I need to set the scene first: Me, about 12-13 years ago, on the surface looking like a respectable career and family man, pillar of the community…Behind the scenes slowly falling apart, trapped in an abusive marriage, a job I hated more and more each day, and told that I had to keep the happy face on for the sake of everyone else.

And one day I just fucking imploded. Left for work one morning like normal, halfway there I threw my phone out the window and decided I was done. I remember driving and driving, stopping a few times for food or just to get out of the car and meander…but I had no real direction, started to panic about the possibility of going back to hell or staying lost out here. I blacked out.

Apparently my car ran out of gas and I ditched it. I was told when they (they being the cops) found me I was several states away, couldn’t remember my name, was talking nonsense, and was covered in my own filth. I was involuntarily committed and when my wife tried to visit me I tried to attack her, told her I wanted her dead, that she better never come near me again. That was the last I ever saw of her or our kids. My dad had no idea how to handle this so he just decided to treat me like I was dead and sold off most of what I owned, and at the time I was too inside out to care. I was in and out of psych wards for the better part of three years.

So yeah, destroyed a family, a home, my career and reputation, and caused a ruckus in a sleepy little rural shit town. I did get better…much better, and I’m happier and more together than I’ve ever been, but that’s the boring part of the story.

Once I spilled my trader Joe's chicken Tikka masala all over my pants and while it wasn't really a big mess in the long run it was still very disappointing in the moment

factory I worked at, I snapped a bearing rod on an injection machine.

it was made of steel, about 16 inches in diameter, about 18ft long, and cost around $1.5 million to replace.

complete accident, required a mandatory one week off (no pay) while they investigated if it was due to negligence or just routine wear and tear.

it took them six months to get a new one and cost the company close to $100 million on lost revenue on top of the cost of the part.

Managed to topple a big oil drum of waste oil in my dad's garage. I was 5 or so, and I was wearing a brand new winter outfit. It was light blue.

My dad was doing something, and was talking to someone who had stopped by. And this being on a moderately large farm, I always found something to do. 99.9% of the time, this was not a problem, as there wasn't much that could physically maim me other than stuff my parents obviously watched out for.

However, I've never managed to reach any higher levels of cimedic timing in my life, and I doubt anyone else could either. The visitor asked my dad where I was at, knowing I was usually in the immediatevicinity. Upon hearing "around here somewhere", they were concerned that I was kind of unsupervised. "There's not a whole lot of bad stuff he can do" my dad said, just around the time when they heard the sound of something large falling over, combined with my excited cheer. I was a crafty little shit, and I somehow understood the concept of leverage.

That was 38ish years ago. I still remember the smell. My brand new winter clothes weren't blue after that.

I drained an entire airplane's fuel tank onto the hangar floor once. Wasn't really ready to mop up 26 gallons of avgas.

I accidentally set a model home on fire when I was 12 while trying to burn bugs with a magnifying glass. Not a toy model, but like the house they show buyers to get a sense of the layout of the house they would have built.

Mine is probably the same both physically and metaphorically!

Almost cut my finger off with my dad's table saw when I was four. Ran through the house screaming and spurting blood everywhere.

I still remember my thought process: I was trying to see how close I could get my finger to the spinning blade without touching it. I don't know what success was supposed to look like here.

My entire life after high school

Ever interfered with mobile carrier in a state capital city? Yea.... We did. I'll grab the link to the story.

https://lemmy.world/post/19338754

I put my leg through the ceiling of a General's office. He wasn't the commander of the base mind you, he was the commander over several bases.

Someone had asked my team to repair one of his lights, and his office was in a WWII era building that had had a facelift. So most everything you could see was newer looking, but that did not apply to the base structure of the building, which included the area above the ceiling. Took a bad step and CRASH, huge mess.

Lucky on two points: He wasn't in his office, and I was able to grab support so as to not fall all the way through.

His secretary heard the commotion and yelled, "oh gosh, are you ok?" Bless her, she was concerned for me. Friends/coworkers laughing their asses off in the ceiling with me.

"Not sure. I think I probably need CPR!" Couldn't resist saying this. Friends still howling.

"Oh jeez, I'll call the Fire Department".

"No, not necessary. I'm fine now, thank you."

I never did see the General, and they didn't want me in his office to clean the mess.

So this was my biggest mess in a figurative sense due the circumstances. Which would have been orders of magnitude worse had the General been at his desk.

I can't remember exactly what happened, but my parents have a photo of me when I was little and my face very full of chocolate cream :)

I once was preparing to have a calm wine night with my friend but somehow managed to break the neck of the bottle when trying to take the cork out. Blood went everywhere, and I started to get dizzy. My friend was shocked, amused, and amazed by my strength all at the same time. I believe she mentioned The Hulk at some point. We didn't get a single drop of wine. I was given orange juice and asked to rest. All of this happened when I was completely sober by the way. I have never gotten close to repeating that again and, to this day, still don't fully understand how it happened in the first place

I was lab assistant at school. I had to make up a fruit fly medium for a class' genetics experiments. I mixed it up in a 2 liter beaker and put it on heat. It was pyrex. It broke and the medium spread all over the floor. There were fruit flies buzzing around the classroom for the next month no matter how often they washed the floors.

Physically I've dropped a lot of flour and such over the years. Sugar as well. Sugar is worse because we get sugar ants so I have to make sure to scrub down everything so they don't appear and swarm.

Forgot passwords, including a Bitwarden master password.

Locked my 3 credit bureaus, and I think the passwords to the accounts were in that vault.

Still locked out of the credit thing... been procrastinating with trying to get them unlocked...

Changed clutch plates on my motorcycle, but I assembled it wrong. And the clutch wouldn't disengage.

I was thinking surely it's just stuck together ...let me slam it in gear and pull the throttle.

Lucky that i put the front wheel was against a wall, the bike did a burnout pulling all of the linoleum off the floor on to a big pile.

Well, I did a huge chalk drawing on a sheet of tiling backer board for an art contest once over a decade ago and ended up looking like a smurf by the end of it.

The fact that chalk is as messy as it is is a huge part of why it's so fun to play with, chalk is basically like dry fingerpaints, at least if you forego the blending stump.

But yeah, the biggest messes I've made in recent years are any time I've gotten my chalk out to play with basically.

Beyond that there's playing in the mud when I was a really young kid and still living in Washington state at the time, and the countless glitter crafts and stuff I did in school growing up like pretty much everyone else in here has probably done.

We did Work Experience at my school and I managed to get a place at a local radio station. Now, what's the worst thing a work experience kid could do at a radio station specifically? If you answered "take the entire station off the air" then you'd be right.

I married a bipolar woman. Those were 3 interesting years.