One day during a lull in incoming calls we started swapping stories of computer stupidity, and one of my colleagues, Steve, told me a story about an ex-neighbour that happened a few years ago.

His neighbour, who we'll call John, knowing my colleague's computer expertise asked some general computer questions, eventually asking how CD-ROMS work, he seemed particularly interested when my colleague mentioned the laser inside.

A few days later, Dave was awoken by an ambulance pulling up outside his neighbour's house. John's wife and a bit of investigating told the whole story.

John had told his wife he was making a laser gun. Used to his frequent declarations of madcap inventions that never work, she just ignored himn and let him get on with it. Apparently John had taken apart his CD ROM to get at the laser (it seems the warnings about never operating the drive with the door open spurred him on). He'd cut the laser out of his CDROM and tried touching a 9V battery to the wires, expecting a whine, a bright red beam and a flaming whole in his target. This is sad, he'd actually set up a 'range' in his garage. When this unsurprisingly failed, he switched to a car battery, using pars of a wire coahanger to extend the CD laser's short wires. Frustrated that he hadn't made a device that could shoot a starwars style laser beam, he'd figured that because the cd rom needed to be plugged into the mains to make it work, that's what he was doing wrong. Not having a spare plug handy, he made his own prongs with the wire coathanger and jammed them into the socket. He'd been fried almost instantly.

Bear in mind that UK uses 240V of AC. Usually the main fuse would blow, but John had seen to that to. Bored with having the change the fuses when something blew it, he'd replaced the fuse wth...you guessed it, lengths of wire coathanger.

Unfortunately, it never made the news. However, John's obituary is out there somewhere stating an 'accidental death'. When I find it, I'll let you know.

Submitted on 03/17/2005

Submitted by: Jeff
Reference: Personal Account - May 2003

Copyright © 2005 DarwinAwards.com

Daniel said:
Maybe Toss: Lacks Excellence
Please use spell check.

Charles said:
Neutral: Darwin Award
So he needed more power, so he poked two bare wires into a socket, holding one in each hand... you'd think he would have learned the first few times. This sort of thing is very common, but I am tempted to keep it because of the extreme ingeniousness of his stupidity.

Jack said:
Neutral: Personal Account
I'm inclined to go with Charles. Not only the ingeniousness of his stupidity, but also the combination of increasingly stupid actions!

Kelly said:
Definitely Keep: Honorable Mention
I wish this was verifiable.

Tracy said:
Definitely Keep: Personal Account
If we could only verify this - we may have had a DA here!

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