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