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”
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.
Nothing extremely expensive. Just a DS. That, or an old Asus laptop I had that ran horrible windows 8. With the laptop, Best Buy geek squad had said how the best course of action would have been just buying a new computer rather than fixing it. Don’t remember all the damage, but it wouldn’t even boot if I remember correctly.
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…
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 pushed the largest TV off a window ledge at an electricals store because I wanted to watch the TV, so I put myself between the TV and the window. Obviously I’d never lifted a TV before and had no idea about their centre of balance. Because it wasn’t tied down properly the store was reprimanded and my poor mother didn’t have to fork out. I think I was around 4 or 5
An electric keyboard imported from outside of soviet block. I was too young and stupid to understand the power brick and conected it directly to mains. A shower of sparks tought me an important lesson about electricity and voltage.
Oh man, that reminds me of the time that I was trying to record a demo for my friends band. They had a PA system, and apparently the 1/4 cable that went from the main speaker to the other carried power. I didn’t know this. I plugged it into the sound card on my PC. I’m super lucky that all it did was fry my sound card. It died so fast.
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.
Some kind of fancy antique vase, a friend taught me to make a how to fold a really good paper dart and was throwing it all around the house and it hit it and knocked it over 😂
I know it’s not as expensive as some others here, but a basement window. I was a latchkey kid, and one afternoon I’d come home from school and taken the dog out for a walk. When we got home, some neighborhood kids showed up and we were playing in the backyard with the dog, and I didn’t get around to unlocking the house. And then somehow I lost my keys. I knew my folks would be furious with me for goofing off and losing my keys rather than doing my homework, so I was laser focused on getting inside the house. I took a pipe and broke a basement window, planning to climb inside, let the dog in, and then find a way to fix the window without my parents knowing. (I don’t remember what I was planning to do about the lost keys.) And of course, the minute I broke the window, they pulled into the driveway and saw what was going on, and I was grounded for like an eon after that. I’m in my 40s and they still bring it up now and then. My dad replaced the windowpane himself but he was too grumpy to show me how, lol.
I know it was different times, but if my kid was so afraid of not doing homework to the point of breaking into the house through the basement window, I would consider it a huge failure on my side.
Oh yeah, I hear ya - my mother had no chill. She flew off the handle over the smallest things. I moved out as soon as I could and was estranged from them for several years.
This was in the 90s or early 2000 when VR was non existent to consumers. During holidays visiting the US we ended up in this arcade center, probably in LA, where they had circled booths with an old FPS VR game that you play standing up. The headset looked like a helmet and was plugged from the top.
During my game, I turned on myself (360 no scope style) so much and always in the same direction that the cables got tangled and finally broke, probably with a little spark and some electrical sound. Game over.
As a French preteen, my English was bad and all I remember is the “shiiiiiiit” the worker said when he looked at the headset and cables.
I paid $5 USD as a kid to play this thing at the mall, which was a fortune to me, but I loved stuff like this so much I thought it was worth it. The game was so shitty I couldn’t even tell wtf was going on or what I was supposed to do. Just randomly floating through a sea of polygons until the guy said time was up.
My ex’s brother released the hand break when he was a kid left alone in the car for 5 minutes. Rolled into the wall of store his parents were buying groceries
A car window, or a record player would be it, I’m just not sure which cost more.
They were both accidents, though the car window was ab accident due to stupidity rather than a completely innocent act that went wrong.
The record player, I was just trying to play one of my 45s, and the arm snapped off. I don’t really remember applying much pressure, and I was about 5 or 6, so it wasn’t like I was a powerhouse. My dad didn’t get it repaired, so no clue what monetary cost would have applied. He ended up buying a better one second hand from my uncle, which was about 150 back in the eighties, so not cheap but not crazy either.
The car window was my dumb kid ass chucking rocks with my sister. Now, the dumb part was throwing them in the direction of the cars at all, but me and my sister were both pretty damn young, and I had no idea I could throw a small rock that far. Maybe the size of a dime. Wouldn’t have thrown that direction if I had thought I could hit anything.
Again, not sure what the actual cost was because my dad never said. But it was enough that he couldn’t make a trip to go to a wedding up north, so there’s that as a rough idea.
Other than that, I was not a destructive kid, nor a reckless one. Anything else I ever broke was genuinely something where it would have broken for anyone, or was just a result of a kid not having perfect balance and control. You drop shit when you’re a kid, but it was always minor stuff.
I broke my dad’s laptop by dropping it on the ground. I was pretending to work, with my parents right there.
But honestly, all the other little stuff that I broke combined probably cost more than that laptop. Recently I changed the battery of the clock and it immediately stopped working. It’s like I have the hands of destruction.
Laptops used to be better built back in my day. You used to open up the case, cradle it out of its straps, pull the analog wires to attenuate the device correctly, apply the friction resin to the input rod, and finally place it underneath your chin and play it.
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