Your Worst Hacking Failure Stories
Last week, readers told us about their biggest life hacking failures , and some of them were truly impressive. So good that we just had to share them with you. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, but most of the time, you’ll be glad that you didn’t try any of these tricks yourself.
The one with the beautiful stance , from Jägs :
According to this Lifehacker post , I tried to do the same in my garage. Here are some of the immediate results:
I was very pleased. The next morning I went into the garage:
Although the shelf supports were rated to weigh over 100 pounds, they failed miserably. I found a few more difficult ones and they haven’t had any problems since then.
Whoever has the mess , from TJ :
I watched a video on how to make sparkling wine from Sodastream wine. This … this was a mistake. Roskato was EVERYWHERE.
The one with the egg avocado from Mr. P Is Mad Wack :
GD baked an avocado with GD’s egg.
Commentator V. B. explains the hack in more detail :
The preparation was to be as follows: half an avocado, pour a little more from the pit and pour in raw scrambled eggs. Bake and have a cooked egg inside a delicious Pinterest-worthy breakfast! It turns out to be disgusting. The temperature at which the egg is cooked makes the avocado disgusting and the egg doesn’t even cook. I just gasped as I wrote this and thought about it.
The music commentator agrees:
This video was one of the most misleading things I can think of. The egg is not suitable, you need to create a base for baking it, it takes at least 12 times longer than the video suggests, and is about as delicious as simply preparing an egg and placing it on top of an avocado.
And to bury me in Makeout Creek offers a warning:
I did it once. The avocado has become bitter and the egg has a very strange consistency. Looked and felt like the rubbery scrambled eggs you can get in a toy house with let’s play imagination cooking.
The one with Matt’s DIY Soylent :
I wanted to try Soylent to see if I could get all the “amazing” benefits I read about. The problem was that the order for Soylent was delayed and he could not ship for a month. I took the DIY route and bought all the ingredients from Amazon to make my own. A 50-pound bag of cornmeal, 10 pounds of salt and flaxseeds, a gallon of olive oil, and so on — that’s it. I have tried manually mixing ingredients that were in the metric system and am trying to convert them to American. Then I switch to my $ 200 blender which almost breaks due to the consistency.
After I finally cook this soylent, everyone says to let it cool for 24 hours for it to taste better, but I figure I can handle it. I pour myself a glass, excited that I won’t be making dinner tonight, and I take my first sip … It’s like warm concrete going down my throat. I am struggling to figure it out. A second sip should be better. Wrong. I have to fight my gag reflex. I barely swallowed half the glass before I poured it out. I even tried it again in the morning with the same result. Only this time the concrete was cold. I spent $ 200 on Soylent ingredients just to drink 4 ounces.
The One With His Eyes Closed With Wine , from Carrie Matheson :
I was in the process of making tomato soup, which goes well with red wine, and I had a bottle, but I only realized when the soup was already on the stove that I wasn’t sure where the corkscrew was. Therefore, I go to the Internet and find “tricks” how else to open bottles of wine. I think I was too nervous about the “stick him in the shoe and press him against the wall” trick, so I stuck the knife into him and turned to pull him out. It worked at first, but soon I somehow pushed on it and shattered the plug in the process. So I went as a last resort and just shoved it right into the bottle because I was so disappointed and needed wine and tomato soup.
The next thing I know is that my eyes are burning and on me 1/3 of my bottle (my face and my lid, which luckily was red so the wine was not too dark), a table and a small stain on the ceiling between the blades of the ceiling fan. The top barely survived the new internet hacks and there are still a few drops on our ceiling as I didn’t even notice they were there until it was too late.
Anyone who has … POP! Jeffj’s White Chocolate Surprise :
Trying to make a white chocolate hollow sphere – following very clear directions from the internet – by dipping a latex balloon into melted white chocolate. The explosion that followed left small drops of white chocolate in places you can’t even imagine!
The one with the really hot panties , from mrgoodbeer :
Having just graduated from college, my partner and I visited my mom. We stayed overnight. Can’t remember why, but we brought some laundry and my mom’s dryer didn’t work very well. In the morning, her clothes, which had been tumbled dry all night, were not completely dry, and she had no dry underwear on the way home. With a basic knowledge of how a microwave oven works, I figured that a quick nuclear strike would heat the water in wet panties so they could evaporate and dry over our morning coffee.
I did not count on an elastic band or decorative metal thread in the belt. In just a few seconds, they turned into a molten, shriveled pile that began to burn. Despite the embarrassment – especially since my parents knew that their son, with his new degree, had just set a flaming piece of panties on fire in the microwave – we survived, had children, and settled in the outskirts.
The one with random cocktails , from Some Guy on the Internet :
When you are short on freezer space and are trying to quickly chill, say, a bottle of vodka, you can remove some of the ice from the ice maker and put the bottle in there. And if you forget about it there, you end up suddenly adding to ice cubes.
The one with a little miss perfect , from masterhab :
I saw an art project in which you line up a bunch of Crayola crayons along a white canvas, then melt them with a heating lamp so that they flow down and create this cool rainbow effect. It ended up looking like brown porridge, and I guess I left it for too long, as almost all the wax dripped from the canvas onto all of my important work papers on my desk.
To piss me off even more, when I went to see my sister, I saw that she had tried the same project and executed it flawlessly.
The one with very crispy bacon from ex Lifehacker EIC Whitson Gordon :
When we met, my current wife invited me to her family’s house for Easter. I don’t remember if it was our first or second vacation together, but it was definitely relatively early in the relationship. It was a big brunch and her mom didn’t have enough room on the stove for all the bacon, so her brother advised her to grill it with aluminum foil. Apparently this is what should work. I was skeptical, but he insisted.
He helped me settle down at the grill and then told me to mostly stay with the bacon and look after him while he helped inside. All went well until the flames got too strong. My then wife said: “Hey, watch out for this flame …”. I turned to her and said, “Don’t worry, the aluminum foil doesn’t catch on fire … right?” Well, when I said that, SOMETHING burst into flames. Still not sure if it was foil or all of the bacon fat, but the flame was definitely growing and turning off the burners didn’t help because it was already spreading through the bacon.
So she turns to the latticed door, where the whole family cooks, plays with the children, etc., and calmly says, “I don’t want to disturb anyone, but there is a small fire here, does anyone want to help us?” Of course no one is listening, so she speaks a little louder: “Hey guys, fire …” No answer. Finally she shouts: “FIRE!” her mom understands what’s going on and luckily, being more knowledgeable about life hacks than I was at the time, she takes some baking soda and puts it out. All this happened in about 20 seconds.
And this is a story about how on Easter I almost burned down the house of my relatives.
Epilogue: After that, her brother left the house and said: “Well, did you even save some bacon?” Unfortunately, the bacon was half raw, half charred, and covered in baking soda.
Thanks to everyone who posted! If you missed out on the opportunity to apply for this round, feel free to share your pain in the comments below.