What's the most expensive thing you broke as a kid and what's the story behind it?
Mine was our CRT TV. I would rapidly push the power button on and off because I thought the picture coming and going looked cool but eventually it fell inside of the TV. I think I later stuck a magnet on the TV.
Not looking for Reddit answers like “My parent’s marriage”
My dad drive into our driveway with his brand new 1986 Porsche 944 Turbo. After showing me and my little brother, his brand new car, he then broke the news that our Christmas would be a “little light this year.” I put an entire bag of sugar in his gas tank that night.
His Christmas was a little light that year, the fuck.
Edit: Oh, hell yes, I absolutely told him I did it. On Christmas morning.
Edit 2: as an adult, I still think it’s one of the most awesome cars I’ve ever known (my fav car is still the BMW 2002, tho). He got a new one - the fuck - and I later learned how to drive stick in that car. He has still never forgiven me, although I have still never forgiven him for what he did then or in the decades following. We haven’t spoken in years.
As the years go by, I only grow more proud of my 6 year-old self for punishing that selfish fuck for putting himself before his kids/family. And I’d do it again in a heartbeat. Also, my mom laughed about it at the time and always has since.
the garage. I was 6 or 7, my mom was undergoing a major health situation and the medication wasn’t doing her mental processes any favors. One morning she was running late and so asked me to start her car. I’d never started a car in my life, I had no idea what to do and I couldn’t reach the pedals so I asked my younger sibling to help out. I stayed on the floor and operated the pedals, my sibling was in charge of the key.
mind you, this was a stickshift and it was parked in the driveway, facing the garage door.
I have no idea what we actually did, I only remember the crashes as we went through the garage door and through the back wall. The front of the car now blocking the alley, we yanked the key ran to hide because we had just taken down a fucking building ruined mom’s new car, and thought we were going to be killed. Of course she instantly realized what happened and knew that she was at fault so when she found us we were of course in no trouble; but man, what a ride that was…
A motorcycle back in the late 90s when I was like 9 or 10?
We were at a dealership because my dad was thinking about buying a motorcycle. At one point, they put my younger brother on a motorcycle because it was cute or whatever. After they took him off the bike, and my parents and the salesguy moved onto another motorcycle, I wanted to try. So I did. And I tried to be careful, knowing it could fall over.
Getting on was no issue. And getting off was no problem either. Until I was like a few feet away from the bike…and it fell over. Shattered the windshield.
Even though it was an accident, the dealer tried to get my parent’s to pay up. And I think my parents would’ve been willing to pay something…except the dealer wanted, I believe, $800. The bike was probably only a few thousand bucks – I actually have no clue how much the bike was, but, as an adult, I know how much bikes are. No way a windshield was a third of the price of the bike. Not in the 90s, not today. So my dad and the dealer got into a shouting match. We left, and the dealer tried to get our license plate number as we drove off.
Nothing ever happened with that. No cops were called or anything, as far as we know. Besides, the dealer should have insurance for these situations. But since I wasn’t supposed to be on the bike in the first place…I got in tons of trouble. Got my ass beat by my mom, got grounded, couldn’t go to a sleepover I was supposed to go to…
Definitely the most expensive thing I broke. At least based on what the dealer was demanding.
Not sure, but if the windshield shattered there’s probably damage to other parts too. If the bike had side farings those would probably crack too and need to be replaced. If not, the engine could have touched the ground, and replacing once of the sides of your engine isn’t cheap either.
The handlebars could be damaged, the forks could be out of whack. Everything needs to be checked to make sure it’s still safe to drive.
800 dollar may not be the damage that was there, but if you take into account the hours the mechanic has to spent checking and fixing the bike, the bill adds up quickly.
Source: dropped my bike. Around 1200 euro damage. That was not a fun experience.
Oof. Sorry to hear that happened. Vehicle repairs suck.
I do remember my parents talking about $800 for the windshield specifically, but maybe they were just simplifying out of anger. With the dealer, with me, whoever. It very well could’ve been the estimate for the total damage. I can certainly imagine some dents and scratched paint. And yeah labor is often the highest cost.
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.
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?
I really, really liked disassembling stuff, and then not knowing how to reassemble. The most regrettable thing I disassembled was probably the Wii U. It would be nice to still have one, but I also really don’t feel like buying one, so, yeah.
My grandparent’s desktop computer. I didn’t break the hardware, but i set the default font size in windows 98 to some ludicrously high value. That made it so large the OS became unusable and the dialog to change it back was also unusable. Probably a quick terminal command would have fixed it within a couple seconds but I wasn’t old enough to understand that and my parents weren’t very tech-savvy.
That reminds me of when people would enter a keyboard combination to flip the screen of the computers at school. I think the IT department ended up removing those computers.
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.
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…
I broke a microwave when I was little because I didn’t know I had to remove my fork from my plate of broccoli, then proceeded to accidentally break the garbage disposal trying to dispose of the broccoli because I didn’t know broccoli couldn’t go down the disposal.
Certain materials found in foods, such as an overabundance of fiber, clog and damage the blades in the garbage disposal. Broccoli is at the top of this list.
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.
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