Ever amazed by your own stupidity?

[Andy in Germany]

This thread is doing wonders for my self esteem.

At least I've never done that

I thought that when the discussion was about mistakes with cars, until it occurred to me the main reason I haven't done most of them is that I don't own a car.

 

[Jenkins]

The only thing that amazes me about my stupidity is that there isn't more of it.

 

[ebikeerwidnes]

I used to work on "high availability" IT systems. Ones that were linked across data centres to be able to takeover in the event of major disasters.
This sometimes involved sitting in machine rooms on a screen, with multiple 'windows' on my one screen to different systems.
I can neither confirm nor deny that a live 'NotEast' Stockbrokers system was halted mid afternoon due to typing it in the wrong window 👀
Luckily, that was back in the 90s....& I have stepped away from the keyboard.....

Oh, & then there was the time I powered a rack of kit on without ensuring individual shelves were off. That was when I discovered the meaning of the term "inrush current", whereby although the rack could happily run once running, the surge on bootup was enough to trigger a trip switch.....& a chunk of datacentre powered off with it

Or the time I had to slide a rack of drives out, & one caught on a belt buckle, nudging it's locking button and sliding the disc within to the floor 😳

Oh, so many happy days 🤪

I worked in front line IT for 20 years - I looked after several systems that were business critical
I can absolutely confirm that I have never once been connected to several systems at once and accidentally shutdown the wrong one

no no no - not never

I have also never got fed up with fixing a problems every damn week when I knew how to fix it but the fix was deemed to be low priority compared to other system changes - and it was certainly not me that accidentally inserted the fix to the problem into a production update with authorisation
No - that never happened either - and if it ever went wrong that was certainly never me

 

[ColinJ]

Not MY I.T. stupidity, but I witnessed it...

One of my friends had a hard drive fail which contained all the work he'd done in one year, and of which he had no backup copies, not even any printouts of it. The company had paid him £20k to do that work, so you can bet that they valued it at £50k-100k!

He looked physically sick when he went to tell the departmental manager! I think they had to send the drive to be rebuilt in a data recovery specialist's clean room, at enormous expense.

 

[Chris S]

I paid £12 to see a Rod Stewart tribute at a local pub last night. The same act are playing a pub nearer to me tonight, for free.

 

[Marchrider]

This weeks act of stupidity
needed to make an aluminium pallet to hold a work-piece on to the milling machine. With great precision I measured and marked out, drilled and tapped the 7 holes to secure the workpiece. Unfortunately I had forgot to invert my template, so I spent 2+ hours making a perfect mirror image of what I needed

had to do it all again

 

[Gillstay]

Took a car seatout, struggled with the plastic trim trying hard not to break it. Took the seat apart mended the fault but was so concerned about getting the plastic trim off that I forgot 4 major bolts untill I had the seat back in the car and wired up. Still it will be easier to do again in the morning as the bolts etc will be greased.