Have you ever had a moment where you thought, “Wow, this idea is so crazy, it just might work”? Well, you’re not alone! We’ve all been there, and in this corner of the internet, we celebrate those wonderfully absurd moments when dumb ideas somehow turned into strokes of genius. Whether it’s a spur-of-the-moment decision, a wild experiment, or just a plain old goof-up, the stories we’re about to share will leave you laughing, scratching your head, and nodding in awe.
Back in the flip phone days, I had dropped mine and the screen stopped working. I could make and receive calls, but the screen was just completely blank. I put up with it for a couple of weeks because I couldn’t afford a new phone, but one day I had the thought “Well, if dropping the phone made the connection loose, maybe the same thing can fix it” and threw my phone at the ground. I picked it back up and the screen was working.
Was really REALLY desperate to leave my past employer after 15 years. Had been applying and interviewing and striking out. Finally got an interview at a place where (at the time) I felt, “Meh, I am not really sure this is right for me, but anything is better than where I am at.”
Instead of prepping for the interview, rehearsing answers, etc…I pulled an “office space.” I was cocky, brash, unconcerned, made it seem like I was happy where I was at and didn’t really care if I got the job or not.
They called me back the next week and I waited a week to return their call. Same deal with the second interview. When they offered me the job, I hemmed and hawed, said I needed to think about it really hard, and that it was a “big move” for me, etc., etc. I came back and demanded well over $15,000 above what they were offering in salary. They accepted.
Real estate told me I had to have the carpets professionally cleaned (which wasn’t in the contract) or I’d lose my $800 bond.
I did some research and found out I could become an accredited carpet cleaner as there are no official licensing boards in my state.
So, I did what any sane person would do. I paid the $85, did the online course and got my certificate. Registered a business name, ABN etc etc. (all free)
Handed the property management a copy of my accreditation and an invoice for services.
I became a professional carpet cleaner and launched a vacate cleaning business that is still going 6 months later.
When I was in the Coast Guard, I was rearranging my room in my apartment and had set my TV on the edge of the bed. While I was moving my desk, I heard a loud thump and turned around to see that my TV had fallen off of my bed and was sitting face down on the floor. I picked it up and turned it on and the screen was just blue and wouldn’t do anything else.
I sat there for a few minutes wondering if I could even afford another TV before the dumbest idea hit me: “Maybe if I sit it back on the edge of my bed and give it a slight nudge to land face down again, it will bump everything inside back into place and fix it.” I laughed at myself for even thinking it but then was like “Well, the worst case is that it still won’t work.”
So I did it.
I hopelessly plugged it back in and to my surprise, it turned right on and worked just fine again.
I still laugh and shake my head every time I think about it.
I stuck my neck out for an ex-con on house arrest at my job. He interviewed well, but his availability was HORRIBLE between the ankle bracelet and meeting with his PO, drug treatment program, etc. My GM said “No” and I said, “I’m doing it anyway.”
The FIRST night he worked there, I found myself in a bind. He was the ONLY person scheduled in the kitchen from 8-10p, and I had no one who knew the kitchen besides myself because our store had a wicked virus traveling around.
I told him “Look, dude, we’re pretty f*cked back here, and I’m going to try to keep my cool but I can’t promise… And because I’m the only manager on duty, I might have to run to the front/drive-thru.”
Well, this guy MASTERED production in about an hour. He was faster than my GM on the grills and fryers, and his attitude was so good. I waited on NOTHING and he even tried to help me make sandwiches and send them out. He also managed to clean up the entire kitchen.
He eventually moved to maintenance and fixed all the crap the previous guy ignored in a DAY. Then he moved to service for more hours when the hour restrictions came off and was GREAT with the Karens.
My GM got over the ankle bracelet, record, and tattoos, and actually hired him for his house-flipping business.
All because I said, “We need f*cking employees, and you can’t be picky when he’s the only guy I’ve interviewed in a month…”
In university, I was late on an assignment that was supposed to be in my T.A.’s drop box by noon that day. I didn’t manage to get there until almost 3 so I was sure he had already emptied it.
Now, the drop boxes were literal boxes in cubbies with a slot on the front and a lock on them that prevented them from being pulled out. The rack holding them was just a basic metal frame with about 5 rows of boxes. My T.A.’s box was somewhere in the middle of the shelf.
So I figured, “I’m late anyways, why not take a chance?” and slipped my assignment into the box below my T.A.’s box.
I got my assignment handed back a few weeks later than everyone else and it had a note from another T.A. scribbled on it that said “Looks like this fell into my box by mistake.”
I got full marks on the assignment.
In college my buddy and I took an investing class and for one of the projects we had a month to “invest” fake dollars into the stock market and see which team would have the most money after a month. It was spring semester so we put all of our fake money into Heinz, thinking there would be a spike in ketchup and mustard sales as the weather got warmer. The next day, Berkshire Hathaway purchased the entire Heinz company and the professor accused us of insider trading. We had no idea what we were doing
In college I was taking a class that required me to purchase an online textbook and workbook that was registered under your name, basically ensuring that each student would have to buy a new online copy each semester instead of buying used textbooks. I had a friend who took this class a semester before me so we came up with the idea to message customer service and explain that I had recently gotten married (so my last name had changed) and I legally changed my first name from [my friend’s first name] to [my first name] and I would need them to change it in their system. It totally worked and the rep even congratulated me on my marriage.
In my senior year of high school, we had to spend our final quarter doing mandatory volunteer work to graduate. I was placed at a Head Start in my city, and while some of the kids I worked with were great, there was one, Brandon, who was an absolute nightmare. 20 months old, endless energy, no empathy, no speech beyond a few words, and no ability to recognize pain in other children. At nap time, someone always had to be sitting next to his cot, as he would otherwise just get up and run around, sometimes hitting the other sleeping kids, if he could get away with it. He would be a spiteful little sh*t and repeatedly stick his feet out from under his blanket after you pushed it back in like it was a game.
One day I got so frustrated trying to get this brat to sleep that I basically just laid him down flat, arms and legs together, and closely tucked his blanket in under him from top to bottom like a burrito. To my shock and delight, he made no attempt to escape and was asleep within two minutes. I repeated this tactic over the next few days with the same results. It worked. Brandon would sleep. Brandon would actually f*cking sleep. One of the actual teachers/workers there saw this one day and asked me what I was doing. I explained the process, but she was skeptical until I showed her just how quickly Brandon would chill out. I swear, her face lit up like a Christmas tree,
I forgot to bring a resume to a job interview, but I had an index card in my bag. I cut the index card in half and wrote my name, my contact info, and “creative problem solver” in my best handwriting, and gave a copy of my “business card” to both the interviewers.
I got the job.
I was working as an art director at an animation studio, making videos for clients. One client was especially pesky about the use of yellow in the background. They wanted it to be that of their logo, which was this horrible neon-piss yellow. We advised against it, but after numerous calls, we had to cave and gave a version with that colour. They hated it and asked for a change. What followed were 12 versions with numerous calls in between tweaking the colour over and over.
Eventually, I got tired of it and just sent the original version again, I didn’t even bother to rename the file. The client said, “This looks exactly the way I wanted, thank you“!
How that ever went right I still have no idea.
Years ago I remember applying to a bunch of copywriting jobs and feeling frustrated because I wasn’t hearing back from any of the places I was applying. It was especially frustrating because I was putting in all this time on cover letters and I felt like nobody was even reading them, so I said, “F*ck it, I’m gonna write one that is ridiculous, that is more me.” I absolutely thought it was a dumb idea and never imagined that it would work, but somehow it did.
I applied with this cover letter and the subject line “Copywriter: Will Work for Beer” to a job that I was underqualified for. It managed to catch the eye of the headhunter for the ad agency and was enough to get me an interview. Shortly after that I was hired and ended up working there for a few years.
However, this probably wouldn’t work everywhere, but it fit the culture of the agency. Plus the job listing said that I would be working for beer brands as clients and that free beer was a perk of the job.
In my freshman year of college, my grades were really not great. And my parents were really strict about getting good grades. When my dad asked to see my grades, I panicked and did the inspect command on the computer where you can change typefaces on the screen to read different words and letters. I changed all of my sh*tty grades to good grades. My dad was so happy that I did “good” in my first year of school. He asked me to print my results. I did, and turns out he had to send them to our car insurance company for a “good student discount”. Ultimately, I committed insurance fraud by accident. But I got the discount.
I am very anti-social and don’t get along with people, don’t go out and dread to talk to anyone. School trauma, I guess.
So I moved into a house with 9 strangers as flatmates to force myself to interact with people.
So far I enjoyed living there. I am no longer afraid of talking to them, met many nice other people who even like me. One dude let me draw on his face after he came without a costume to the Halloween party and was so happy. He even recognised me a week later, shouted my name and hugged me. Others complimented the gunshot wound I made. They really care about what I did and do. They are nice and I like them.
So it was my mom’s birthday: we’re barbecuing and we got her to stay inside and prep food so we can decorate the front with balloons and streamers and what have you. Well, we got the whole thing done in secret as hoped, but then we realized there was no way we could get all the leftover decoration material and balloon pump inside without her noticing.
Now there are two ways into our house: the back door that leads into the garage and then into the kitchen where mom was, and the front door which is visible from the kitchen sink. So, I told my brother I would go in from the back door and distract her while he brought the stuff in through the front, and down the hall past the kitchen
Once i got in the kitchen it had occurred to me that I had no plan of attack so I legit just said “Hey mom look at this dance I made” and started like swaying and bopping up and down and doing jazz hands and going “lalalala”. Mind you, I’m like 17 years old in this scenario.
So she’s just watching me and when Bro comes in and is sneaking through the hall behind her with all the stuff, i keep telling her “Wait it’s about to get good” and she kept watching in confusion. The second he was in the clear, I stopped and said “OK That’s it” and that was that. We succeeded.
My work had an employee cafeteria where lunch was $1 and the food was actually pretty good. I was a freshman in college and $1 was something that was better used for ‘you-call-its’ rather than lunch. They had these punch cards you could buy that had ten meals on them for $8.
In looking at the punch card, I realized it was just printed on normal card stock. I bought one, took a picture of it (did not have a scanner) and imported it into a graphics program. I then made 10 versions, all with different serial numbers. I printed out hundreds and passed them out to my friends at work.
When we used 9 meals, we would throw it away so the serial number wasn’t tracked. We would always buy random employees their lunch for them, out of the goodness of our hearts. Whenever I got low, I would just print out more. We used them for nearly two years, netting in at least a few thousand free lunches.
Me and my friends wanted to get into this fancy expensive club but it was sold out (plus very expensive). We got into the club next to it for free, and there was a hallway connecting it to the other club. We sweet-talked the bodyguard saying that this party sucked bc it was empty and we were ripped off (we hadn’t even paid to get in) and to please let us cross the hallway into the other club.
He freaking agreed. We were all shook and had a really fun night at that fancy club without paying at all.
So I work in the luggage claim department for a major airline. All day I get to hear customers yelling and complaining. What I did was borrow one of the wheelchairs from the airport and sit behind my desk all day long. Customers come in all angry see me in the wheelchair realize they are about to yell at a guy who is possibly crippled and all of a sudden they turn into the nicest people. Physically my blood pressure has dropped and in general, I’m in a pretty good mood most of the time
In college I was driving my friends around, annoyingly honking the horn to the music — all of a sudden blue lights. I tell the guys in the car to let me handle it. Cop walks up and asks “Was that your horn” and I said “Yes sir – there’s a short in the horn, so I’m actually going home right now and just disconnecting it until I can figure out the issue”- cop says “ok you do that.” — So I start the car and immediately lay on the horn and get right back to holding the beat with the music and drive away. He followed me for about half a mile before turning off.
I used to work in a camera store that sold warranties. No matter how the camera broke, they would fix it or replace it under the warranty.
The only problem was that the store would ship off the camera to be repaired, sometimes for months, up to five times before replacing it.
So, let’s say your battery cover breaks off. You ship it off and six weeks later it’s back. But, it’s really a brand defect, so, the cover pops off again. They won’t replace the whole piece or give you another camera. You’re out of the camera for months while it’s being fixed. They keep selling the defective camera and the warranties.
I got tired of f*cking over customers. I thought it was dishonest.
I read the contract myself and found an interesting clause. If the camera was so physically damaged that it was obvious it couldn’t be fixed, we could take a pic of it and send that instead. The person immediately got a new camera.
When people would come in with a camera with a defect I’d seen 100 times, I’d ask if they just wanted a new one (the next model up, without the defect). They’d say yes and I’d tell them to take it out into the parking lot and run over it with their car. I’d pile the pieces on the counter, take a pic and give them their new, non-defective camera.
I slept fine.
I got a speeding ticket when I was 17 and was sentenced to ‘teen court’. The penalties were various community service jobs you could choose from. I was sentenced to 90 hours of community service. One of the jobs was at city hall scanning paper documents and then shredding them (this was in 1997). I was only working on documents that were not sensitive like various old budgets and stuff, but the sensitive documents were just on another shelf in the same room.
After about an hour I found my speeding ticket record, shredded it, and left. Never heard anything else about it.
Back in the day in high school, we had our “huge” junior term paper to do. Our teacher absolutely required that we have some ridiculous amount of like 100 note cards all with individual quotes on them, and citations from the numerous sources we were supposed to have collected and read for this research paper. Most of us in the class hated this teacher and she hated most of us, I think.
None of us were actually making the 100-note card citations and keeping them in little boxes, and then organizing them. It was ridiculous. So when the note card deadline came up in like February or whatever, almost no one had all the note cards. I got busted in class for not having them and she called my parents and told them to talk with me because she thought I was a druggie burnout who didn’t do anything. Actually, I had done like 50 legit cards.
But one kid in class had made zero note cards. The night before he just made up a sh*t-ton of quotes and fake names and put them on cards and put them in his box.
The teacher thinks he’s a goody-two-shoes, so pulls out his box from the pile in front of the whole class, flips to a random card, and reads the quote, which is 100% made up the night before. It was something like: “We are the Molemen, we must make it over that hill. We are the greatest warriors to ever live.” – General Mole (1942). We were all like, ‘Oh sh*t, he is f*cked.’
Teacher raises an eyebrow, ‘General Mole,’ Jonathan? And I sh*t you not, without skipping a beat kid replies: “Yeah! You mean to tell me you don’t know who General Mole is? One of the greatest French generals in World War 2?” And she’s like ‘Oh,’ puts the card back in the box, and moves on to the next person to bust.
What a b*stard. We all hated him for that sh*t, ’cause he didn’t do any of the work we were supposed to. But I still respect him for f*cking pulling the wool over that lady’s eyes so easily. Wish I could b*llsh*t like that…
I have a terrible stammer/speech issue due to my mother taking phenobarbital while I was still in the womb. This caused me to have stammering and word-mixing issues after I was a pre-teen. I have always enjoyed singing and acting and I would constantly pretend I had different accents for as long as I can remember.
One night I was in my own little world and I noticed I wasn’t stammering with my words when I was alone, or when I was singing. I also noted that I am not nervous talking to other people, it’s more that I am frustrated that I can’t be understood well.
This is when I put everything together and decided I would try to talk with a light accent to see if I could speak normally. I practiced my best James Bond accent because why the heck not, put on my coat and went to a Friday night party to see if it would work.
It actually worked pretty well, I was able to clearly be heard and understood and I have been doing it ever since. A couple of months later I did some research on why this works. It turns out that when you sing, or act like making an accent, for example, you use a different part of your brain than what you use to speak. My stammer, stutter, and word mixing are completely gone now, what’s replacing it is this mixture of different accents that I mashed together.
When I was in vocational college (about 19 years old, mid-90s), it was split between 1 – 2 days in school and the rest in the company. However, I had to work a second job to make ends meet, and what we did in school wasn’t really bringing me forward. So I developed a habit of skipping most of the school days, valuing some sleep over the useless BS we did there. In my second year, I went to school only 5 or 6 times in the first half.
As a background: being expelled from school would mean being fired from the company as well. No one noticed until then, so I didn’t care until I was catched.
Our head teacher, who also happened to be the secondary principal of this school called me into the office and explained that based on my missed days, he was about to terminate the whole thing and call my boss about it.
Without spending a single thought on it, I asked him: “So I haven’t been here for half a year and you guys noticed just now? I might have f*cked up, but you did even more. I am looking forward to seeing my boss hearing this.” He went silent immediately, and in the next minute we had a gentlemen’s agreement: I wouldn’t skip days anymore and they would forget the whole thing.
I finished the school about two years later.
I sprained my pinkie finger and it pointed at a pretty awkward angle, so despite excruciating pain over a couple of days I kept binding it toward my other finger to straighten it. I was told by doc it would go back when the swelling went down.
A week later I got it x-rayed, turned out the doctor misdiagnosed and the f*cker was broken by a spiral fracture. It was too late since it had already mostly healed but since I partially corrected it myself it’s not too bad now.
I went to Tokyo for the first time many, many years ago, long before smartphones with GPS. I was visiting friends who wanted to take me to a Taiwanese Buddhist vegetarian restaurant somewhere in the middle of the city. We got off the subway, started walking around, and soon realized we had no idea where we were going. After more than half an hour of wandering in circles, we were hungry and ready to give up. Then I saw a man with a shaven head and orange robes. “Aha!” I shouted. “That is probably a Buddhist priest. It’s dinner time, so he’s probably going to dinner. Let’s follow him because he’s probably going to that restaurant.”
So we followed him for five or six blocks, and he did indeed walk into the restaurant we’d been searching for. Tada! My dumb association of Buddhist priest to Buddhist restaurant worked… even though this man could’ve been going anywhere.
When I was a kid I REALLY did not want to go to school one day. I told my mom I was feeling sick even though I was fine and before she brought me the thermometer I fired up the torch on my old Sony Ericsson phone. I put the thermometer on there and voila, 39 degrees Celsius, that was enough to keep me home for the day. Or so I thought. Mom got worried and took me to the doctor. I was stressed out because I knew that I was completely fine. Well well, how the turntables, the doctor found out I was actually not okay and had some sort of throat infection. She told my mom to keep me home for two weeks. So there I was, feeling absolutely fine, doing nothing but playing Assassin’s Creed for two weeks straight.
When I was in high school I had a Spanish teacher who was nuts. Old lady who spent her whole day looking a fashion magazines. Every night she would give us pointless busywork of taking home 50 words in Spanish and writing each one ten times, which translates to having to write 500 words every night and wasting like 10 pages of paper. One day, while I was watching her grade them in class I saw she was simply reading the name of the top and writing it in the grade book as being received. She was going too fast to actually be reviewing the work, so I put it to a test.
Every day I turned in the same exact homework, the same words from a random night I had done in the past. Every day she gave me credit as if I had turned in a new assignment. I got by every day having to do no homework and never got caught. Even if I had I could have pulled the old, “Oops, I must have grabbed the wrong one off my desk this morning.” excuse.
I had been unemployed for almost two years and gotten pretty d*mn desperate for any kinda job, so I said to heck with it and started going completely nuts in my cover letters.
Instead of trying to come off as a responsible adult, I started writing like a maniac. I wrote lyrically about my enthusiasm for whatever it was I was applying for, be it fast food service or telemarketing, warehouse work or sweeping floors, I made it sound as if it was my lifelong dream.
I went on long tangents about having seen a member of job x or y, and being deeply moved by the inherent nobility of their work or some routine task I’d observed them performing. The elegant movements of a floor sweeper, the grin of contentment on a groundskeeper having finished pulling up weeds, the joy of being part of a flawless chain that is the warehouse worker fetching a box for delivery or packing stuff into boxes.
And somehow that landed me a job. I had given some almost insane spiel about how cleaning hospital wards was as if serving at the feet of the saints who were the doctors healing people, or something like that, and I was for some insane reason called in for an interview.
And during the interview, I kept that up, of course, because if that had worked to get me this far, maybe that’s what they wanted? I’d have sacrificed a live chicken at the interview table at this point if I’d had the slightest inkling it’d get me employed.
And it just worked, for some daft reason. The guy on the other side of the table must have been desperate at this point, or half asleep or something, but I got the job.
Looking back at it, I have no idea why that worked.
After a meeting, I told my boss the visiting manager was hoping to go to my favorite Chinese restaurant afterwards.
Then I told the visiting manager my boss wanted to go to the restaurant.
They talked to each other, agreed, and we all went to my favorite place.
Easy.
One time, senior year of high school, I came home around 5 a.m. after staying out all night. I hadn’t slept, so my eyes were super groggy and red.
I was supposed to be staying at a friend’s house up the road but was with some other friends in a town over.
My mom wakes up at 5 a.m., so I knew I’d have to face her.
I took red lipstick and used it on my lower lash line as eyeliner. Did a little dab right in both of my eyes, also.
I told her I woke up at my friend’s house and that her mom sent me home because I must have major pink eye in both eyes.
Stayed home from school, got some sleep, and even the DR thought I had pink eye.
I used to work at a restaurant that would track our tip percentage, but not too much else of our activity. The amount of tables we got per night would be based on our tip percentage, and there was also a regional leaderboard.
We were allowed to buy food from the restaurant, but we couldn’t ring ourselves in. Which led me and my friend Jim to our greatest discovery.
We would buy a side of mashed potatoes from each other, a $2.00ish side, and pay with a credit card. We would then tip each other 10-12 dollars, a 500-600% tip.
We would do this every so often, not enough to be ridiculous, and within a few months we were the top servers in the entire region, with an average tip percentage of over 30%, thereby granting us some kind words from management and the most tables per night of the whole restaurant.
Not mine, but my ex-husband husbands very dumb idea… when we were getting married I knew I wanted lilies and I am close with a woman who does amazing fake floral arrangements so I wanted to use her and make sure everything looked perfect.
I had found this deep pinkish orangish Lilly (real one) in a shop and took a picture because it was gorgeous and I wanted my flowers to match)
My florist was really struggling to find a fake lily that matched this gorgeous color and she couldn’t find a place to buy bulk real lilies in this color…. cue my ex saying “Can we just buy white lilies and paint them the right color?”
I start making fun of him, like “yEaH, lEtS pAiNt ThE fLoWeRs”
The florist is like, “You know that is actually brilliant, I’ve never tried that before”
So she painted each Lilly to be the exact color I wanted and they looked amazing, everyone thought they were real.
I was doing a series of training videos for a client. They always wanted an element of comedy in what they were doing. I would send scripts, and they would always have weird things singled out for me to revise in the scripts. I would make the changes and we’d move into production.
But no matter how much I tried to learn their tendencies, I couldn’t write something that they didn’t want to pick apart. I guessed that they just felt the need to change something. To test this theory, I tried adding one patently inappropriate joke into the next script. They rightly pointed out that we couldn’t use that but said they loved everything else.
So that’s what I did from then on – add one joke that was so weird, so inappropriate for a corporate culture that they HAD to say something about it. And they left the rest of the script alone. Every time.
When I was 13 I was caught doing graffiti by the police. I didn’t know what to do so I pointed behind the officer and said “Why am I in trouble and he gets away Scott free?!” The cop turned to look and I bolted as fast as I could and actually got away.
There was nobody behind the officer.
We tried fostering a dog a few years ago and the second we got to our townhouse it jumped out of my arms and took off. We spent days putting up posters and to our surprise, we got several calls from people saying they had seen him around the area; this tiny Chihuahua had survived almost a week dodging heavy traffic and countless city hazards. Each time we got a call we would rush to the location and a few times we spotted him before he disappeared. We had the police helping and everything, but it was useless. We had almost given up when we came home and saw him outside. He must have been able to smell his crate, even though he hadn’t ever even been inside. We had all of our friends block the exits to the complex, but that little basted dodged me and slipped under the gate into the night.
The next day I set a trap. I put a hotdog on the enclosed patio and ran a rope from the gate back inside the door. I sat there for at least two hours peeking through the blinds with the rope clutched tightly like Wile E. Coyote. My wife thought I had lost it, but right when I was about to give up ‘Paco’ slinks up onto the patio. I waited until he was well clear of the gate then YANK, and the gate slammed shut behind him!! The best part was that he had previously been fostered for years by a girl who had to move away for college, so she had been heartbroken to hear that he ran away immediately after she had to surrender him. We called her and she was there within minutes. The look on his dumb little face when he saw her come in was one of the highlights of my life. He jumped all over her and they rolled around on the floor crying. We all cried. Her mom ended up being able to adopt him so all was well.