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JohnC6

JohnC6

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My wife belongs to very small select forum..invitation only..ladies only.. and a very friendly 'place' it is,too. Ten came here, one day in a summer, for a garden buffet. So..I know no more than they have been having a chat about people who exaggerate about what has happened in their lives..various incidents or embellishing one incident. One of the ladies posted these incidents, set out below, which really did happen to her. I wondered if anyone had any out of the ordianary experiences that would be interesting for the rest of us to know about.

The lady's list.

I did see the space shuttle on the back of a jumbo jet over Houston.
I have killed a snake with a broom.
I did wake up in Australia with a large cricket on my arm, and a Huntsman Spider on top of it!
I did think I was going to die, when police came to arrest the gardener at our house in South Africa.
A stolen car did hit the bank outside our house, overturn and end up the wrong way up our driveway!
Our neighbours house did catch fire, and her teenage son jumped from the bedroom window, onto grass.
My Mum did help my dad catch two shoplifters when he was off duty.
We did have a motorcycle police escort into Brussels from Ostend.
We did live through Hurricane Alicia which hit Galveston Island and Houston in the 80’s.
 
Crikey, tons, I'll kick off.

Waking as a kid one night/morning, with bright lights in my eyes. A Ford Escort had ploughed through my parent's fence, over the garden, coming to rest inches from the house. Some fence posts hit the front door, which woke us all. Turns out the driver was leaving a local club, after a lock in. It was a ground floor flat and the bedroom window was at ground level.

My Mum had one of those twin tub washing machines, she'd always do the washing in the kitchen, in front of the gas oven. I turned the gas on one day, unbeknown to my mother, I would've been about 5. It wasn't long before there was a resultant flash, as the gas ignited on a faulty wire in the washing machine and ht the interior wall opposite. We were both unhurt.

Riding a racing bicycle, down a street one day, wind behind me and I was keeping up with a car in front, when a car from behind tried to pass me, forcing me into the rear of a parked Audi. At this exact moment (of course) the front brake cable on my bike snapped. I bounced off the rear screen of the Audi, completely smashing it to smithereens, I had a slight cut on my head. The owner ran out, helped me up, sat me on the wall, phoned the police after he checked me over. They traced the driver, he got a fine and had to pay costs to the Audi owner. Me? I got nothing. :LOL:


Oh, there's more, looking forward to this.
 
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Ok, I've been nearly blown up three times. Once blown out of bed, the second time someone blew up the building next to the one I was in, the third time was my own fault. While I was blowing something up I got closer then the recomended distance, big bang, and I go flying backwards (like the movies) This probably explains why my hearing is a bit... dodgy, well that and all the gunfire.
 
I struggle to think of things happening to me as a passive participant, but a few stand out where I was completely involved:

- I was flying a small aeroplane (Beagle Pup 150) over the Channel between Lydd and Le Touquet with a friend using his new handheld GPS in 1994 or thereabouts, in poor weather with a low cloud ceiling circa 800ft. He was adamant that he had set the waypoints in it correctly. It was as I was flying down towards the Western Approaches that I pointed out to him that the compass heading was rather at odds with the GPS. That's when he realised he'd made some errors, we turned left and pointed due west and fortunately saw the French coast before the fuel got too low and we became statistics.

- we were travelling back from Hong Kong to London on BOAC when I was 11, but had to divert and stay the night in a grotty hotel near Karachi. Needing the toilet, I lifted the lid, and narrowly avoided sitting on a scorpion!

I guess I must have led a boringly uneventful life!
 
I was fascinated by electricity when about 7, 60 years ago

If anyone remembers the old Wylex plugs , 3 pins across
I took the chain off the toilet and laid it across the pins as I plugged TV in
Large flash loud bang black face
Put hot chain in pocket and denied all knowledge when dad rushed into room
 
I was groped by a wild bull elephant.

Living in SA at the time and the wife and I visited a private game reserve for our honey moon. It's called the Lions Den and is a stilted cabin in the Kapama reserve. You get dropped off by the ranger and that's where you are left until picked up again for game drives or when you leave.

We'd gone out on an early morning game drive and came across a bull elephant in musth. The ranger had turned the vehicle off so as not to disturb the animal but he wasn't best pleased to see us and proceeded to mock charge the vehicle and throw branches and dirt at us. The ranger was worried about starting the engine just incase it took that as a threat and and as the only escape route was backwards thought it best to just sit tight. If the elephant didn't see us as a threat he should move on.

After a bit more tossing all sorts of detritus at us and a few nudges of the front of the vehicle he wandered off to the side of us. We thought he'd had enough but he came back for more. This time on my side of the vehicle. He was so close that I could count the his eye lashes as he proceeded to have a sniff of my crotch, down my leg and around the floor of the vehicle.

We honestly thought we were going to die that morning but I obviously didn't smell that great as he decided he'd had enough fun and games with us and disappeared into the bush.
 
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Wow! some of you have eventful lives........

As for me with direct personal experiences

During the 70's and working in London......
I was driving along Millbank early Sunday morning to do a duty shift in the pathology lab (microbiology department). I was the only car (a 1966 MG Midget) around and I was flagged down by two PC's
" Where are you going?"
"what is your car registration?"
"Please tell us what is in your boot...then open it to show us"

Also, during that period ...there was a bomb warning that someone put a bomb somewhere in the pathlab area. Evacuated the whole area, after about 40 mins the bomb disposal team reported that nothing had been found but as they had done a search and not moved anything to do a full search they requested that some technicians in each department volunteer(?) to return to the departments and advise if everything looked "right"
All was well and we could all get on......I was working on the blood cross matching bench at that time

Lastly, (again in the 70's) two events during a Rock & Ice course in the Austrian Alps. There were early heavier than normal snows that meant one climb was up a winter route. As we broached the top there was an avalanche and IIRC about 10 off us ended 300ft lower in the snowfield we had started from about an hour earlier. Stunned & shocked but only one of the party was injured, it turned he had a ruptured spleen :(

The second part was on the flight home on a BAC 1-11 we hit a sudden pressure drop, thankfully all strapped in as the plane dropped hundreds of feet. Stomach churning as I recall.
 
I've remembered an incident way back. I was about 10. I loved chemistry .I have no idea why I decided to make an explosive. I must have read about it ..maybe in my chemistry set. As I recall, I went to the local chemist and bought some saltpetre..potassium nitrate .. I'm talking about late the 50's. I had some sulphur powder ,iron filings and a strip of magnesium tape in the set. Looking back on it I think I was asked why I wanted it and must have spun a tale. Anyway, I now had the ingredients and had a small metal round tin that had held Kodak film.My dad had a Box Brownie camera. Oh..the penny's just dropped. Box Brownie (Laurence) on here :D I mixed the ingredients and pushed down on them with a piece of cork. How did I know to use cork ? I kept putting more and more mix in. I put a hole in the metal screw cap and pushed the magnesium tape through it. I placed it in a small hole I'd dug in the garden. I do wonder where I got all this information from..not the internet..there wasn't one..Lol. I had a length of about` 12". I lit one end and it fizzed down about 3" and went out. It did that again a couple of times so I was down to about 4" and tried once more. It lit and fizzed down to the container. I'd only taken a few steps away when off it went . Hell's teeth...Lol. What a bang. Behind us about a mile away were woods and seconds later the sound echoed from there. Out came my mum,out came the neighbours to see what the explosion was. The small tin now in a much larger hole in the garden, looked like a peeled banana. I was lucky I'd got a few steps away. I was a bit of a rum lad back them..up to all sorts of mischief. :D My mum took the chemistry set away from me.
 
JohnC6 said:
I've remembered an incident way back. I was about 10. I loved chemistry .I have no idea why I decided to make an explosive. I must have read about it ..maybe in my chemistry set. As I recall, I went to the local chemist and bought some saltpetre..potassium nitrate .. I'm talking about late the 50's. I had some sulphur powder ,iron filings and a strip of magnesium tape in the set. Looking back on it I think I was asked why I wanted it and must have spun a tale. Anyway, I now had the ingredients and had a small metal round tin that had held Kodak film.My dad had a Box Brownie camera. Oh..the penny's just dropped. Box Brownie (Laurence) on here :D I mixed the ingredients and pushed down on them with a piece of cork. How did I know to use cork ? I kept putting more and more mix in. I put a hole in the metal screw cap and pushed the magnesium tape through it. I placed it in a small hole I'd dug in the garden. I do wonder where I got all this information from..not the internet..there wasn't one..Lol. I had a length of about` 12". I lit one end and it fizzed down about 3" and went out. It did that again a couple of times so I was down to about 4" and tried once more. It lit and fizzed down to the container. I'd only taken a few steps away when off it went . Hell's teeth...Lol. What a bang. Behind us about a mile away were woods and seconds later the sound echoed from there. Out came my mum,out came the neighbours to see what the explosion was. The small tin now in a much larger hole in the garden, looked like a peeled banana. I was lucky I'd got a few steps away. I was a bit of a rum lad back them..up to all sorts of mischief. :D My mum took the chemistry set away from me.
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I too loved chemistry........

Including making glass with a conductive coating.......it was when I looked up the cost of the liquid crystal chemicals that the 'project' hit the buffers NB I think I found the method in Practical Science magazine?

But like you I enjoyed things that went 'pop' and with a school mate we had access to machine tools to make complimentary parts.

Suffice to say it was great fun experimenting. Oh the young to teenage years were very educational:LOL:

In the 80's when I was selling lab equipment two places I went and sold very simple stuff was a college in London where they were developing a pilot plant to make fibre optic cabling and they bought our (company I worked for) magnetic stirrer hotplate.

Another was a German company factory in Sussex where the same product was for the development lab........they were introducing CD manufacturing to the UK

Oh, in the early 90's (1991 ?) when I worked at a credit card maker. I had an appointment with IIRC BT in the old Post Office tower........ discussion it turned out was centred around SIM card technology. The chip technology was GEC and nothing the company I worked for could do to do the chip embedding.

I look back on that period of my working life and realise I was peripherally involved with technologies that were/are still what have made our 21st C world 'function'!
 
Chemistry antics. Aged 14 or 15, I decided to make a hydrogen generator with zinc granules and conc HCl in a conical flask that had been a vinegar bottle. Dropped the stuff in, then closed it with a bug & glass tube. It was fizzing away nicely and I popped out for a pee briefly, leaving my younger brother with instructions to wait for a moment and then light the hydrogen coming out. While in the loo I hear a 'whump'. Fortunately the flask didn't break, but the bung & tube had been shot out as the hydrogen flashed back into the flask, and had hit the ceiling.

Explosives were a natural stock in trade for members of the school chemistry club, although the club was closed when someone set off a smoke bomb in the 6th form common room.

Fireworks were available for lads to buy in those days, and the 'aerial bombshell' provided an explosive capsule that could, apparently, crack a concrete sewer pipe.

Rockets could also be fired from higher ground into guarded compounds from higher ground, causing some modest activity.


Early DIYing, one should always check whether wires are live and then check again. I had a notch in a pair of wire cutters and, amazingly, in a steel brick bolster, amazing because I didn't get a shock.


In a different vein, some years back we were in Zimbabwe with friends on a houseboat on lake Kariba. A few of us had gone out on a motor tender from the houseboat, and drove around some of the bays looking for game. When we returned some time later, the HB was gone and it was getting dark. We motored around for a while, and were starting to become concerned when another houseboat hove into sight. Apparently our boat had been moved, and fortunately for us, they had seen where it went - there were lots of crocodiles and hippos in the lake, and it wasn't somewhere we wanted to spend the night.


Going back many more years, aged 6, my family went back to Austria & stayed with my grandmother. On a trip into the mountains, we had gone onto a lookout point made of wood, suspended over a cliff, There was a dog that had been nipping at the mountain cattle which suddenly ran onto the lookout, and of course the cows tried to follow it because they were angry. It was only much later I discovered my mother thought they were going to push the lot including us off the cliff, and it was only some on the men there going and setting about the cows (which I do remember) that saved us.

Pretty sure there's more, but that's enough for now.
 
Talking of chemistry fun....

IIRC it was Potassium Triodide :thinking: someone made it at school and he spread some on the chemistry bench where the tutor had the habit of resting his leather patched elbows (who else remembers leather elbow patches?) and if I recall correctly once the mix was dry it reacted like a contact 'explosive' and it certainly by all accounts livened up that 6th form lesson :)
 
Box Brownie said:
IIRC it was Potassium Triodide
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Nitrogen tri-iodide? Add ammonia 880 to metallic iodine, ensuring the iodine remains in excess. Stable(ish) when wet, sensitive to knocks when dry like many azide compounds. Making it in larger amounts was extremely dangerous, and on one occasion did cause significant damage.
 
ancient_mariner said:
Nitrogen tri-iodide? Add ammonia 880 to metallic iodine, ensuring the iodine remains in excess. Stable(ish) when wet, sensitive to knocks when dry like many azide compounds. Making it in larger amounts was extremely dangerous, and on one occasion did cause significant damage.
Click to expand...
Ah! thanks for the correction.

Your description nicely sums up it's reactivity. It was my understanding that the culprit just used an thin wash/splash on the lab bench.

All this talk of school fun with reactives reminds of what I learned about 1 legged stools used by gunpowder mill workers whose responsibility was to monitor the milling processes.....and woe betide them if they fell asleep on the job, hence the 1 legged stools :)
 
Was in Venice 13th November 2019
Got escorted to work by Police approx 30 years ago (having cleaned my windscreen I put the wrong tax disc back on display....)
 
The time I almost got arrested.

It would've been around 2001, I say that as I was wearing a fleece top from a Champ Car meeting at Rockingham Speedway that year. It was a souvenir from the weekend and my favourite fleece at the time. A few weeks later, I was wearing it whilst out getting some shopping from town. One of my favourite shops to go and have a browse in was an electronics shop, they sold TVs, white goods etc but my interest was the HiFi (proper HiFi) section.

I knew one of the lads behind the counter, he was an old school chum. Anyway, there was a commotion outside, a police car went through on blue lights, stopped just up from the shop I was in and 2 cops got out and stood at the door of the shop, preventing anyone going in or, more relevant to me, leaving. My pal behind the counter said the cops had their eye on me. :eek: I was flustered but couldn't think of anything I'd done wrong. I did the only thing I could do and tried to leave. Immediately as I opened the door, one of the cops ushered me into a corner of the doorway, started asking me questions, like where I'd been etc. He asked my name, I gave it as I had nothing to hide. Then, another police car drove past slowly, another school friend of mine was sat in the back. He had opened his own jewellery shop in the town, he made it all by hand. As the second police car went past, the cop said to me 'you're free to go'. I was happy to get out of that situation, I don't like being the centre of attention and the town had practically come to a standstill, with all eyes on me. :runaway:

It was a small town and word soon spread, it got back to me later that evening that the jewellery shop had been held up and robbed. One of the perpretators was wearing a grey fleece and like me, had very short, cropped hair too. I fitted the descripiton and had been picked up on CCTV when I walked into the electronics shop. :rolleyes:

I spoke to my friend from the jewellery shop a few days later and he told me that when he was driven past in the police car, the police were looking to ID the robbers. My friend confirmed (obviously) that he had told them, in his words, 'there is no way it was Dale'. (y) It all tied up of course and I was left to go on my way.

I had a few cold sweats over that one, I can tell you.
 
I was working in a high security prison about 2 years ago , walking down a wing with my escort on way to a comms room and a massive fight errupted i got locked in the wing office and sat happilly watch it all go down through the thick window for about 20 mins before i was let out and we wandered on our way lol
 
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