Heh, now you may consider me silly after reading this story, but this is the one point in my life where I felt the stupidest and saddest. It's one of those things which literally had no repercussions whatsoever in my life but would the first stop if I ever got a time machine.
Context: I was young, 12-13ish probably. I leave by the seaside and I used to collect dead sea urchins. I collected all sorts of shells but sea urchins were my favourite. They're pretty and I had hundreds of them:
Now the big ones are fine and all that, but I loved me the small baby urchins. I had managed to find myself a few which were a few 3-5mm across, and I used to keep them in a little treasure chest which I had got from a Kinder Surprise.
Then, some time later, I found a secret! Underwater where I used to dive for them, there was a small sandy patch amidst all the rocky seafloor, and I used to find lots of these shells in there. One time I just dived in, and got me a random fist of sand and dirt, took it up to land and I, luckily, had found a tiny little sea urchin in there! Yay! Repeat process 3-4 times and I stumbled upon my prize. A small sea urchin, which was, I kid you not, less than 1mm wide. It looked exactly like a green/hollow piece of sand. Holy shit, this was instantaneously my most prized possession, together with 2 or 3 slightly (millimetrically) larger shells. So those go on some cotton balls in the aforementioned treasure chest, to be displayed proudly in my collection.
Fast forward a couple of weeks, and I realized I had a microscope somewhere (I've always loved science). Long story short, urchin goes under microscope and I crush the damn thing with the microscope itself while I'm focusing. I've never felt so stupid in my life.
