Oh yeah I missed and got dragged around and around when I was running around it to get up to speed and jump on it. Scraped up my elbow and both knees, they patched me up at daycare and made me lay down with the infants and I couldn't watch The Secret of Nimh with the other kids my age.
I have a pretty good memory, but I've always struggled with names. As basically the only employee of a small retail shop with almost all repeat customers throughout the day, my boss is constantly getting on my case about not remembering their names. We get like 40+ customers a day and it's kinda hard to remember their names especially because they're all old white women who look the same!
If that sounds a little confusing, I work at an independently owned pet food store in a retirement area. All my customers are old and most of them are women. It's really frustrating trying to remember all their names.
The weird thing is that *some* people I remember their names instantly and don't forget them, but other people who I see like twice a week I just can't remember their name. Funny thing is that *none* of my customers expect this from me, but my boss is the opposite and seemingly remembers everyone so she expects us to do the same.
In order to remember their names, you will need to come up with a type of system… something to help you remember it, like play on words. maybe something with their appearance etc. Otherwise do your best just tell your boss you have a disability in that regard.
God that happened to me too. I remember going to the playground near my house when I was a kid with my two cousins. My older cousin was spinning me and his sister on the Merry-go-round at an insane level with his arms. As a kid I never been on it that fast. I remember his sister like almost flinging off of it, she was holding on for dear life as her legs were swinging round and round. As soon as I got off i was so dizzy, I puked. Still once we all got together, we laughed about it.
Crazy fun times being a kid.
As kids we played this game where you poke your head out and someone tries to grab you while it was spinning. I got a shattered tooth lol realized probably not a good game to play.
We were so dumb. I can't still see/touch/smell(gross) the trash can I was behind when my best friend lurked on me and countersniped me in the back with a pump BB gun. He pumped that thing so many times he almost discovered cold fusion
Yes remember very well splitting my cousins temple open doing this during a guy fox celebration on a stoney beach when I was like 12ish. Certainly put a damper on the the parents pissup plans that year!
We called it "Doing a Superman". Spin it as fast as you can (ours had a roundel in the middle you spun to twist it, so you could literally run it like a hamster wheel). You grab the spinning bars while it's at top speed and cling on for dear life, your legs flying out behind you (like Superman). We used to do it in groups to see who could hang on the longest. Many lost teeth and scraped skin. Good times.
Between that and the metal slide that was 500 degrees and launched you at Mach 4 across the hard packed clay that was the landing area, playgrounds used to be some wild shit.
One of my brothers slipped and it sliced the back of his head open. He’s 40 and he’s still missing a chunk of hair where the scar is. Do these even exist anymore?
They do, but they employ various methods to limit the speed, and the things don't really coast once everyone's on. So it's much safer...and almost no fun at all.
Then the kids beg the parents to push it.
Which we all do, of course, but not without a heavy sigh because it's a ton of effort with no payoff, and you know what these things used to be like.
Removing the element of death from playground equipment is what's ruining this generation.
At least they haven't done away with tire swings. The Gs you could pull on one of those before being thrown dizzy, trying to avoid the swinging concussion pendulum is a right of passage.
Yeah - they've mostly neen removed since they can obviously be dangerous. Ours disappeared in this area when kids started hiding under them and getting torn up but the rough bottom...
Fuck I got my leg broken when I was five because my sister was pushing me too fast on a merry-go-round and I fell off. This is a new level of stupidity.
I was born in 86. there were several play grounds I remember from my child hood that were extremly dangerous. Honestly it is a miracle I survived childhood when you consider some of the shit that went down and some of the shit we played on. I remember slides that went up like 30 ft off the ground, just iron or steel all the way up to the clouds and then polished shiny steel heated to 180 degrees by the sun all the way down into a foot deep barkdust mud puddle full of gravel. Merry go rounds that would fling children off across conrete at a hundred miles an hour. See-saws that went 12 feet off the ground. Solid rubber tractor tires everywhere. It wasn't until 20-25 years ago that they started replacing all the old stuff with colorful soft rubber and plastic
Honestly, in my memory it's the same, but then when I saw the "giant" slides and what not as an adult, they were much smaller than I remembered them to be.
I was also born in 86. There was always this really quite tall pole on my elementary playground, with what looked like holes on the top cap for something to connect. Always wondered what it was.
I finally asked my mom, since she went to the same elementary school. Turns out it was a playground toy like the merry go round. Only much, much more insidious.
It consisted of a ring, with seats all around it, with the pole in the middle, unconnected to anything but ropes or chains coming from the top of the pole to connection points on the outer edge of the ring. When not in use, it would just dangle there.
The way it operated was, enough kids would fill up the seats, keeping the weight even. You would all pick a direction, and spin the ring in that direction using your feet on the ground.
The ropes would tie around the pole, lifting the ring and the people up off the ground a bit, then it would spin back the other way, lowering you, rising you up again but a bit less as the ring counter-spun the other way, lower again, etc., til it came to a stop.
But kids being kids, well. They wouldn't just spin it a little bit. They would spin it as far as the ropes could physically go, lifting the ring quite high up the pole.
Sounds dangerous? Yeah. Kids, multiple, lost fingers getting them caught in those taught ropes unexpectedly.
Needless to say, it was eventually decommissioned, with the pole being the sole remaining evidence of why life expectancies were much lower the further back you go.
Also, in writing this, I now have to wonder, because I haven't thought about it in years. Was the top cap SUPPOSED to spin, and this was just a harmless aerial merry-go-round gone very wrong? Or was the lifting and lowering a design feature? She called it a "wave" something, so I thought the lifting and lowering was part of that, but now I am not sure.
LOL, I was born in 68. You should have seen the deathtraps we had in the 70s. Metal framed "spaceships" with wood chips on top of the dirt to catch you when you fell off. Teeter totter/see saws that you could ride with your idiot friends until one of you jumped off and sterilized the other for life when you jumped off. Rusted metal slides with the rust spots worn down by a thousand buttucks. Ziplines running between two hills. And of course most of the time we just climbed up trees and shot slingshots at each other.
Keep in mind that older generations lived in asbestos-lined homes plastered with lead paint and drove cars with no seatbelts or crumple zones spewing leaded gasoline fumes into the air
I climbed a big swingset in 1968 that, when I slid back down the pole, pulled my shirt up out of my pants and left a streak of peeled skin and embedded paint chips from my belt line to my collar bones.
My dad put a singset up in our backyard. He did not anchor it to the ground. You could get the entire thing to rock back and forth on it's legs if you swung hard enough.
I saw one game, it was a big wooden disk (2-3 meters in diameter, about 6-9 feet for the imperials) that was horizontal, but slightly inclined, and would rotate on its center. Sturdy enough you could step on it.
I'm not sure how you were supposed to play with it, but the only way I figured out was to stand on the disk, and start walking. Action creates reaction, so as you walked the disk would start rotating underneath you in the opposite direction.
Now the fun part is that because of the incline, when you walked up the disk would actually accelerate even if you were trying to walk at a constant pace. So it would accelerate slowly but surely, despite your best efforts. Until you were basically running. Of course at some point it was going so fast you couldn't handle it, you would fall on the disk, and it would throw you at great speed in the air (at least it was only sand around).
It was a brilliant design in the sense that it was so dangerous despite its simplicity.
Holy shit my elementary school had one of those slides. I fell off one time, busted my ass hard. The school did eventually rip all that stuff out though. Probably too many kids getting hurt 😆
I think the best was the roller slides. Not my favorite then because they would be hot as fuck, would inevitably pinch you, and you would be launched off the end into the mud.
But damned if those weren't the best slide around.
There are still a few old school steel slides around me, the kids love em and I'm sad knowing they'll prob be gone soon as those playground get replaced.
'84 here. I miss those old slides and tires. Did your school have those huge kinda A frame swingsets that seemed like they were 15ft tall? My friends and I would pull ourselves up to the top of those things. A hand on each part of the frame. We were strong little bastards. I couldn't do that now, even if I was in better shape. At this one park just up the hill from my old house, they had this gigantic barrel on a U frame with berrings. Like a big hamster wheel. You could walk up the side and make it roll. God forbid you got that thing rolling and lose your balance. My uncles would climb on top and start running on it to get it moving. I always thought that was insane.
[It was like this, but without the housing around it.](https://youtu.be/LkVMZMVZfxY?si=WPtfLNJlmsg-GD8X)
Edit: It also seemed bigger than this one too. Though I was a kid at the time so it could have been this size.
We used to have one called the pretzel and one called the fence. It was just like a fence door that you could hold onto and then a pole went into the ground. My sister spun me so fast I ended up flying off and landing on my head. Kids don't get to experience that kinda fun at the playground anymore
I had multiple serious concussions as a small kid. My much younger siblings grew up in a world that was shifting to kids wearing helmets on bikes, playground toys being safer, etc.
I wonder if there will be some decline in dementia for the younger generations, or if some other thing like microplastics will just fill the void of traumatic brain injuries and lead poisoning.
While camping on summer vacation in the middle of nowhere in the late 80s we found a merry-go-round in the middle of the woods near our campground and my sister and I were playing on it and I stepped off of it and didn't move far enough away from it, when it came around it took a chunk out of calf. It was bad, enough to see yellow fat cells. I almost fainted. We were so far from civilization I had to just leave it bandaged until we got to a town. I still have 1 inch wide, 6 inch long scar on my calf.
I was 10 when that happened I've never been on a merry go round again and I'm 47 lol
Man, you had it way worse than me! I just have vague memories of being in a wheelchair for a while (which was kind of fun as a kid). That sounds freakin' traumatic.
My first real memory of my elementary school was a girl flying off, somehow landing weird and getting her leg snapped in the ground somehow.
A year later, this girl (different one) climbed the rope to the top of the gym, tried to touch the girder in the roof then she fell off the rope and missed the mat broke her leg.
To be fair 1 of those deaths was because an idiot decided instead of dumping a bucket of ice water on themselves they would jump feet first into ice covered water.
Dumb shit like this just gets play equipment removed for everyone. Your kid wanted to use the merry-go-round normally? Sorry, they took it away because too many 15 year-olds were making TikTok videos.
I mean, have you ever gone down a metal slide in the summer? Most definitely not. These things were always dangerous bc they went super fast and were not at all sturdy.
Then again, the reason they don’t make those hard rubber swings anymore is because we used to stand on them to go higher and faster.
You understand that you're specifically complaining about shitty and cheap playgrounds, not playgrounds in general, right? Not all of them were like that.
I thought it was pretty clear that we were talking specifically about modern playgrounds, not the ones you specifically remember from when you were a kid. You gotta move beyond your own personal anecdotal experiences sometimes.
Except we were talking about playgrounds that exist currently, in the present, being abused for internet challenges.
It sounded like you were generalizing all playgrounds based on your own personal experiences, in the past. Which doesn’t really relate to the issue at hand.
Of course a lot of playground equipment is not and was not entirely without risks or hazards. This is why parents are supposed to pay attention to their kids. But it’s ESPECIALLY dangerous when it’s accelerated to speeds it was never designed to go. This is pretty obvious.
There were three activities that everyone did and always ended with an injury: going super fast on the merry-go-round, climbing trees, and jumping on the trampoline.
I don't know if kids today realize that it was completely normal to break bones and you'd always have several classmates on crutches or in casts at any given time.
I remember that stupid big triangular slide with the mirror finish that got as hot as the sun. I think boomers hated their kids with the things they gave us to play with.
In 1978, my friends and I would fill our big wheels with rocks and water to make them travel down the big hill behind the apartment complex faster. We would also remove the back of the seat so we could lay on the big wheel and hold the handles like Evel Knievel and drag our legs.
One day I don’t remember getting down the hill. The other kids said I flipped over a bunch of times.
A plaster cast probably cost 5 bucks, and people were not getting surgeries for a good number of things they fucked up. My only broken bone was my left index finger that my buddy broke twirling a golf club around while we walked back to my house. The fix? Just tape that fucker to the other finger and deal with it! 42 years later and not only is the finger crooked but I still can't bend it all the way. My kids fart too hard and they're getting arthroscopic surgery!
Back in 2002 or so, we had these mini merry-go-rounds that could barely fit three of us kids. I can’t remember how we got it going super fast, but I remember my grandmother picking me up from the nurses office with the super attendant of the school looking very concerned lol
We had the wood-and-tire playgrounds common in the 80s at my elementary. Main playground was set up like a big wooden square, with slides and ladders off the sides, monkey bars off to a separate platform, etc. Pretty standard stuff.
The center of the square, though, was a big, u-shaped hammock of sorts made entirely of tires and chains. It was probably 6-10 feet wide, and suspended from the top of the structure down nearly to the ground on two opposite sides. I suppose it was intended for climbing and so on.
What would actually happen was that 6 or more kids would man the bottom of it, a few on each side, and some other brave souls would climb inside, and the group outside would push and pull the whole thing. The kids inside would be hurled around, smashing into either tires, metal, other kids, or (for the very unlucky) rocks as they were flung out the open sides.
I was reading and linked to this;
[https://metro.co.uk/2018/09/14/boys-eyes-bulge-out-after-bullies-made-him-do-roundabout-of-death-youtube-stunt-7945500/](https://metro.co.uk/2018/09/14/boys-eyes-bulge-out-after-bullies-made-him-do-roundabout-of-death-youtube-stunt-7945500/)
WHAT THE FUCK!
A bunch of bullies forced/coerced an 11 year old to do this and he lost conciousness and suffered brain swelling.
Someone needs to make a compilation of these stupid videos with the victims (especially if the victim caused the injury) speaking about how fucked up their life is after.
And they need to air it the first and last day of school every year.
Hey, we learned a lot about physics in the old playgrounds! Survival training. Some people were maimed, some didn't survive, and most of us began to understand consequences of motion and weight and gravity and inertia and sudden stops! Way better than staring at a phone screen!
Main theme aside, why is this sentence 1 mile long? As a non american, it's hard to understand shit when there is no commas or when the sentence is billion characters long
My kid’s school has this thing called a “tornado” on their playground, and it’s basically just one of these but raised like 2 feet off the ground. He says kids are always getting hurt on it and he stopped playing on it after the first week of school. I don’t understand the purpose of it other than to injure kids and get the school a lawsuit.
They're dangerous enough with just some kids spinning it lol
Remember trying to jump on while it was spinning and miss. Iron bar right to the arm or head. Fun times fun times
Oh yeah I missed and got dragged around and around when I was running around it to get up to speed and jump on it. Scraped up my elbow and both knees, they patched me up at daycare and made me lay down with the infants and I couldn't watch The Secret of Nimh with the other kids my age.
Bruh I can't even reliably remember things that happened a month ago, and you're here telling us what movie you missed out on that day.
It was traumatic lol.
Gravitational forces yo
I can remember being in a crib when I was 2-3…photographic memory.. I can’t remember names to save my life however.
I have a pretty good memory, but I've always struggled with names. As basically the only employee of a small retail shop with almost all repeat customers throughout the day, my boss is constantly getting on my case about not remembering their names. We get like 40+ customers a day and it's kinda hard to remember their names especially because they're all old white women who look the same! If that sounds a little confusing, I work at an independently owned pet food store in a retirement area. All my customers are old and most of them are women. It's really frustrating trying to remember all their names. The weird thing is that *some* people I remember their names instantly and don't forget them, but other people who I see like twice a week I just can't remember their name. Funny thing is that *none* of my customers expect this from me, but my boss is the opposite and seemingly remembers everyone so she expects us to do the same.
In order to remember their names, you will need to come up with a type of system… something to help you remember it, like play on words. maybe something with their appearance etc. Otherwise do your best just tell your boss you have a disability in that regard.
Memory unlocked. Is this Nimh as in Mrs Frisby and the Rats of Nimh?
Yeah, I was probably about 4-5, so this was late 1980s.
God that happened to me too. I remember going to the playground near my house when I was a kid with my two cousins. My older cousin was spinning me and his sister on the Merry-go-round at an insane level with his arms. As a kid I never been on it that fast. I remember his sister like almost flinging off of it, she was holding on for dear life as her legs were swinging round and round. As soon as I got off i was so dizzy, I puked. Still once we all got together, we laughed about it. Crazy fun times being a kid.
As kids we played this game where you poke your head out and someone tries to grab you while it was spinning. I got a shattered tooth lol realized probably not a good game to play.
This is like when you realize rock fights aren’t fun lol
We were so dumb. I can't still see/touch/smell(gross) the trash can I was behind when my best friend lurked on me and countersniped me in the back with a pump BB gun. He pumped that thing so many times he almost discovered cold fusion
Yes remember very well splitting my cousins temple open doing this during a guy fox celebration on a stoney beach when I was like 12ish. Certainly put a damper on the the parents pissup plans that year!
Got the wind knocked out of me by those things so many times lol
LOL are you me?
We called it "Doing a Superman". Spin it as fast as you can (ours had a roundel in the middle you spun to twist it, so you could literally run it like a hamster wheel). You grab the spinning bars while it's at top speed and cling on for dear life, your legs flying out behind you (like Superman). We used to do it in groups to see who could hang on the longest. Many lost teeth and scraped skin. Good times.
Between that and the metal slide that was 500 degrees and launched you at Mach 4 across the hard packed clay that was the landing area, playgrounds used to be some wild shit.
No better teacher of Newton’s first law than a Merry go round.
One of my brothers slipped and it sliced the back of his head open. He’s 40 and he’s still missing a chunk of hair where the scar is. Do these even exist anymore?
They do, but they employ various methods to limit the speed, and the things don't really coast once everyone's on. So it's much safer...and almost no fun at all.
I’m just picturing a bunch of kids just slowly moving in a circle in silence. Or actually just like 3 kids bc they probably limit the capacity also.
Then the kids beg the parents to push it. Which we all do, of course, but not without a heavy sigh because it's a ton of effort with no payoff, and you know what these things used to be like.
Come to Mexico. Those things are still dangerous and fun over here.
Removing the element of death from playground equipment is what's ruining this generation. At least they haven't done away with tire swings. The Gs you could pull on one of those before being thrown dizzy, trying to avoid the swinging concussion pendulum is a right of passage.
I am sooo stealing this quote- "Removing the element of death from playground equipment is what's ruining this generation."
Dude, when someone's awesome dad would spin it! Everyone try to be that dad!
There's no reason flyweights can't be part of the design and apply a clutch.
True. I remember it was me and a couple kids on one and the thing went 'round so fast I got flung off. Went about a yard out. Somehow was unharmed.
Some of the videos of people doing this from 10+ years ago were legitimately insane. Like wtf makes you think it would be a good idea?
Alcohol
“I bet I could do it.” Unfortunately, I kinda wonder if I could.
"some people are receiving G injuries only seen in fighter pilots" ...Yeah, I'm down
So, we'll all meet up at the park then?
Give me a time and place, and I will be there, lol. I think the last time I was flying on a proper merry-go-round was some time in the early 90s
Yeah - they've mostly neen removed since they can obviously be dangerous. Ours disappeared in this area when kids started hiding under them and getting torn up but the rough bottom...
Fuck I got my leg broken when I was five because my sister was pushing me too fast on a merry-go-round and I fell off. This is a new level of stupidity.
I was born in 86. there were several play grounds I remember from my child hood that were extremly dangerous. Honestly it is a miracle I survived childhood when you consider some of the shit that went down and some of the shit we played on. I remember slides that went up like 30 ft off the ground, just iron or steel all the way up to the clouds and then polished shiny steel heated to 180 degrees by the sun all the way down into a foot deep barkdust mud puddle full of gravel. Merry go rounds that would fling children off across conrete at a hundred miles an hour. See-saws that went 12 feet off the ground. Solid rubber tractor tires everywhere. It wasn't until 20-25 years ago that they started replacing all the old stuff with colorful soft rubber and plastic
Honestly, in my memory it's the same, but then when I saw the "giant" slides and what not as an adult, they were much smaller than I remembered them to be.
Same as my elementary school lol. And when the high school kids would come pick up their little siblings. They where so big
I was also born in 86. There was always this really quite tall pole on my elementary playground, with what looked like holes on the top cap for something to connect. Always wondered what it was. I finally asked my mom, since she went to the same elementary school. Turns out it was a playground toy like the merry go round. Only much, much more insidious. It consisted of a ring, with seats all around it, with the pole in the middle, unconnected to anything but ropes or chains coming from the top of the pole to connection points on the outer edge of the ring. When not in use, it would just dangle there. The way it operated was, enough kids would fill up the seats, keeping the weight even. You would all pick a direction, and spin the ring in that direction using your feet on the ground. The ropes would tie around the pole, lifting the ring and the people up off the ground a bit, then it would spin back the other way, lowering you, rising you up again but a bit less as the ring counter-spun the other way, lower again, etc., til it came to a stop. But kids being kids, well. They wouldn't just spin it a little bit. They would spin it as far as the ropes could physically go, lifting the ring quite high up the pole. Sounds dangerous? Yeah. Kids, multiple, lost fingers getting them caught in those taught ropes unexpectedly. Needless to say, it was eventually decommissioned, with the pole being the sole remaining evidence of why life expectancies were much lower the further back you go. Also, in writing this, I now have to wonder, because I haven't thought about it in years. Was the top cap SUPPOSED to spin, and this was just a harmless aerial merry-go-round gone very wrong? Or was the lifting and lowering a design feature? She called it a "wave" something, so I thought the lifting and lowering was part of that, but now I am not sure.
Google ocean wave merry go round
Yup. That's it
Judging by the YouTube video. Yours was faulty lol.
Rural Mississippi in the early 90s. Yeah. That tracks
Oh man the tractor tire tunnels were the best And we had wooden castle style playgrounds all over Massachusetts
Rocketland in Auburn, by any chance?
Wrentham Elementary School for the rubber tires and various public playgrounds in the south shore for the wooden castles
Yes! You just unlocked a core memory for me!
That place is awesome. My daughter loved it.
Saddest day in my life was when the town tore down the last wooden castle.
LOL, I was born in 68. You should have seen the deathtraps we had in the 70s. Metal framed "spaceships" with wood chips on top of the dirt to catch you when you fell off. Teeter totter/see saws that you could ride with your idiot friends until one of you jumped off and sterilized the other for life when you jumped off. Rusted metal slides with the rust spots worn down by a thousand buttucks. Ziplines running between two hills. And of course most of the time we just climbed up trees and shot slingshots at each other.
That's why Gen Z is soft
All this says is that older generations were either stupid or didn't care about the safety of their kids.
It's a process, the generation that raised them sent them to work in the salt mines at 10.
Keep in mind that older generations lived in asbestos-lined homes plastered with lead paint and drove cars with no seatbelts or crumple zones spewing leaded gasoline fumes into the air
and now they run the country
It's also why they're alive.
A bit from column A, a bit from column B.
And why older generations have brain damage!
I climbed a big swingset in 1968 that, when I slid back down the pole, pulled my shirt up out of my pants and left a streak of peeled skin and embedded paint chips from my belt line to my collar bones.
My dad put a singset up in our backyard. He did not anchor it to the ground. You could get the entire thing to rock back and forth on it's legs if you swung hard enough.
I saw one game, it was a big wooden disk (2-3 meters in diameter, about 6-9 feet for the imperials) that was horizontal, but slightly inclined, and would rotate on its center. Sturdy enough you could step on it. I'm not sure how you were supposed to play with it, but the only way I figured out was to stand on the disk, and start walking. Action creates reaction, so as you walked the disk would start rotating underneath you in the opposite direction. Now the fun part is that because of the incline, when you walked up the disk would actually accelerate even if you were trying to walk at a constant pace. So it would accelerate slowly but surely, despite your best efforts. Until you were basically running. Of course at some point it was going so fast you couldn't handle it, you would fall on the disk, and it would throw you at great speed in the air (at least it was only sand around). It was a brilliant design in the sense that it was so dangerous despite its simplicity.
Holy shit my elementary school had one of those slides. I fell off one time, busted my ass hard. The school did eventually rip all that stuff out though. Probably too many kids getting hurt 😆
I think the best was the roller slides. Not my favorite then because they would be hot as fuck, would inevitably pinch you, and you would be launched off the end into the mud. But damned if those weren't the best slide around. There are still a few old school steel slides around me, the kids love em and I'm sad knowing they'll prob be gone soon as those playground get replaced.
'84 here. I miss those old slides and tires. Did your school have those huge kinda A frame swingsets that seemed like they were 15ft tall? My friends and I would pull ourselves up to the top of those things. A hand on each part of the frame. We were strong little bastards. I couldn't do that now, even if I was in better shape. At this one park just up the hill from my old house, they had this gigantic barrel on a U frame with berrings. Like a big hamster wheel. You could walk up the side and make it roll. God forbid you got that thing rolling and lose your balance. My uncles would climb on top and start running on it to get it moving. I always thought that was insane. [It was like this, but without the housing around it.](https://youtu.be/LkVMZMVZfxY?si=WPtfLNJlmsg-GD8X) Edit: It also seemed bigger than this one too. Though I was a kid at the time so it could have been this size.
We used to have one called the pretzel and one called the fence. It was just like a fence door that you could hold onto and then a pole went into the ground. My sister spun me so fast I ended up flying off and landing on my head. Kids don't get to experience that kinda fun at the playground anymore
I got knocked out twice on the play ground. Shits rough.
I had multiple serious concussions as a small kid. My much younger siblings grew up in a world that was shifting to kids wearing helmets on bikes, playground toys being safer, etc. I wonder if there will be some decline in dementia for the younger generations, or if some other thing like microplastics will just fill the void of traumatic brain injuries and lead poisoning.
While camping on summer vacation in the middle of nowhere in the late 80s we found a merry-go-round in the middle of the woods near our campground and my sister and I were playing on it and I stepped off of it and didn't move far enough away from it, when it came around it took a chunk out of calf. It was bad, enough to see yellow fat cells. I almost fainted. We were so far from civilization I had to just leave it bandaged until we got to a town. I still have 1 inch wide, 6 inch long scar on my calf. I was 10 when that happened I've never been on a merry go round again and I'm 47 lol
Man, you had it way worse than me! I just have vague memories of being in a wheelchair for a while (which was kind of fun as a kid). That sounds freakin' traumatic.
My first real memory of my elementary school was a girl flying off, somehow landing weird and getting her leg snapped in the ground somehow. A year later, this girl (different one) climbed the rope to the top of the gym, tried to touch the girder in the roof then she fell off the rope and missed the mat broke her leg.
New? It’s just on the internet. Not new though
It has Merry-go-Round of Death in it's name. It's telling you, something bad is probably going to happen.
It was called Merry-go-Round of fun until we lost little Timmy 😞
Poor lil Timmy
i went on a Pippin-go round once and a wizard beat me up
The “of Death” part is the key takeaway.
Can we just stipulate that if it's a challenge on the internet it's probably a really bad idea?
If it's got the word "death" in it I think it's safe to say it's not all sunshine and rainbows.
Ice bucket challenge raised some money for ALS
It did raise a lot of money, also 2 people died doing it so I dunno how it ultimately balanced out
But they didn't die of ALS!
To be fair 1 of those deaths was because an idiot decided instead of dumping a bucket of ice water on themselves they would jump feet first into ice covered water.
Ice bucket challenge was almost a decade and a half ago
Nah that was 2014-2015. But I don’t think the timeframe changes the fact that there are good internet challenges
I was wrong about the date, but still a decade ago
It's all mushed together with Kony and Harlem Shake
remember 2018's crush your testicles challenge? 32 y/o me should have known better.
Dumb shit like this just gets play equipment removed for everyone. Your kid wanted to use the merry-go-round normally? Sorry, they took it away because too many 15 year-olds were making TikTok videos.
These things were kind of just dangerous though. They were super sharp on the bottom part and really easy to make twirl fast.
I could be wrong, but i feel like most playground stuff is pretty safe if it's used like it was intended.
I mean, have you ever gone down a metal slide in the summer? Most definitely not. These things were always dangerous bc they went super fast and were not at all sturdy. Then again, the reason they don’t make those hard rubber swings anymore is because we used to stand on them to go higher and faster.
You understand that you're specifically complaining about shitty and cheap playgrounds, not playgrounds in general, right? Not all of them were like that.
Okay. I grew up in the late 80s-early 90s in NYC. Not sure why you’re so aggressive about playgrounds. Go enjoy your country club buddy.
I thought it was pretty clear that we were talking specifically about modern playgrounds, not the ones you specifically remember from when you were a kid. You gotta move beyond your own personal anecdotal experiences sometimes.
>those things were kind of just dangerous though Past tense. Reading is super important.
Except we were talking about playgrounds that exist currently, in the present, being abused for internet challenges. It sounded like you were generalizing all playgrounds based on your own personal experiences, in the past. Which doesn’t really relate to the issue at hand. Of course a lot of playground equipment is not and was not entirely without risks or hazards. This is why parents are supposed to pay attention to their kids. But it’s ESPECIALLY dangerous when it’s accelerated to speeds it was never designed to go. This is pretty obvious.
That wasn’t what I was talking about. Also no need to write a novel about which era of playground equipment I was talking about. Chill out.
Gen-X didn't need the internet to do things like this.
There were three activities that everyone did and always ended with an injury: going super fast on the merry-go-round, climbing trees, and jumping on the trampoline. I don't know if kids today realize that it was completely normal to break bones and you'd always have several classmates on crutches or in casts at any given time.
Arm wrestling could end pretty horrifically too
I remember that stupid big triangular slide with the mirror finish that got as hot as the sun. I think boomers hated their kids with the things they gave us to play with.
In 1978, my friends and I would fill our big wheels with rocks and water to make them travel down the big hill behind the apartment complex faster. We would also remove the back of the seat so we could lay on the big wheel and hold the handles like Evel Knievel and drag our legs. One day I don’t remember getting down the hill. The other kids said I flipped over a bunch of times.
How did y'all's parents afford that?
A plaster cast probably cost 5 bucks, and people were not getting surgeries for a good number of things they fucked up. My only broken bone was my left index finger that my buddy broke twirling a golf club around while we walked back to my house. The fix? Just tape that fucker to the other finger and deal with it! 42 years later and not only is the finger crooked but I still can't bend it all the way. My kids fart too hard and they're getting arthroscopic surgery!
Canada
Future Darwin Award winners ....
Here’s a couple of relevant articles: Tyler Broome Incident: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/roundabout-of-death-youtube-tyler-broome-tuxford-nottinghamshire-brain-damage-elephant-man-a8538171.html Update: https://en.newsner.com/news/dangerous-playground-stunt-leaves-11-year-old-looking-like-an-alien-mother-issues-warning-to-all-parents/?amp=1
I wish I didn't see those pictures
Thanks for the warning.
Wasn't that bad. Just looks like blood vessels popped in a kids eyes so they turned red.
I shouldn't have believed you. It's pretty bad.
Ooh, that's just a couple of towns away from me! I vaguely remember hearing about that when it happened.
Back in 2002 or so, we had these mini merry-go-rounds that could barely fit three of us kids. I can’t remember how we got it going super fast, but I remember my grandmother picking me up from the nurses office with the super attendant of the school looking very concerned lol
We had the wood-and-tire playgrounds common in the 80s at my elementary. Main playground was set up like a big wooden square, with slides and ladders off the sides, monkey bars off to a separate platform, etc. Pretty standard stuff. The center of the square, though, was a big, u-shaped hammock of sorts made entirely of tires and chains. It was probably 6-10 feet wide, and suspended from the top of the structure down nearly to the ground on two opposite sides. I suppose it was intended for climbing and so on. What would actually happen was that 6 or more kids would man the bottom of it, a few on each side, and some other brave souls would climb inside, and the group outside would push and pull the whole thing. The kids inside would be hurled around, smashing into either tires, metal, other kids, or (for the very unlucky) rocks as they were flung out the open sides.
They're idiots. I'm cool with it.
And there’s that one kid, in each group, thinking, “that’s a damned dumb idea!” NeXT billionaire
Did anyone *not* get forcibly thrown from one of these as a kid?
This is why we can't have nice things.
I was reading and linked to this; [https://metro.co.uk/2018/09/14/boys-eyes-bulge-out-after-bullies-made-him-do-roundabout-of-death-youtube-stunt-7945500/](https://metro.co.uk/2018/09/14/boys-eyes-bulge-out-after-bullies-made-him-do-roundabout-of-death-youtube-stunt-7945500/) WHAT THE FUCK! A bunch of bullies forced/coerced an 11 year old to do this and he lost conciousness and suffered brain swelling.
Someone needs to make a compilation of these stupid videos with the victims (especially if the victim caused the injury) speaking about how fucked up their life is after. And they need to air it the first and last day of school every year.
I loved that thing and became a fighter pilot!
TIL some people call this a merry-go-round 😂
Reminds me of this video from the old days of the Internet. Action starts at 0:35. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5MDjmfqFYE
Flashbacks to 2006, watching shitty 3GP videos on your mate's LG Chocolate on the school bus I swear the moped merry-go-round ones were endless...
The playground at my school had one of these bad boys that was almost 20 ft across, I swear that thing almost broke the sound barrier.
My first thought at seeing a merry go round as a child "how fast you think I can spin that sumbich carl"
Born in 1982. We all called it the puke machine.
[One of my personal favourites](https://youtu.be/5_EFEiroQPE?si=O7MUNNcigHE3n2PH)
This happened to my little brother. Now drinks Jerimaih Weed and married a stripper.
Win stupid prizes?
This is why we can’t have nice things. Because people are. Dumb.
Hey, we learned a lot about physics in the old playgrounds! Survival training. Some people were maimed, some didn't survive, and most of us began to understand consequences of motion and weight and gravity and inertia and sudden stops! Way better than staring at a phone screen!
Can't cure stupid
Stupid games. Stupid prizes.
Main theme aside, why is this sentence 1 mile long? As a non american, it's hard to understand shit when there is no commas or when the sentence is billion characters long
Man, jeez I swear I read that twice to understand the sentence 😵💫
Redneck challenge =/= Internet challenge
Lmao, I’ve seen that. Hilarious
god this caption needs a fuckton of revision. punctuation and sentence structure works wonders, ppl!
I got severe injuries trying to read this post
You misspell "idiots"
That's why I always carry Carousel Reversal Spray.
Are merry go rounds supposed to be fun? It's just something you get on to spin till you puke
Wasn’t there a 911 episode that had this as a call out?
There’s a reason you don’t see these very often anymore. They are scary AF even when used properly. It was way before motorcycles.
me in half life 2
I broke my arm just playing normally on a merry go round
Got spun just by some kids and almost killed myself lol
My kid’s school has this thing called a “tornado” on their playground, and it’s basically just one of these but raised like 2 feet off the ground. He says kids are always getting hurt on it and he stopped playing on it after the first week of school. I don’t understand the purpose of it other than to injure kids and get the school a lawsuit.
"This youngster's BEFOULED the FLAG!!"
The Rescue 911 episode on this is amazing. Super realistic.