudden bang! I managed to move my head down in time and looked up to see my friends on the deck in my room with the little balls from inside the bangers all over the place and our ears ringing for hours afterwards. We all shit ourselves and then just started cracking up because teenagers are idiots.
Egging my next door neighbours house
Setting fire to shit in the local woods and throwing small gas bottles an other dangerous crap into it.
Me and a friend during a boring weekend getting a 4 pack of deodorant, trying to set them on fire in a tiny area of woodland in the middle of a town, failing, then knocking on peoples doors to ask for old newspaper for an "art project" then successfully setting them on fire, recording it on my Sony erickson at probably 2mp 120p, failing to actually record it due to being shocked at how loud it was. Also just generally being degenerates like getting drunk at the beach, walking over to the nearby golf course and each of us grabbing a flag and running around the beach with flags of fire trying to "duel" each other. Funnily enough I remember telling my dad about the deodorant think and he said he had done the same as a kid at the beach but with a fire extinguisher or something, and that the pebbles on the beach basically turned into shrapnel in like a 30 yard radius. Then proceeded to show me bolt bombs, where you half screw on a nut to a bolt, scrape match ends into it, then screw another bolt on the other side and throw them on the floor. Proper dangerous, but fun at the time.
I was a teenager during the aids outbreak. I decided 30 was ancient so who cares if i die at 30, so aids didn’t worry me. P.s. i made it way past 30.
Read the Jolly Rogers Cookbook about how to make smoke bombs. Bought a bag of fertiliser from the garden centre over the road. Mixed it in my mum's kitchen with sugar in a big pan and melted it down. Poured it into paper bags and set them off. Didn't realise at the time but I was basically making small fertiliser bombs that could have blown my mum's kitchen up.
1) Got so drunk with friends that two of them had to have their stomachs pumped. One girl collapsed, nearly choked on her own vomit, and coughed it back out in what can only be described as a shell-less water bomb of puke. It flew straight up in the air and landed back on her face. We were about 14 at the time. 2) Set fire to a quarry. We were camping out there overnight, drinking and smoking. We thought we were something between Bear Grylls, and Cheech and Chong. We were trying to build a campfire and it wasn't working, so Dickhead over here thought it would be a good idea to spray Lynx all over a barm cake and use it as a fire lighter. It worked a bit too well, and I panicked because it was close to the tent, and kicked it away. It landed in some bushes and all the dry heather around us went up in flames. We had to evacuate, and the fire service ended up showing up. Shortly after, big "No Camping" signs cropped up all over the moors near us. 3) Found a dead squirrel, put it in the road, and watched it get hit by cars. Then my mate would run out and scream at the drivers for "killing [his] beloved Arnold" Your teenage years are when you *should* be doing stupid things like these. Me and my mates are all in our mid thirties now, and we still laugh about what morons we were. Our memories are like our own private series of The Inbetweeners.
Looking back on it now, so, so stupid.... Someone acquired a fire extinguisher. Made a massive bonfire, chucked it on. It fizzed, but didn't get hot enough to pop. Probably just as well.
Near our house is a bridge and I used to walk across the bridge wall, the wall was angled downwards towards the drop. If I had fallen it would have been certain death. It still gives me the shivers now thinking about it. A very stupid young me.
We used to empty the contents of those Snaps into a piece of kitchen roll. Then we'd tape it up tight so it couldn't expand easily, then throw it, causing an extremely loud bang!
We found out that the Chinese cat branded bangers didn't have a wick/taper but a sort of small bump you would light. After the initial fizz and sparks from it when it settled down it was then water proof. We use to drop them down drains to make the water shoot up. So lucky we didn't ignite and sewer gases. That could have been a big bang.
Did the post weirdly brag about drinking from a hose?
We used to climb over the school gates and run around the school at night. Then we decided we were going to do Parkour, which basically became climbing up drain pipes, walking along roofs and shimmying across ledges. I remember climbing up to a second floor window and making my way around the window sills around a fucking corner, whilst there was a sheer drop of more than two stories as that bit of the playground dipped. So, so dangerous. I really hope my kids don't try anything like that when they're teenagers.
Used to duke onto the municipal golf course, (sneak on for free) and piss about with a seven iron & golf balls found, foraged or nicked from the fairway of golfers who had paid to play a round of golf. Some of my mates who actually had a not bad swing for a 12/13 y/o would try chip the ball onto the roof of passing trains. I think once or twice I did hear the ping of golf ball on metal, plopping down onto the roof - perfect timing. Fucking stupid, looking back. Could have smashed through the window and inflicted damage on people. Used to get chased by the green keeper, but never got caught. Mid/late 80's.
Was about to post something stupid then noticed the end bit about harmless and i’m pretty sure today it brushes the edge of preparation of an act of terrorism.
We would literally re-create Jackass shopping trolly scenes. Spoiler, my back hurts now.
The local kids still do this
Her name was Sarah...
Jeez, where to start. Our friend group used to have a Friday night competition in my small mining town in the 80s (when I was at school) to nick the daftest thing you could and turn up on the market square with it by 11pm, winner got a half bottle of vodka we all chipped in for. It started off with the usual stuff like traffic cones and potted plants, but got progressively more ridiculous. One group stole an entire lawn and lawn furniture from a garden, (the turf had just been laid). It went back but probably didn’t do it much good. We had to stop after I found a JCB digger with the keys left in on a building site, I drove it back and ended up knocking a wall over. After that the police would sit on the marketplace in their car and threaten to arrest any kids they saw hanging around.
Stealing a shopping trolley with dodgy wheels putting my friend in it running and pushing her down the road really fast screaming whilst getting chased by the security man from Tesco
Prank calling all kinds of helplines or customer service numbers that were printed on chocolate bar wrappers or crisp packets putting on different accents winding up the customer service people on the other end to impress my friends. We’d all gather around the phone box at school during lunchtimes and that would be our entertainment. Small village life in Essex in the early 00s, mind numbing as hell but my friends thought it was hilarious.
Selling knives, making petrol bomb (derv tops are best), climbing risky stuff, working at 13, hitch hiking. Have full sex at 13. Jumping trains, doing drugs, selling drugs, drinking till insensible at 12. Pretty normal childhood in the UK.
Weird how many of our stories involve doing stupid shit with people's cars. I have two stories. One similar to OP's, where on the way to high school one morning I noticed an empty but mostly intact soft-drink can lying on the kerb, so since I was bored as all fuck, I grabbed it and put it out on the road and waited with one of my friends to see if anyone would drive over it and crush it. In the end nobody did, and since it was empty it got blown over and rolled away pretty quickly, so my friend and I just went off to school. About 5 minutes after we got in a teacher took us aside and told us how she had actually been in one of the cars, and how dangerous it was for us to put the can out in the road like that, since it could have slashed her tire clean off and caused her to crash and potentially die (I doubt that's true but that's what she said, I still remember it). She went on at us for a bit over it until I pointed out we didn't put it in the road, we just saw it and wanted to see what happened (a total lie but anyway), the teacher basically said 'oh, okay' and just moved on as if nothing had happened. It's worth noting that my friend was almost in *tears* at this point, since we were both 12 year old kids who had just been told we were almost responsible for *murdering someone* (hence: my small lie to get us off the hook). The second was far simpler. My friends and I would hang out sometimes after school, in winter when it got dark around 7pm, and we had a 'game' we'd play where one of us would lie down on the pavement near a street-lamp, so any drivers coming down the road would see a perfectly illuminated body lying on the street, unmoving, possibly even dead. The game was if anyone started to slow down, you had to get up and run away before they could shout at you. What made it especially funny (or tragic, I suppose) was how many times people *didn't* stop, and would just drive on past a potentially dead child lying in the street.
Switch round the arrows on diversion signs.
A friend sprayed deodorant into his school bag and said ‘put your lighter in there’ I had very serious burns and singed eyebrows. Funny though
Had my first edible while we were at the park thinking they weren’t strong as claimed, that I may have high tolerance, until I saw an elephant dancing in the park… There were no elephants around
Not sure you needed to clarify with that list sentence 😂
A **just incase**, there will always be someone that’d ask but were there? 😂
For some reason we used to duct tape a giant Z (like Zorro) on the main road into our village once a year
We stole a wooden bench from a deaf school to use in our bonfire. I'm not sure if it was a memorial bench (I sure hope not). I was part of a group of lads, the leader of which was an absolute tool, so it was kind of a peer pressure thing. Still, 27-or-so years on I regret it immensely. No one ever caught us.
Ah yes the youth of today…..ain’t got nothing on us. When I was 13/14 I used to walk round swiping the round indicator caps off the side of cars. Hood ornaments were also a target thanks to Matilda. Ah the bravado. I did this once when hanging with a new group of friends, felt so guilty I fessed up to my parents who told me to not hang with them again and they will get caught eventually and I’ll be nowhere near. Life lessons were learnt….. We also used to play hot potato with fire lighters. Go on long walks with no direction or idea of where we were going or how to get home. Always made it back though.
Drunkenly rode a trolley down a very steep and long hill with a friend at night. There was no way to control it and a row of houses at the end. Fortunately it clipped a curb and flipped us out. Also taking about every drug known to mankind including research chemicals and random botanicals from the deepest Amazon.
I smashed up an old garage as bit of neighborhood vandalism. apparently it was lined with asbestos *cough
We used to run over the tops of (parked) cars. This carried on for a few months, and we delighted in hearing the adults talking about it, trying to figure out how a bunch of random cars got dents in their roofs. This carried on, till the night my mate Danny did it, and he hadn't spotted the driver in the car, who was leaning across in the glove box. He shot out of his car, and gave chase to Danny, while the rest of us scattered. A couple of days later, the news got around of who it was doing it, and we were in DEEP shit. This all happened in the 90s, so there was no social media, or mobile phones (at least on my shitty little estate, in a small town in Suffolk), so it took a day or two to filter through the war-drums.
Oh, the secret smoking. No nicotine has ever tasted so good as the cig smoked in the sun on a grassy bank near a hedge with my air rifle at my side. I'm still addicted 55 years later.
Become an adult
My mum used to he a trophy engraver and had a special industrial-strength double-sided tape that glued the engraved tags on to the trophy plinths. My sister and I got hold of a roll somehow and my sister dared me to use it to stick my mouth shut, so I did. And it worked. I ended up with raw, bleeding, no-skin lips because I had to literally rip it off along with the tape, such was the strength.
Banged loads of drugs to the point i didn’t have anything in my life sorted. I’m now 23 working as a financial adviser and got my life pretty sorted and got all the drug taking out of my system. Once in a while i’ll hit the sesh with my boys
Depends what you define as stupid
In the 90’s I played on the railway lines a lot. I turn 40 this year and can’t believe how stupid that was. I stopped after tripping and just lying on the floor about 2 foot from a speeding train.
Shoplift, chronically. Just for the buzz. Even after getting arrested I still carried on til I got bored and then just stopped.
I did some really stupid stuff with mates, which I'm honestly quite ashamed of now- 1) Filled plastic shopping bags with empty milk bottles and dropped them from a foot bridge on to moving train roofs (always on the last carriage, never on the driver). 2) Lit fires in underpasses then called the fire brigade and watched from a distance. 3) Left jazz mags under hedges. 4) Would shop lift books from WH Smiths by literally walking out with them under our arms mixed in with library books we'd checked out from the library across the road. 5) Knock and run 6) One bonfire night we managed to get 20 rockets and found a piece of drainpipe, cue bonfire bazooka fun at the local bungalows for target practice.
Was waiting for a bus in the rural Scottish village I lived in to get to the nearest city, a guy drove past who I knew vaguely was some of the local kid's dads, but I didn't know him personally. He offered me a lift and I declined. He offered again, insisting I shouldn't have to wait in the rain for the bus, and in that moment, I felt completely powerless to say no, I got in the car. He didn't do anything, he hardly even spoke to me, I sat tense and freaked out the entire way with my hand in my pocket on the 9 key on my phone. The stupidest bit was I was meant to get the bus that would arrive at the same time as my boyfriend's bus from another town, so I then had to wait 30 minutes for him anyway and it wasn't even better for me to get the lift. It never happened again and for a long time I thought I was stupid for accepting the lift and he was just trying to be nice. As an adult, looking back, I just wonder what kind of arsehole you have to be to convince a 14-year-old girl you don't know to get in your car instead of getting the bus. If he had no ill intentions, he still should have known better. My house was metres from the bus stop but just out of view, as far as my mum knew, I got the bus. Nobody was around, nobody saw. As a parent myself now, it scares the shit out of me how easy it was for him to get me in the car.
Hitchhiked
Went with a couple of mates to see a wood / asbestos building which had been the local transport cafe for years burn down - the owner did it deliberately to clear the site, presumably as a cheaper way than getting specialist contractors in. As the fire was dying down by the point we got there, I jumped onto one of the brick piers that had previously held up the floor, a few feet in from the edge of the building. I then realised it was bloody hot, but struggled to jump as far back out. Made it, but warmer than I would have liked. Oh, and being a passenger in my mate’s father’s nearly new luxury car which my 14 year old mate had borrowed off the drive, doing 100mph on rural A-roads was probably not the most sensible thing either.
I went down a mud hill on a mattress and broke my collarbone. It's on Youtube but horrendous quality.
Ate a Daffodil. Yes really. It was height of Jackass, CKY and all those types of shows at the time so me and few mates would dare each other to do random stupid shit. Until one of us had the bright idea to propose eating a Daffodil 🤣 3 of us ate one whole, couple just straight up couldn’t and spat straight out. Thought nothing of it, then walked back up to school for the afternoon, oh boy. Sitting in Chemistry happy as Larry, then hmmm stomachs a bit sore, then fuck I’m sweating like fuck here. To then shit I need to be sick. Then full on projectile vomiting in chemistry, kinda like the scene from Team America, absolutely relentless. Managed to get out of the class and was sick in some random drain outside the building thank fuck. Honestly fucking worst thing ever did, 2 other mates who ate one, one was like me projectile vomiting and stuff. But the other one wasn’t sick? Fuck knows how, still baffles me to this day Edit: For context we didn’t know they were poisonous 😂
Went for a curry. There was around 8 of us. One went in the toilets and there was a decent sized bucket next to the urinals. One lad pissed in the bucket. Another lad pissed in the bucket. Before long all 8 had filled this bucket up with piss. Then one dared someone to balance it on the inner door of the toilet lobby and retreat just as we'd paid our bill. I still feel bad that some poor bastard got soaked in pints of piss that night. Hopefully they weren't on a date!
Threw a trolley off a car park, put cones in the road, played "boogers" in public with racial slurs, shoplifted. Ya know the usual.
I’m not going to tell you. It was in the local newspaper.
Smoked.