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.

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

As a kid, I kinda had anger issues and would get frustrated easily. I broke the screen of my GBA SP by throwing it against a wall after not being able to solve a room in Mario vs. Donkey Kong. Similarly, I threw my iPod Touch on the floor after losing in a game called Bad Apples which broke the glass but the iPod itself still worked afterwards.

I really wish I still had that SP, as replacing the screen isn’t that hard. It even was a limited edition one as well…

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.

ITT: kids with wayyyy too much time on their hands

• Latchkey kid

As a 10 year old I drove our car into a tree. It didn’t quite break though

An electric keyboard imported from outside of soviet block. I was too young and stupid to understand the power brick and conected it directly to mains. A shower of sparks tought me an important lesson about electricity and voltage.

When I was a teenager my dad got a beautiful marble chess board. It was leaning on a wall, and when I picked it up it broke into two halves.

My dad was really sad and angry at me, that board meant quite a deal to him. He always thought I mishandled it, regardless how I said I was careful.

He died last November.

I got sent a few boxes with his belongings, and when I opened one of them I found that chessboard. It is glued with epoxy.

It sits in my apartment now, and I still don’t know if I want to keep it or get rid of it. One one hand it meant a lot to him, on the other hand it is one of the very rare things where I felt treated unfairly.

I once broke my neighbor’s sliding glass doors with rocks.

A neighbor kid and I were really stupid when we were 9-10 years old, and my next door neighbor’s house had been empty for a while because they rented it out. So we thought it would be a good of fun idea to go through the broken fence between our yards, and chuck the decorative rocks (pretty big ones, not pebbles) at the glass and make it shatter. We broke one open, and then another, then went inside to check out the empty place. We started to go at the third one when my brother came outside and heard the loud smashing.

Cops were called, in the end both of us were very apologetic and told them everything.

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.

Dec 20, 1985

My dad drive into our driveway with his brand new 1986 Porsche 944 Turbo. After showing me and my little brother, his brand new car, he then broke the news that our Christmas would be a “little light this year.” I put an entire bag of sugar in his gas tank that night.

His Christmas was a little light that year, the fuck.

Edit: Oh, hell yes, I absolutely told him I did it. On Christmas morning.

Edit 2: as an adult, I still think it’s one of the most awesome cars I’ve ever known (my fav car is still the BMW 2002, tho). He got a new one - the fuck - and I later learned how to drive stick in that car. He has still never forgiven me, although I have still never forgiven him for what he did then or in the decades following. We haven’t spoken in years.

As the years go by, I only grow more proud of my 6 year-old self for punishing that selfish fuck for putting himself before his kids/family. And I’d do it again in a heartbeat. Also, my mom laughed about it at the time and always has since.

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)!

My kid stuck a big ol donut magnet on our TV and ruined the screen.

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 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.