Have you heard of the expression "Throw the spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks?"
It's a pretty tried and true method of adulthood. By now we have all acknowledged that there are no "real" adults and nobody has any idea what they're doing. Which is refreshing, because now we can all laugh about it!
Reddit user NSalonga26 asked the internet at large:
Reddit, what's your top "Holy shit, that worked?" moment?
Here are some of those answers.
Bob-ing for Jobs
A guy we'll call Bob left the company I was at. A year or two later he started recruiting people from our company, I was interested so I flew out for an interview.
First five interviews went great. Seemed like a good group to work with. The final interview was with the HR director. It went okay and then we got to the pay part. I said I wanted X amount. She said the average pay for my experience and position was X - 20k.
My response was "Bob didn't fly me out here because I'm average,"
I have no idea why I said that, but I got the job and the pay I wanted.
Months later when we were getting drinks Bob brought that up. Apparently HR director thought I was very quiet and introverted from our interview so my response caught her even more off guard than it caught me. SardinesGivePower
Different Tools, Same Result
Used an electric palm sander to clean the soap scum out of my tub. Put a sponge right on the bottom and turned that bad boy on.
I thought my tub was just naturally eggshell color, nope. It's pure white. RedditforLent
If I'm Dyin' I'm Lyin'
A very confused patient was fighting me when I was trying to give him IV antibiotics.
"YOU'RE GOING TO KILL ME, WHAT IS MY FAMILY GOING TO DO IF YOU KILL ME?!" he wailed while pointing at his adult son.
"If I kill you, they can sue me and the hospital and be rich," I said.
The man just kinda made an "oh yeah" kind of mumble and let me hook him up to the IV. His son was trying so hard not to laugh! kayquila
Who's Gonna Notice?
I once got fired from a job at the grocery store. I really needed money though, and no other place was hiring, so a week later I just showed up and started doing my job as usual. No one said anything, and I got my pay at the end of the week like normal, and I stayed at that job till I quit a year later. Octofriend
Tree & Sympathy
I had a test coming up and, needless to say, I didn't want to take it. So, nine year-old me decides to jump out of a tree and fake being hurt. I didn't go to school for the next two days.
I realize now that I could've just said that I fell out of a tree, I didn't have to actually do it. epher95
Trick The Technology
My first edition PS3 stopped working in 2011. It would turn on, but would never read a disc. About 6 months ago, I randomly found a video on YouTube with like 120 views that was basically a 12 yo kid showing how if you lift the PS3 vertically when loading a disc, it'll start to read. I tried it and boom that sh*t worked. ironjatt
Fuel Pumpin'
My first vehicle was a 1985 dodge ram that had around 300k miles on it. Needless to say, it wasn't exactly reliable.
Anyway, my friend and I had tickets to go see a concert in a city that was about 3 hours away. We made it there just fine and had a blast at the concert. We couldn't afford to stay overnight so we started on the long journey home. If all went well, we would get home around 3AM.
There was one stretch of highway where there was 60 ish miles between towns. It's pretty much the worst place to break down on that journey. There were big signs warning travelers to fill up with gas before leaving town, but I had half a tank. My truck sputtered out and died almost halfway between the two towns. It sure sounded like I ran out of gas but the gauge still showed half a tank. All had not gone well.
So there we were - 1:45 AM, stuck on the side of the highway in Texas, 30 miles from the nearest towns, no moonlight, and this was before teenagers had cell phones. We were screwed. After a bit of poking around with a flashlight, we discovered that we did have fuel but the fuel pump had died. We decided to sleep in the truck and mess with it in the morning.
On those old dodge trucks, the fuel pump was inside the engine instead of in the fuel tank like a modern vehicle. It was powered by the engine instead of an electric motor. Essentially, the fuel pump would constantly pump gasoline when the engine was running and gas would always be available for the carburetor float valve. The extra pumped gas would just go back into the gas tank.
I was just drifting off to sleep when I got an idea. I worked for almost an hour in the pitch dark. I used some extra hose from an agricultural fertilizer, a drink straw, screw clamps, and duck tape to rig the windshield fluid pump to pump fuel from the fuel line into the carburetor float line.
I got in my truck, hit the windshield fluid lever, and the truck started right up. It took a bit of trial and error but I was able to get the timing down where I knew how often to hit the lever to keep the truck running.
We made it back home just after 4:30AM. My dad wasn't immediately amused with my handy work, but he told all of his friends how clever his son was so I guess it passed the dad test. Nevermind04
I Don't Guana Go
To get out of an after-hours work event, I came up with the quickest thing I could think of and told my boss that my iguana was sick and I had to get to the pet store to pick up his medication before they closed.
I don't have an iguana.
The next day I changed my desktop background to a photo of someone else's iguana. People kept asking me for weeks how my iguana was doing. dudecephus
High School Sweethearts
In high school, I told a girl who was way out of my league, "You should give me your number."
She asked, "Why would I do that?"
I said, "Because if I just dial randomly, it will take forever to call you..."
Waited to be shot down. But she laughed...and gave it to me! We were together for seven years. relativex
Dad Points: 80,000
My son was living nearby and had locked himself out of his room. He called me for help. During my many assignments in the military, I was once stationed with a guy who was also a locksmith. Incessantly told me about locks, lockpics, tumblers, etc.
So I show up at my son's apartment, armed with a basic knowledge about how locks work and two paper clips. I half-straightened them out. Used one to flick the tumblers and the other to pull at the bottom of the lock to turn it. Two minutes later, I was in.
My son says 'Holy sh*t, you did it!' Got serious dad points for that one. OldGuyGeek
Unintentional Piracy
Mine is both a little silly, and recent.
I was using a trial version of a plugin suite for some software I was using (it's a trial that you can activate, or it just dies after 30 days if you use 'Trial' for the key), contemplating buying because it was so expensive. This suite of plugins for a video editing product cost $1000. i wasn't considering buying the $1000 suite. I just wanted one of the plugins that comes with it that cost $400 as a stand alone
As I was contemplating, I started poking around for tutorials. i found one by the author. i was a complete tutorial including the license activation.
During the video he showed how to enter the code.. I thought "there's no way.... Screw it, I'm going to try"
I paused the video, wrote down the number he used in the video and clicked 'activate'
it activated the entire suite.... mindzipper
Magiqu
When I was younger I was into magic and thought I invented a magic trick that used subliminal messaging to get someone to pick a card.
I secretly turned the two of hearts over in the deck, and handed it to the kid my mom was watching.
I asked my mom to name any card, then I said to the kid:
"You too, [name of kid], whatever card is in your heart."
Trying to get him to say the two of hearts.
To my disbelief he actually said the two of fucking hearts. I didn't touch the deck for the entire trick and told him to go through it and he saw his selection turned over. I was in just as much amazement as he was. Nantoone
Duping The Teacher
In school, I belatedly realised I had an essay due the next day, which I simply didnt have the time to do.
What I did have time to do was write slightly more than a page. I then printed only the first, full page, and handed this in, inside a plastic wallet. I then finished the essay at home that night.
So, the next day, when my teacher grabs me in the corridor and says You realise you only have me the first page of your essay, right?, I was able to say Oh, shoot, the rest must have fallen out or something. Ill go print it out right now and bring it to your office. batty3108
Eight Hour Delay
I once showed up eight hours late for work. My company was trying out this crazy three shift schedule that would change every day, but there was no order to the scheme. If you didn't check what the manager put out that day, no one knew when they should be at work the next day. So after a hard shift I forget to check that bad boy, and when I came in the next day expecting to arrive at the shift change, everyone was at their desks working away. Someone sees me and asks, "Hey did you get moved to this shift?" I picked up a clipboard and said, "No, just here to...inspect." I spent about ten minutes walking around the office just nodding or scribbling notes before I went home. Not only did I not work that day, one of the managers thought it was awesome that someone was checking up on projects. saltnotsugar
Freebies
i have a verizon center STAFF lanyard that a buddy gave to me from some concert 10 or 12 years ago. it literally says nothing but "verizon center" and "STAFF." white letters on a black background, and then has a small bar code and some illegible jibberish on the other side. it could be entirely fake, as i've never seen anyone else use one like it.
so far, 3 free concerts and one free NBA game. half-afraid to keep using it, especially since the arena changed its name. i can't get anyone else in with it, so while i can literally go anywhere, i have to do it alone, which is much less fun. cubs_070816
Duping The Teacher, Part Deux
In college, I was taking a class not at all related to my major, because I needed a few credits. We had a professor who was kind of a hardass, along with a delightfully scatterbrained old-guy assistant professor. One of our assignments was to write a paper, which I put off and then ended up not doing.
Of course, I had to do the paper in order to pass. So eventually I got around to writing it, weeks after the due date. After the class where everyone's papers were returned to them, I went up to the professor - with assistant professor also present - and explained that I had handed in the paper a day or two late, but had indeed handed it to the assistant professor in the hall one day, and was just wondering if I'd be getting mine back? Assistant professor actually said that he remembered me handing it to him and that he must have misplaced it.
So I offered to print it off again and bring it with me to the next class. Which I did, and I passed. In hindsight it was all way more work than just doing it when I was supposed to, but I was a stupid lazy ass in those days. -Listening-
Sleeping Genius
Back in secondary school I had to take Business Studies, which was easily my most hated subject. I just found it so intensely boring, I couldn't help but fall asleep in every class without fail.
This was a small country school in rural Ireland, so our class only had about 20 students. Falling asleep was pretty risky since it wouldn't be difficult for someone to notice. On top of that, I sat in the first row, right in front of my easily-agitated teacher, who regularly lost her temper with students and would often loudly discipline them for even the smallest infractions.
That day I'd nodded off as usual, only to be jarred awake by my friend sharply elbowing me in the rib. I didn't have time to express my surprise before I realised that the teacher had asked me a direct question and was waiting for a response.
Since I'd not heard her query at all and therefore had idea what her question even was, I snapped out of my dream and groggily mumbled "Uh, it means... they're not... doing their jobs... properly?"
My teacher's face lit up as she broke into a rare smile. "Yes, exactly! I'm so glad someone here has been paying attention."
Over 15 years later and still amazed I got away with it. LadyGagarin
Exploiting The Web
Moved in to a new house, got my first municipal water bill at the new address. Didn't want to go out and buy stamps. Figured, "hey, I'll pay online, excellent!" only to find out that the fucking website wanted me to put in the dollar amount of my previous water bill when signing up with an online account. I tried the current and only water bill I had, no luck, came back with an error.
So I said fuck it, let's see if they're sanitizing their database inputs: put a * in for the value and tried again. Success, it let me in, I paid my bill.
For the uninitiated, the reason this works is because their website was literally taking the information I was putting in to the website, and without looking for special characters or malicious code, querying the database with that directly using a language called SQL. In SQL, the * is a wildcard, so their sql query probably looks something like "select ACCOUNT from ACCOUNT_TABLE where USERNAME = <user_provided_username> AND ADDRESS = <user_provided_address> AND PREVIOUS_BILL_AMOUNT = <user_provided_value>" (edit: yes DBAs of Reddit, I'm aware that this is a gross oversimplification, the billing stuff is going to be in another table) - I had the first two, of course, but the last one I just gave it a * and, because they're not checking for stupid shit like this, it worked and I could see what I needed to to add the house to my account - bypassing their security entirely. Odds are good I could have just put *s for all the fields and seen who lives at every address, and their previous water bills.
I emailed them shortly thereafter saying that it was a security hole. No response.
A few years later I moved again. I had my account, but to set up said online account's connection with the new address... you guessed it, they wanted me to put in the value of my previous month's bill. Fuck it, let's see if they patched this sh*t... nope! * still worked. Mnementh2230
Underage Thinking
I went to NYC for fashion week with a boutique I was working for. After the fashion show we attended everyone wanted to go out clubbing. Me, being young and new, I didn't want to be the buzzkill. So I went with them even though I was only 18. Arriving at the first club we were allowed to skip the line because we knew people and we get to the bouncer. He's going one by one checking everyone's ID's and I'm sweating bullets. When he got to me we just looked at each other.... He goes "ID" and I freeze and for some reason I said "man I already showed you mine" and til this day I don't know if he was being nice or just didn't want to look stupid but he let me in. Needless to say I got hammer off 18$ mixed drinks because f*** it right? BrennanDunlap
Going Under The Fun Limit
The time I avoided getting in trouble by being really boring.
About 6 years ago I was at my ex-girlfriends house on a sunday. Behind her house was a service center for city vehicles. So since it was a government building it was closed on Sundays. Behind the main building was a trail that you can walk down for a couple minutes and get into a subdivision.
so me and my ex decide to drive down to the head of the trail behind the building and try out the mini bong I had recently purchased. So we pull up and I take the bong out and I am holding it out the window pouring a bit of water into it when I look into my mirror.
There is a fucking cop car 15 feet behind me flying up and here I am dangling a bong out the window in front of them.
I bring the bong back in and throw it under my seat and pushing a sweater on top it. The cop car has now pulled up right behind me and two cops are dashing up to the side of the car.
"WHAT'S GOING ON HERE, you can't be back here. It is trespassing" said the cop on my side of the car.
"Oh hey officer... we were just.. going geocaching"
"what's that now?"
"geocaching sir.. umm here look" and I take my hiking GPS out of the dash and show it to him.
I then go into a 10 minute long spiel about geocaching and what it's all about and I am super dry about the whole thing.
my speech ends and im looking at him and he just says.
"ok then.... welp.. have a nice day"
"uhhh should I leave sir? you said this was tresspassing"
"whatever don't worry about it"
and both cops got in the car and left.
No idea how that worked. TonyHxC
