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(1983, United Kingdom) Young Mick had settled in for a good night's sleep
when he was awakened by a loud explosion. His bedroom door had been blown
open by air pressure, and his curtains had flown out the open window. He
rushed downstairs, to find his mother staggering from the kitchen with
smoke rising from patches where there used to be hair. She seemed more
dazed than injured, so he sat her down and went into the kitchen.
It looked like a small bomb had gone off. The net curtains were a pile of
melted nylon, and the cotton curtains were still on fire. Mick put them out
with a few glasses of water and returned to his mother to find out what had
happened.
"Well," she said, "I thought that the kitchen was a little smelly so I got
out a spray can of air freshener. Nothing came out but I knew something was
inside, because I could hear it when I shook the can. So I thought I'd open
it with the can opener and sprinkle some of the contents around."
Propellant spurted from the can as soon as the can opener cut into it,
startling Mom and causing her to throw the can into the air. It landed on
the gas stove, where the pilot light instantly turned the can into a
fireball. Mom had narrowly avoided winning herself a Darwin Award.
In positive psychological terms, Mom was conditioning her son to reacting
to danger, to avoid his own untimely removal from the gene pool. Mom's
lesson worked. Mick is still alive and passing on her lessons to the rest
of us.
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In a previous lesson, Mick's mother
showed him a broken vacuum cleaner. She had tugged too hard on the
power cord, and pulled the wires out of the plug. "I opened the plug
and put the wires back," she said, "but it still doesn't work." Mick
opened the plug to find all three wires twisted together and
inserted, luckily, into the neutral pin. If she had chosen the live
pin, the vacuum cleaner would have become electrified, waiting for
Mom to touch it and send 240 volts charging through her on their way
to ground. |
DarwinAwards.com © 1994 - 2020
Submitted by: Mick
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Air Freshener
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