rSlash - r/Askreddit What's the Dumbest Idea that Actually Worked?

Episode Date: March 2, 2026

0:00 Intro 0:03 Todays question 0:08 Cowboys and aliens 0:53 Missing 3:15 Mouse 4:23 The dream 5:25 Moving 7:46 Pool 9:07 Missing bill 9:47 Truck 11:25 Shotgun 11:50 Ribs Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Eligibility restrictions apply. See golden nuggett casino.com for details. Please play responsibly. Welcome to R slash Ask Reddit where people answer the question. What's the dumbest idea you've seen that actually worked? Our first replies from Lujini. How the movie Cowboys and Aliens got made. The property had been optioned but never used.

They then made a graphic novel out of it, priced way under what a comic book that size would normally cost. Then they offered the comics in bulk to large comic shop chains around the country with the promise that if they bought a thousand dollars worth of comics, they would get a thousand dollar check back from the publisher. Several comic chains did it, and they got their thousand dollars back, as promised. It seems like a bonkers marketing strategy.

Until they then use those sales numbers to go back to Hollywood and show them they had the biggest selling graphic novel in the country. And it worked. A studio picked up the script and got it made. Our next reply is from Sobupin. 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 to the farm 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 into a field. We spent the next two days walking through extremely tall grass looking for the thing. We were never going to find it. The foster dad, who owned a retired police dog at the time, came out with an old, rusted,

non-working gun. He looked at all of us and said, I've tried dumber stuff than this, and it worked. And he pretended to throw the gun into the field. That damn dog brought back the missing gun 30 seconds later. Beneath that, we had this reply from James only. My friend let me park my car in his driveway to do an engine rebuild. I had all the parts ready for assembly, and it was going to be quick. I started tearing down the engine.

When I removed the first piston by removing a tiny circlip, the damn circlip popped out of my pliers and shot far through the air, disappearing into the deep grass of the yard. It was a big yard, and it shot really far away. There was no way I could find it. Now, my disabled car was sitting there in my friend's driveway with no engine, blocking the driveway, and it was all my fault. I would have to wait a week for delivery of a new set of circlips. That night, I got really drunk, tied a magnet to a long piece of string, and in the dark of the night, I went fishing with a beer bottle in one hand and a long string in the other.

I walked through the yard for about two minutes, singing and swigging beer, and dragging the magnet behind me. Sure enough, when I collected the string, the missing clip was right there, stuck to the magnet. Stupid idea or drunken genius? This is the trippiest fact I know about dog's ability to track things by smell, is they can tell time. Like, let's suppose there's like five doors. And on Monday, you walk through door number one, Tuesday, door number two, and then Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, all the way to door number five. If a dog tracks you, it will track you to door number five because that's the most, recent scent. That is so crazy to me. Our next reply is from Ekby Bjarnum. 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, put a lit on it and took the mouse outside to set it free. Also, in college, I had a test I was worried about on a subject I really struggled with. My roommate was actually good on that subject, and our third roommate suggested we all get drunk and have a last-minute tutoring session the night before. Somehow, I did better on the test than my roommate who tutored me. Again, we were drunk during this

tutoring session, like drunk drunk. Beneath that, we have this reply from Annie Catch. Once, my sister caught a mouse in a humane trap. She took it to a park a few miles from her house, opened the trap, and as soon as the poor little guy ran out, a hawk swooped down on it immediately. Our next reply is from retroactive recursion. I was broke and had no real plan or opportunities. I quit my job and drove across the U.S. to find myself, figure out life? No idea. I was 23, probably an idiot, but I had no responsibilities to anyone but me. I found out that I found A career in IT, a wife, and now have a grown kid, a house, a dog, a couple of cars, the whole American dream package. Every once in a while, usually while standing in my yard over a grill

with a beer in my hand, I'm like, F me! It worked! And then beneath that, we have this reply from Charles Bear. This is unbelievably similar to my own story. I quit my job, drove across the States, no plan in mind except to find myself. It was a life-changing experience. I didn't find a job. I didn't find a job or get married, though. I got Chlamydia. Then another reply, same. I drove across the country to L.A. to see if a girl was the one. She gave me herpes. I left immediately. Our next reply is from Wonderful Price. Many years ago, my brother was moving apartments, only about six blocks. He had a big couch, but none of us had a truck. So we dragged the couch behind his car in early December in the middle of the night. We took the legs off and put padding underneath it. Worked like a charm.

Then another reply from Nudes Danger Tits. This reminds me of the time that my friends were getting kicked out of their rental house and I was going to take their trampoline. It was one of those round ones and it was only going across town so we figured we'd roll it there. It only took us turning it onto its side to realize that 14 feet is really effing high and there's no way we were clearing the power lines between here and there. So we balanced it on my friend's mini pickup instead, but we had to hold it up so the legs didn't drag, and we just jogged along the side of the car as he drove slowly. I was wearing a t-shirt dress and thin little flip-flops that made plapping sounds with every step. We ran into a cop about halfway there, but before he could do more than open his mouth,

the driver launched into a very fast explanation about how we're just moving our friends. trampoline just down the road, just there, no problem. We'll just be on our way now. And tootled off before the cop could say a word. When I looked back, the cop was just still sitting at the intersection, stunned. I think he eventually decided that it wasn't worth whatever paperwork goes with illicit trampoline transportation and moved on, but who knows. We did eventually get the trampoline to my place, which was a house converted to apartments with one small square of grass in the back. A couple of weeks later, a friend jumped onto it off my second story back balcony and ended up putting a huge hole in it. Right after that, my landlord called and asked if I knew where it had come

from. I, not being a fool, said, no. He seemed suspicious and tried to pull that King Solomon stunt on me and said, well, I'm going to have it hauled off since nobody knows where it came from. But the joke was on him because it was broken anyway. I was just like, sure, sounds good. None of my business. That saved me another transportation errand, if I'd even thought to bother, lull. Anyways, that's my trampoline story. Our next reply is from Maliki. I bought a pool for my kids, a little 14 foot above ground pool. It was meant to be a surprise, so I tried to set it up, foundation included, before anyone noticed. As I'm filling it up with water, right around sundown, my nine-year-old finally takes notice of it and asks what it is. I said, oh, that's the water trow for the cows I just ordered. I'm just

filling it up before they arrive. He looks at the pool for a second, then back at me and says, Oh, can I name one of them? At least I don't have to worry about college. Then a similar reply from Oki Red Dog. My mom has a good story of her grandpa tricking her and her sisters growing up. Anytime there are rabbits in Pops yard, he would hand out salt shakers to the girl and tell them to try to salt the rabbit's tails. He claimed they could catch the rabbits if they could get salt on the rabbit's tail. They did this from the age of five up until they were 12 or 13 as Pop watched from the porch. They never caught a single rabbit, lull. When she was in high school, my mom finally asked Pop how salting a rabbit's tail was supposed to make it easier to catch. Pop chuckled and said,

If you're close enough to salt a rabbit's tail, you're close enough to just grab it. Obviously, Mom had my two brothers and I chase rabbits with salt shakers until she spilled the beans on the reason it worked when I was 11. Her next reply is from Blackmellon. I worked at a Sears Automotive in the 80s 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 just 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 bill. I kid you not. Our next reply is from Illuminated Pickle.

So my dad was a truck driver, and when I was a kid, I would tag along on trips whenever I could over the school holidays. The company my dad worked for was in the north of New South Wales, in Keynesland. Most of what they did was take molasses down south and bring other stuff back up. Because molasses is heavy, you don't need a tanker trailer to get to your max weights for the average truck class. You can just have a massive rubber bladder that can roll up in the front of the trailer, but take about 30 tons worth of molasses when it's rolled out. So we make a delivery to this cattle farm, and Dad has managed to reverse into this really weird unloading area that this farmer had cleared out. We dropped the amount that we're supposed to drop into his tanks, and dad realizes the worst thing has happened.

With about 25 tons of molasses left in the bag, it had twisted over because the ground wasn't level while it was being slightly emptied. This meant that we couldn't strap it back up. The farmer said, I have no effing idea what to do. My dad said, I have no effing idea what to do. I said, but what if you just drive it out and park it in the same place? place facing the other way for a while. It might just slump back over. My dad and the farmer both said, That won't effing work. So my dad calls his boss. The boss says, maybe you should park it facing the other direction and see if it slumps back over. My dad said, all right, I'll give it a try.

Wishing he hadn't made that call over a loudspeaker while I was nearby, refusing to look at my shit-eating grin. And folks, that stupid idea worked. My friend had this small, maybe one and a half foot driven well at a summer place near the beach. The well stopped flowing, so he stuck a shotgun down the pipe and pulled the trigger. The shotgun barrel swelled up like a snake that swallowed a rat, but it didn't explode. The well started filling with water again. The gun was destroyed, but the wells worked ever since. Our next reply from Steeple Fun.

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, but was still stuck in my esophagus, so I couldn't swallow anything. Anytime I tried swallowing something, liquid or solid, it would make it to that point and then come back up. I thought, meh, my body will 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 that I would 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 that 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 the cartoons. I said, let's do it. No one believed that 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 win is planned. When we called the doctor back to tell him to cancel everything, he was dumbfounded.

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