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Imagine you volunteer to carpool with some colleagues when, one day, a coworker climbs in and casually mentions he’s carrying a homemade bomb. Oddly, he’s not trying to pull some bizarre carjacking, and it’s definitely not “bring-your-explosives-to-work day.” So, naturally, you kick him out. But that’s when things take an explosive turn for the worse.

This isn’t fiction from a summer blockbuster. It’s a true story out of the Netherlands. Back in 2008, some colleagues were carpooling into the port of Hindeloopen when a 33-year-old man casually mentioned he was carrying a bomb, proudly adding he’d built it himself.

The driver of the car, understandably freaked out, immediately pulled over and kicked him out.

The bomb-building coworker got out, but then asked if he could hop back in for the rest of the commute. When the driver refused, the would-be bomber tried to reassure him, asking if he could demonstrate how he could disarm the bomb.

One can imagine the driver’s shock at this request. That bomb was armed all along!?

At this point, the explosives enthusiast began excitedly showing how to arm and disarm his contraption. He insisted that, in this way, it could be “stable” enough for a carpool. Yikes.

As luck would have it, he crossed the detonator wires during the demonstration, and the bomb went off. According to police, the bomb was far from deadly. Despite it going off in the man’s hands, he was “shaken but unharmed.” But according to the 2008 Darwin Awards (for which he earned an honorable mention), “unharmed” means the bomb went off “blasting away several of the man’s non-vital body parts.”

Unharmed or not, something tells me he’ll be driving himself to work from here on out.

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