An arcade center VR headset.

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.

Sorry buddy 🤷🏻‍♂️

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).

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.

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?

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)!

ITT: kids with wayyyy too much time on their hands

• Latchkey kid

deleted by creator

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.

Jesus maybe? At church during the Christmas service. Accidentally dropped it. No clue how much it was worth, but I don’t remember breaking particularly expensive things.

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.

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

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

Kitchen window. About 2x3 metres if I remember right.

We had a trampoline in our backyard, outside the kitchen so mum could watch us while cooking or whatever. There was a huge hill (our house was in a bit of a mountainous area), and we decided to throw some rocks down the hill and bounce them off the trampoline… but we were uncoordinated 10 year olds so we missed every time. And it was just a bunch of little stones gathering in our backyard.

Then I found one rock. Pretty big, had to lift it with two hands and shot-put it down the hill. That was the one that we finally landed on the trampoline. And it bounced right through the kitchen window.

Our barnstable. I burned it accidentally. About half a million damage. Though the new barnstable was an upgrade.

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.