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Times you accidentally destroyed valuable crap

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Some great stories here, but you guys are no Bob_White .(

As for me, I was using the laptop on the bed when my wife and I decided to have a little tryst. It wasn't until we were done that we noticed we had sent the laptop flying during our little fits of passion. It was totaled.
 
Amir0x said:
I have one thing that immediately comes to mind. One day when I was very young my father had an old friend who collected cards and comics since he was a kid. He had a plethora of rare baseball cards in this stack too which I still have a lot of to this day. At some point he gave them all to my father. [snip]
my god
 
EricHasNoPull said:
That was years ago...and frankly I don't give the shit about it anymore, (nor do I keep in touch with my friend or her filthy rich douchey brother and his family) and now I think about it.. who the fuck puts fragile shit on top of a subwoofer anyway?
If you didnt break it, they would have.
 
Amir0x said:
Welp I don't think the comic was near mint - probably like 7.5 on CGC scale or some shit - but I know a few years back a near-mint version of it sold for over $150,000.

Edit: Scratch that, $210,000

Do you by chance have any of the other comics on that list?

You've probably already done this, but I'd check the rest of the collection for potential value.
 
littlerat said:
I was helping my grandma put everything up off the floor in preparation for the recent Brisbane floods. One of those items happened to be a coffee table with a marble top and solid wood legs. We though putting it up on top of a slightly less nice table would be a good idea, so we picked it up and proceeded to turn it over so it was legs up and out comes the apparently not actually attached slate of marble and breaks in two on the lower table.

The flood didn't reach the street at all (1974 flood apparently reached 2 meters in the same street).

The table is still usable, we just put the two bits of the slate back inside the ledge of the frame, but it still sucks now that there's a huge crack in it.

Pein said:
me and my cousin were moving his parents marble coffee table and we picked it up and the top just slid off and split in half. I didn't know that shit wasn't connected together.

??
 
A few years ago I had an iPod 5th generation 30gb. I wanted to buy a holder for my car, so I went to a store and tried out a couple few. Even one holder working with a magnet. I stuck my iPod on that magnet without a clue, not knowing that it was only supposed for navigation-systems or cellphones with flash memory.
Of course the magnet fucked up the iPod and it didn't work anymore.
I sent it to Apple and after a couple of days later I got a phone call from them. A woman from Apple told me that they couldn't repair it and want to exchange it for a new one. Unfortunately the don't have any iPods left with 30gb and she asked me if it was ok when they would send me an iPod with 60gb.
 
For a while I was housing a friend and one day when I came back from a long day of work, I threw my body onto my sofa-bed, and then the next thing we knew we heard a cracked, I looked under my pillow to find his ds, at first we couldn't see any damages on it and then I turned it out and bam the screen is fucked up. I end up replacing his ds for another one.

One time when me and my brother were wrestling and well I missed him and made a big hole in my bedroom wall
 
Although I don't remember breaking anything myself, the thread reminded me of this.

techtv-o.gif
 
In my graphic design course at school there was about four days left before our final project was due. We had to turn in the final plus new print outs/packaging/etc.. of the stuff we had already done throughout the semester. I was working in a lab trying to finish some stuff up just as it was about to close. I saved everything on my flash drive and left for another lab to get some more work done. Sat down, plugged in the drive and it was completely empty.

Spent the next couple days having to re-do everything to pass the class.
 
Sorry Amirox, but I just don't believe you. You sure it wasn't one of many many many many reprints? It just seems way too dramatic and unfortunate to be true.
 
UOTE said:
haha, ive done this before. the local connection wasnt working, so i clicked some magic button called settings and changed it to connect to different places untill it worked. california finally did. our bill was only $400 canadian, nothing close to yours, but parents were piiiiiiiissed
 
I was renting out a townhouse with three friends last school year. Was wrestling with one of the roommates and attempted to slam him into the door frame. He shifted slightly and ended up going through the wall. Through. The. Wall. It was an interior wall that lead from my bedroom to the hallway. Was close to an 18"x18" hole. Thankfully, his grandpa is a bad ass craftsman and managed to repair the whole thing, all I had to pay for were the supplies... and I bought him lunch. Makes for a fun story now.
 
I had a limited edition vinyl release of The Pogues 'Fairytale Of New York' that I stood on and broke in half. Not really expensive but it was something of sentimental value.
 
rhino4evr said:
Sorry Amirox, but I just don't believe you. You sure it wasn't one of many many many many reprints? It just seems way too dramatic and unfortunate to be true.

Obviously there's no way I'm going to be able to confirm anything like that so it's no point in trying. I had got the comic when I was like 6, then I didn't find out about its worth til I was like 7. That would be around 1991-ish. When I received the comic, it already seemed old. The guy had these comics for many years before we got them. I'm not sure when they issued reprints and there's no way my memory of the issue at age 7 would be clear enough to tell the difference anyway.

Anyway, it's fine if you don't believe it, there's no desire here to prove anything. It happened to me, and we certaintly interpreted it to be a high value comic. Whether we would have later found out it was a reprint is something nobody could say.

I know that some of the other comics we got turned out to be worth a little bit, as well as the rare baseball cards he gave us, but that's about as much as we'll ever know.
 
Do cars count? The most valuable thing I ever owned was the car I had in high school, but as a reckless teenager I ended up fucking it up major. The worst was when I crashed it into another car, accidentally.
 
I pulled my ram sticks out of my mobo while it was plugged in. Twice.

Had to get two mobo's replaced. For some reason I never thought that having it plugged in mattered, but apparently it does.
 
Amir0x said:
Obviously there's no way I'm going to be able to confirm anything like that so it's no point in trying. I had got the comic when I was like 6, then I didn't find out about its worth til I was like 7. That would be around 1991-ish.

Today I learned that I am the same age as Amir0x.

My father has been an art/antiques collector for years. He has 1000+ paintings in various places. Needless to say, when my brothers and I fought when we were young, many an antique was destroyed. I wouldn't be surprised if he lost a few grand from our antics.
 
I threw my ipod touch 32 gb in the wash by accident. :(

Edit: Oh, and not my fault, but two things happened with both cars I drove. A 99 subaru legacy gt's alternator failed on me while I was driving it, causing all the electronics to stop, abs, power steering, etc. It sucked. Then when I was driving a '01 bmw 740i the transmission died on me. None of them were really my fault, it was all just bad luck.
 
Every time something like this happens I play a little morality tale in my head like "you were going to be in a car accident that killed you but because your wife threw out your $450 pair of Mephistos by accident thinking it was your old New Balances in that box, you don't get in the car, and your life is saved--was it worth it?"

On the flip side I once used my mad-leet computer skills to recover one of my uncle-in-laws important documents. He was a psychologist who did evaluations of death row inmates so I had a little thrill thinking about the impact of that.
 
weekend_warrior said:
I broke a $500 laptop by snapping the screen off when I got pissed. I broke a Dreamcast by throwing it on the ground. I've also broken controllers, mice, keyboards, and TV remotes.
Those aren't accidents, that's you being a child.


I was putting together a PC once and didn't mount the motherboard off the case, immediately fucked it up when I powered it on. I've also accidentally soldered right through a board when I had it turned up way too high.
 
I don't have any major stories, but there was one that I thought was huge as a kid. I was probably 5 or 6 and I had detailed written instructions from my dad for doing the DOS loads of games and I was playing as normal. Something happened and I got my first equivalent of the BSOD. There were messages about memory loss and whatnot and I was so scared I had destroyed our first family PC. Of course it turned out to be no big deal, but I had a moment of intense fear.
 
I was playing with my dad's work Amiga with my babysitter, and wanted to try out the 2 player mode of Lemmings with her. (Why didn't they include that in any of the ports???) Anyway, I plugged a mouse into the second port.. without turning it off first. Toast. I seriously thought I was going to be killed when he got home.
 
About 7-8 years ago I Was going to return a CPU heatsink because the contact plate was slightly uneven causing my CPU to overheat... In a rush to remove it from the socket I used a butter knife instead of a screwdriver... It slipped off the clasp and decided to take a few vital components with it :( was a top of the line motherboard too

A year ago I bought a $200 pair of headphones, I was excited to listen to em - So I was going outside so I can relax and enjoy some music- they had a special flat wire or whatever... As I was putting on my shoes, I went to stand up and the wire got caught under my shoe... And it being a flat wire, it just tethered to the sole and ripped the cable right in two... Yay.

I'm really grateful that I haven't damaged much more than that

Funniest ones I was witness to:

My friend getting upset on one of the heavenly sword bosses, gets up and trips over the stool he was sitting on, launched it legs first into his $2000 fish tank...

And at a pharmacy I worked at... Called in some guys to fix a leak on the roof drain due to ice buildup... Their bright idea was to use a hammer to break the ice loose... The drainage pipe ran over top of the pharmacy and the force of the hammering dislodged the pipe and released tonsssss of water all over the pharmacies med supplies... $100,000 loss
 
Split soda all over a Commodore 128 about 3 hours after I got it (note, it wasn't brand new, we were poor, so it was pretty outdated). It smoked, and never turned back on. I read the fuck out of that manual, afterward, and the programmer examples book that came with it. I was so, utterly, devastated. For years. I didn't get another computer until 3 years later.

God just looking at the wiki article makes my stomach turn remembering how stupid I was. Ugh!

The best part about it, however? I have never had another high money value accident since. Life lesson, right there. And I'm serious. I've had monitors fall off of desks, and caught them in midair, I've had high value quartz vases fall and caught them, or deflected them so that they wouldn't break. I sat down with a camera in my back pocket and instead of fully sitting down on it, it immediately clicked what I was about to do, and I allowed my entire body to push my chair backwards and over just to preserve my camera.

Ahh, good times. I'm actually kinda OCD about high value items these days.
 
layzie1989 said:
i spilled a large cup of water all over my macbook pro...


The feeling of emptiness that overtook me can not be described.

I feel for you man. That shit ruins evenings.
 
Thanks to the spectacularly bad iPhoto '11, I lost about 2000 holiday photos and videos while transferring them off of my iPhone just Friday.

Upgrading to iPhoto '11 is up there with one of the worst decisions I've ever made.
 
When I was around 8, I threw gummies at my older brother (I don't even remember why) and one of the gummies got caught in a $1000 color printer as it was printing.
 
Oh yeah snapping stuff doesn't count, I remember snapping a disc of NBA 2K2 after someone saved over my game, which I had spent about 3 months playing (I used to play full seasons) and finally gotten far into the playoffs on high difficulty. I don't even think I was sad about it. I must admit it did kind of feel good.
 
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