So, this morning I’m brushing my teeth while my 8-year-old is having a wee.

I finish and put my toothbrush back – and in doing so knock Mrs16’s electric toothbrush off the shelf…

It drops onto the sink below and bounces downwards… hitting the bathroom cabinet on the way. The impact turns the toothbrush on and sends the brush arcing upwards in a slow, doom-laden trajectory… straight towards the toilet… where my 8-year-old is still having a wee. The toothbrush immediately makes little wee bubbles and my heart sinks.

The knock, the drop, the bounce and the splash all occur in fearful slow-motion. My son’s peels of laughter as he screams downstairs give me chills… and I can hear Mrs16 yelling “HE DID WHAT??!?????“

Anyone else have any slow-motion d’oh! confessions?

It’s a pity he told your missus, you could have just rinsed it off and put it back.

Mine is also toilet related although a happy ending. I went into a cubicle, pulled my phone out of my pocket and it slipped out of my hand and headed straight for the open toilet bowl. I waved my hand at it and managed to slap it sideways. Phew! It then bounced off the wall and headed back for the bowl. A further panic-induced sideways slap and it headed for the other wall, then back to the bowl which it bounced off the edge and fell on the floor.

Luckily all intact.

Mines going round for a curry at the mrs parents who just so happen to have a brand new white carpet.

I stupidly order the brightest red rogan josh you have ever seen and set about scoffing it down.

Couple of seconds in and a piece of chicken stubbornly rejects my fork instead deciding to fly off the plate with such force that it must have gone a good 6ft in the air. All in incredible slow motion it spins as I scream alerting everyone else to my error. The chicken erupts like a volcano firing it’s juice everywhere.

New carpet ruined and my face the same colour as the newly coloured carpet.

Wedding ring coming off and arcing through the air whilst playing with my kids in the massive and crowded sandpit in the park.

The following 5 minutes “panning” for it also seemed to be in slow motion too.

I once had my car key in my jersey back pocket, after a lap of Cwmcarn. I went to the porta potty but wait, I’m wearing bib shorts. So I took the jersey off over my head and the key fell out of the pocket in slow motion, bounced around the rim a few times and down the hole, plopping squarely onto the top of a neat pile of other people’s shit.

I dropped a hammer whilst working above the bathroom sink once.

The sink didn’t even slow the hammer down as it went through it.

Putting woody garden waste through the shredder. Wonder why it seems to be struggling momentarily. A while later at the kitchen sink, wonder where my wedding ring is. Eventually find mangled ring in shredded wood chips. In the long run it turned out that I shouldn’t have worried!

Was reaching to get a bottle of degreaser from a shelf in my garage and knocked a small can of paint over, I watched mesmerised as it rolled off the end of the shelf and fell a couple of feet landing on the top tube of one of my bikes, neatly denting it. In hindsight I could pretty easily have reached out and stopped it if I’d tried 🙁

Was installing a new kitchen. Just putting the finishing touches to something at ceiling level with a large and heavy Philips-head screwdriver. Dropped it, and watched helplessly as it fell slowly and neatly pointy-end-first onto a lovingly-installed worktop where it punched a nice cross shape into the surface.

Or the time (years ago) when I jacked the car up to work on the handbrake underneath. Had to let the handbrake off and watched helplessly as the car toppled slowly off its perch. In a vain and desperate attempt to prevent the handle of the jack tearing a whole in the door skin, I grabbed the wheel arch and heaved at the car to keep it upright. Needless to say I soon had to let go.

Live and learn, eh?

My front wheel washed out on the transition from grass to coping stones on the local canal. In what seemed like 1 frame per second, I looked at my left hand then my right hand and then the water as I broke the surface and went under. I remember thinking “do not swallow any of this shit.”

It was a miserable 8 miles ride home once I’d fished out my bike.

New Years Day 2010, on my way out to Woodhill (local trail centre). It’s a rural(isn) road and I’m doing about 80 kph in my three month old BMW 123D.

Two cars ahead someone is towing a trailer full of firewood. It’s the middle of summer … for the love of god, why?

A quartered log falls from the trailer and gets clipped by the car in front of me.

I see it rotating, slowly in the road. I could go left or right. Just a foot either way would be fine.

Ever so slowly (at 80kph) I plough straight on, completely unable to avoid the wooden toblerone of doom.

To this day I can clearly recall four distinct sounds. Psshht-bang, psshht-bang. Front tyre and rim, rear tyre and rim, both utterly shagged.

In the end, it turned out that the front and rear suspension had also been knackered.

Insurance is still quite expensive for me.

f

Wow. 😯 My story seems positively mundane compared to some of yours!

feckless – were you injured in this log incident?

Working on a weekend office move. We have been given the (one and only) key so that the lift can be held on a floor so it can be loaded/unloaded.

8 stories up I turn the key to lock the lift, and watch in slow motion as my hand snags the keyring, pulls it out the lock, and it slides across the lift floor to disappear down the gap between the lift doors into the lift shaft below. Cue some unhappy looks from the people in the lift with me.

Then we got the little triangular key to unlock the basement lift door so we could slide it open and someone braver than me could climb down and retrieve the lift key. Which we did. However, it turns out once you have unlocked the door, you need to take the key out before you manually slide the doors back, or else you snap the key off in the lock. Cue unhappy look from security man. That didn’t happen in slow motion though.

feckless – were you injured in this log incident?

Not at all. The car just carried on going, albeit noisily since there were chuffing great bits of wheel rim hitting the brake calipers every revolution. Wonderful things, runflats.

Not sure how the impact failed to set off the airbags, but I was even tempted to try and drive the mess home. Gave that up about 2km later though, when the noise became to loud to ignore.

Back in the day*, I was tidying my room as a good boy should. I was trying to make my dad happy. Back then I used to use his spare HiFi gear, and that week I had a NAD Power Envelope amp sitting on my desk.

I stood on the chair, and started to tidy my bookshelf [above the amplifier]. During this process, a tiny nut [that I had salvaged from something I took apart the day before, probably] was dislodged, and scooted across the shelf.

I could have caught it** but I eyed it with disinterest as it rolled along, dropped off, fell, hit the top of the amp, rotated around 90 degrees, fell through the casework vents aaaaannnnnd – shorted a power transistor to ground.

Bang. Dead Amp.

This was a week or so after I’d tried to bridge the NAD 3130 and blown that up too.

Some time later, I was blasting out some music in the bedroom, when the vintage ST-88 Sony tuner wobbled off the top of the drawer. Normally it would have fallen harmless to the floor, about 2 feet, perhaps landed on a pile of clothes. But no, the front had fallen off a drawer a few hours before, it was sat on the floor with the handle facing upwards. Clearly, it totalled the face of the tuner.

About 10 years later, I found I still had the Sony in my possession, and started fixing it up for Dad. About a day after I had it all stripped down a rabbit slipped past my defences and made it to the bedroom, where it proceeded to chew the **** out of all the woodwork for the case.

I gave up. It’s gone in the bin.

Lastly, and more OT – I remember going OTB for the first time, on a steep slope down from my house. I had plenty of time to consider exactly how much this was going to hurt, before I hit the deck. It seemed to take ages!

*When I was a young boy, knee-high to a pig :
[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8tbCTyyVZM[/video]

**Fast reactions, frequently drop stuff and catch it before it fallen a foot or so.

Pressing the throttle in a JCB without realising it was in reverse gear. I was parked at the edge of a 20foot drop, and I shot backwards over it. How I walked away from that is a miracle.

riding in Chopwell Woods years about 17 years ago.
Head down a fireroad descent faster than i ever had, ready for the qucik uphill singletrack. Swereve left past the first tree. See the second tree coming. Realise the front tyre is basically useless in the mud. Watch as the tree approaches. Think to myself “this is going to hurt”. Keep sliding. Examine the teree, decide there’s no way its small enough to bend a milimlimetre. Notice the front wheel engage, feel the bike pivot up. Feel myself flying off the saddle and fly through the air for maybe an inch, porbably around 15-20mph. Feel my helmet contact the tree. And thats it. Next thing I know, I’ve passed through the tree somehow and am on my back, still travelling uphill at the same speed, sliding in the mud. My helmet is on the other side of the tree. Go figure…

Other moment, barrlleing down the A1 in a ford fiesta about 75-80mph, wonder why all the vehicles in front are braking hard. Suddenly, from underneath the lorry I’m following, a massive stag, complete with massive full set of antlers, appears. Obviously dead, but the thing is the size of a cow. Do I swerve left or right? No, I have a think and decide that would flip the car, so I straddled the ****er. Made it over, and got to the hard shoulder, sans exhaust pipe.

Wowsers, some of these stories kind of put toothbrushgate into perspective. 😯

Having a shave in the nude post shower which used to be normal practise, somehow my Mach 3 slipped through my fingers. The juggling to catch the spinning & twisting razor at the precise level of my gentleman’s vegetables happened in extreme slow motion, blade, handle, blade, handle….

I always don boxers pre-shave these days.