‘What’s the dumbest idea you’ve seen that actually worked?’ – 21 utterly stupid plans that were somehow a big success

In theory, the best ideas in the world should be the most carefully thought through and intelligent, right? Not ridiculously ill-conceived whims launched on a wing and a prayer.

Well, not always.

They’ve been discussing the phenomenon of schemes so bad that they’re good on the AskReddit page after user hiagaga asked this:

And lots of people chipped in with the crazy strategies they’ve witnessed somehow come to fruition, like these…

1.

‘In college I applied for a lucrative summer job, as did a friend. We knew it had way more applicants than positions. The friend got a call and was invited in. I got that number from him and just called, claiming that I had been called from this number.

‘Person checked, saw that I was among the applicants, assumed that either she or the other shift had called me, and invited me in too. Was a nice financial bonus and even helped me as I could list it as work experience years later.’
–Acc87

2.

‘I grew up in the foster care system. At one home, the foster dad was chief of police. He also had a farm in the northern part of the state.

‘He brought us foster kids up one weekend. A few days after getting home he found that one of his guns was missing. After days of nobody saying anything one of the kids admitted to taking it and bringing it to the farm where he got scared and tossed it in a field.

‘We spent the next two days walking through extremely tall grass looking for the damn thing. We were never going to find it.

‘The foster dad, who owned a retired police dog at that time, came out with an old, rusted, non working gun. He looked at all of us and said ‘I’ve tried dumber shit than this and it worked’ and pretended to throw the gun in the field.

‘The damn dog brought back the missing gun 30 seconds later…’
–S0biepan

3.

‘I worked at Sears Automotive, in the 80’s, as a teenager. It was a really windy day and as I walked to my car I pulled out the only bill in my pocket, a 20, which was a fortune to me at the time. The bill blew out of my hand and disappeared into the abyss.

‘I went back inside, and I told a very old salesperson what had happened and he continued to cut a piece of paper the size of a bill. He walked outside, where I lost the bill, and let go of the paper. We were able to follow the piece of paper, and within a minute it LANDED on top of the lost 20 dollar bill. I shit you not!’
–BlackMelon1533

4.

‘I once got evicted from a college apartment. Scrambled to find a place and found one a street over. I didn’t have a car at the time, so we loaded up everything big on top of skateboards and scooted them bitches to their new home.’
–LordoftheScheisse

5.

‘Putting googly eyes on random objects and suddenly the whole office morale went up like we discovered fire again.’
–CloudyAngelie

6.

‘When I was like, six years old, we had a mouse in the house. I didn’t want my parents to kill it with a snap trap so I used Tom and Jerry logic to make a trap for it.

‘I put a piece of cheese in a bucket on its side and placed a fan next to it to blow the cheese smell to where we knew the mouse was hiding. Within a minute, the mouse came sniffing around and entered the bucket. I tilted the bucket upright and put a lid on it and took the mouse outside to set free.’
–EkbyBjarnum

7.

‘House propane tank gauge was stuck for a month. Hit it with a stick. Propane tank gauge works fine now.’
–negative-nelly

8.

‘A friend of mine had a wobbly ceiling fan that made this awful ticking noise at any speed above low. His solution was to tape a penny to one of the blades to balance it out. I told him that was the dumbest thing I’d ever seen. That fan ran perfectly for the entire three years we lived in that apartment. He never even took the penny off when we moved out.’
–Own_Willingness3670

9.

‘My car broke down a few blocks from my house. I didn’t have a tow strap and I was too broke to buy one so I took a garden hose and wrapped it around the bumpers of my car and my friend’s truck and connected it to its self. Worked perfectly.’
–redbush4real

10.

‘My brother and friend got a jet ski up to full speed and jumped off and skipped themselves across the lake. They took turns being the jumper vs the driver. They had a blast. They were maybe 12.’
–Fitzaroo

11.

‘A water hose helped me avoid surgery.

‘When I was in 10th grade, I was eating ribs at a local restaurant when I swallowed a piece that wasn’t chewed up enough. It went far enough down that it wasn’t blocking my air way but was still stuck in my esophagus so I couldn’t swallow anything. Any time I tried to swallow something (liquid or solid) it’d make it to that point and then come back up.

‘I thought, ‘Meh, my body’ll fix it’ and went home to take a nap. I woke up hours later and still had the same problem. My mom called the local doctor who said I’d need an easy surgical procedure. BUT it was the night of my sister’s rehearsal dinner and she was getting married the next day and I didn’t want to ruin things so I protested and said I could make it through a couple of days without eating.

‘My soon-to-be-brother-in-law made the joke, ‘We could just stick a water hose in his mouth like in cartoons’. I said, ‘Let’s do it’. No one believed it would work except me and the brother-in-law. We went outside and after one failed attempt where I almost drowned, I put the hose in my mouth with my face pointed upwards and he turned it on full blast. It dislodged the meat and the weekend went as planned.

‘When we called the doctor back to tell him to cancel everything, he was dumbfounded.’
–steeple_fun

12.

‘When I was 14, I had an mp3 player (showing my age) and it stopped working, because the connection points on the battery had gotten warped and weren’t connecting properly. All it really needed was something to squeeze it together. So my mum fixed it with the the best small, non-conductive, flexible material she had at hand: a piece of pistachio shell.

‘We have a golden pistachio trophy that we circulate to members of the family who cobble together MacGyver solutions to problems.’
–kitskill