I suspect i might be the winner here. My friend had an alley behind his house along with a nice strip of open land near a busy road. Eventually a strip mall was built and then another large commercial building started to go up. Being basically behind my friends house we walked over to this new building on weekend to check out the construction site.

The building was being built with cement block and had lots of scaffolding and yet-unused block scattered around. I found a pipe-bender - a very heavy tool made out of high quality steel - and found you could just tap on of these cement blocks and it would shatter to pieces. I was fascinated, as were my friends. I have no idea how many cement blocks we destroyed over the next couple of days, but it was a huge number. Then we decided to see if we could go through a wall with the pipe bender… we could indeed, making a hole in the side of the building we could walk through. Looking around we eventually realized what we’d done was awful… we had decimated this construction site. We finally slinked away and come Monday when the crew returned, police were called and neighbors interrogated but thankfully with privacy fences all around, none of the neighbors saw anything. 11 and 12 yr olds are stupid.

Sigh…

When I was in the 3rd grade, our class had to do reports on countries around the world and we were all assigned a country. I got Egypt. Coincidentally, some friends of my parents had recently gotten back from a trip to Egypt. My parents asked their friends if there was anything I could bring in to use for my presentation. They let me borrow this little statue they got. It was an eagle with a hat, I think it was a depiction of Horus. It was carved out of some really nice white stone, maybe marble or something? I brought it into school, put it on my desk, and waited patiently to stand up and do my report. When I stood up, I bumped my desk, and the statue fell to the ground and broke in half.

Now monetarily this may not have been the most “expensive” thing, but it was the souvineer that this family brought back from Egypt that they had on their mantle to always remember the trip. It was priceless.

Why the fuck would you let a 7 year old bring your breakable souvineer to school for a class project?

Anyway, those people stopped being friends with my parents after that, so I have a feeling it was either expensive or meant a lot.

This hurts me to think about. Why did you have to ask this question?

ITT: kids with wayyyy too much time on their hands

• Latchkey kid

You guys could’ve fixed that! You’d just have to open it up to reset or replace the button and hit the Degauss in the settings (assuming it had the option)!

I also put our phone in a bucket of water. My dad asked me to hold it but I was already carrying a bucket of water so I just put it in the bucket.

I grew up in a very unorganized town that wasn’t really regulated with traffic laws. I learned to drive a truck at about 12.

When I was 14 I was driving my dad’s truck around town. I suddenly had the urge to see how well the brakes worked. I drove fast down a gravel road than slammed on the brakes as hard as I could. Within seconds it blew both front brake lines.

Later that same year in the winter I got the truck stuck on some ice. It wasn’t bad, I just happened to stop on a very slippery patch of ice and couldn’t move forward. I got the idea that as the tires spun, they were getting hot which meant it was melting the ice. If I did it long enough I would eventually get down to the gravel. I got impatient and spun the wheels faster smoking them like crazy while the engine roared. In the middle of the noise and smoke, a tire exploded and the truck jumped and deflated. I had blown out a tire.

Dad wasn’t happy with me for a long while because the truck went to the shop and we had to pay a lot of money to get them fixed.

At the very least, I never made these mistakes again.

I set the majority of my mother’s finest dresses on fire. I was very young. We had a powercut one night so we were using candles. It came back soon after, but i was still a curious boy with a candle in my hand. I wanted to go somewhere dark again so i went inside my closet and closed the door. My mom ran out of space in her room for her dresses so she put them on my closet. Only the stuff she didn’t use often so it had the worst and the best. They were wrapped plastic and i was fascinated by how the plastic shrunk when the flame got close. But eventually I got too close and actually set it on fire. How did i react? Got out, shut the closet doors and went to watch tv. It’s a miracle i didn’t torch my whole house

As a kid, I kinda had anger issues and would get frustrated easily. I broke the screen of my GBA SP by throwing it against a wall after not being able to solve a room in Mario vs. Donkey Kong. Similarly, I threw my iPod Touch on the floor after losing in a game called Bad Apples which broke the glass but the iPod itself still worked afterwards.

I really wish I still had that SP, as replacing the screen isn’t that hard. It even was a limited edition one as well…

My sister and I figured out that we could draw. On the windshield of our neighbours car. Using stones.

…

I noticed that the computer was magnetic and played with magnets around it. The hard drive was totally wiped. Now my parents could have reinstalled the operating system but they just got a new computer instead.

My kid stuck a big ol donut magnet on our TV and ruined the screen.

My dumbass was shooting marbles out of my paintball gun. Worked great, but I nailed a few windows on our neighbor’s car!

When I was a teenager my dad got a beautiful marble chess board. It was leaning on a wall, and when I picked it up it broke into two halves.

My dad was really sad and angry at me, that board meant quite a deal to him. He always thought I mishandled it, regardless how I said I was careful.

He died last November.

I got sent a few boxes with his belongings, and when I opened one of them I found that chessboard. It is glued with epoxy.

It sits in my apartment now, and I still don’t know if I want to keep it or get rid of it. One one hand it meant a lot to him, on the other hand it is one of the very rare things where I felt treated unfairly.

I once broke my neighbor’s sliding glass doors with rocks.

A neighbor kid and I were really stupid when we were 9-10 years old, and my next door neighbor’s house had been empty for a while because they rented it out. So we thought it would be a good of fun idea to go through the broken fence between our yards, and chuck the decorative rocks (pretty big ones, not pebbles) at the glass and make it shatter. We broke one open, and then another, then went inside to check out the empty place. We started to go at the third one when my brother came outside and heard the loud smashing.

Cops were called, in the end both of us were very apologetic and told them everything.

When I was around 12, I was learning about overclocking, and accidentally killed my dad’s graphic card, an Nvidia FX 5900.

I vividly remember launching The Sims 2 to test my overclock, when suddenly the screen started turning on and off (the video driver was probably crashing and restarting), and after I reset the PC, there were 2 green lines on the screen and XP was stuck in 640x480 16 colors because not even the basic display driver was able to load.

My dad was mad obviously because it was an expensive card, the damage wasn’t covered by the warranty, and he was into gaming too at the time. I was stuck with integrated graphics for about a month while we waited for the geforce 6000 series to come out.

I was so scared of overclocking after this happened, I didn’t try it again until a few years later years later when I had my own computer (and killed another card, a 9800GX2).