Our house used to have a large above-ground swimming pool. When the original owner went into foreclosure, the neighbors took the pool but all of the piping and wiring for the filter, heater, pumps, etc remained buried in the ground.
Pretty much every time we dig a hole to plant something, we run into remnants of stuff. Yesterday, our aim was to plant a lemon tree, but we ran into a pipe. Ah, just more leftovers from the pool, we thought, so a few whacks with a shovel cracked the old plastic and it was gone. It was getting dark, so we called it quits for the night.
This morning, the lawn sprinkler timer goes off as usual. What was unusual is that the back yard sprinklers didn’t start spraying, but the patio was flooding. Yep, we smashed out a sprinkler line that was cleverly disguised as abandoned pool plumbing. :smack:
My father got me an extravagant sewing machine I didn’t need (I had just asked him to get the two I have serviced for my birthday gift) so I have been super-careful with it because I am notoriously clumsy and “this is why we can’t have nice things”. My family got a new fridge during the 70s (that 70s brown but it was brand-new and beautiful) and naturally I walked by it and inadvertently scratched it. I still remember Mom’s face – she didn’t get mad but she just looked sad and disappointed. Anyway, I was working on a project where I had to pull stitches out and I was using the super-pointy scissors and naturally they flew up and scratched the sewing machine. That was typical clumsy and unfortunate.
The really, really stupid crap was continue the project and doing the same thing again.
Oh, ouch. Well, at least you didn’t put a huge amount of time and effort into it…
My latest wasn’t really, really stupid, but it was kind of silly. I made oatmeal raisin cookies yesterday, and as I was making them, I had a nagging feeling I was forgetting something. Two hours later, I realized what I had forgotten - the oatmeal in my oatmeal raisin cookies. Well, they taste good anyway, but they’d be better with both of the two main ingredients. :smack:
This was well over a year ago, but it’s recent in a cosmic sense…
Booked tickets for me and my wife from St. Louis to New Hampshire and back. Flew out on Christmas Day, coming back on Dec. 31. Went to check in online 24 hours before the return flight and couldn’t. Because I had actually booked the return flight on January 31.
I managed to lock myself out of my car (and also my house) one chilly afternoon about three weeks ago. I either put the keys down on the passenger seat or they fell out of my coat pocket while I was reaching in to get my groceries. I could see them sitting there on the car seat through the window. I could also see my phone sitting, recharging, in the bay window of my house along with my anxious-faced kitties wondering why I didn’t come inside and feed them.
This was about 4 in the afternoon. It was half an hour before I flagged down a nice neighbor-lady, no one I’d spoken to before, who let me use her phone to look up and phone a locksmith and let me sit in her living room for awhile and have a cup of tea. Around 5:00, she had to go out but I told her I would be okay–the locksmith said he would be there in about 25 minutes from when we phoned and it wasn’t supposed to start snowing until 5:30. So I went back out to stand by my car and waited… until he finally arrived some time after 6:00 when it was snowing and after dark and the wind had come up and I had begun to feel like a lost little matchgirl.
A few months ago at work, I was troubleshooting a light on an airplane that did not work. Had power, no ground. Traced the ground wire to near a ground block. Figured ground wire got tied up in a bundle about an inch thick instead of being hooked up to the ground block. Cut a couple wire panduits and found the ground wire. And a wire I had just cut in two. The wire was over 100 feet long. Engineering says replace, don’t repair the wire. It took some major disassembly and reassembly and 6 or 7 people 3 days to fix my screw up. The airplane ended up being delivered 2 days late because of me. Total cost to the big airplane company? A bit over $200,000. Yes, they keep track of stuff like that.
I had tickets to see James McEvoy in The Ruling Class yesterday. I was in the bathroom at 2:45 and shot off the seat when I suddenly remembered they were matinee (2:30) tickets, not evening tickets. Of course the play is completely sold out for the remainder of its run.
I’m in Barcelona and this time my mother isn’t here (she’s been timing her visits to coincide with mine). So, since She Who Fills The Fridge isn’t here to fill it, I want to empty it and defrost.
Enter an unopened pack of fondant chocolate ice cream.
Left it out for a while, then went to serve some into a bowl before it really was ready. A huge lump jumped out and went smack against/into the space between the oven and the closet. I’m as much a believer in the five second rule as anybody who remembers childhood, but… not when the seconds involve a location that hasn’t been cleaned since that oven was put in place in 1967. I fished up as much as I could and dumped it in the basin instead.
We have two water heaters. One for some infloor heat, the other is the domestic supply.
About every two months I top off the infloor heat water heater with an a few ounces of water (the air in the water bleeds out causing a need for more water). To do this, I throw the breaker on it so the pump doesn’t come on when adding water.
I took a shower later, and noticed it wasn’t that hot. For my domestic heater, that’s a sign that one of the elements has burnt out. I’ve done this before, so I get the hoses out to drain it, a couple of tools and get ready to go.
First step is of course to turn off the breaker.
It was already off. I had turned it too when I turned off the infloor heat. Was an easy fix anyway, just turn on the breaker and put tools away.
“Honey, I fixed it :D” [sub]no I admitted may stupidity[/sub]
As important, when dovetailing drawers, it is important to keep the top/bottom, in/out orientation straight, lest you end up with a //\ zigzag instead of the rectangle you expect.
The frame was made using sliding dovetails, and they only go together one way. When I cut the notches on top of the frame rails for the pieces that support the table top, I got one of them flipped. It still went together, but was racked. :smack:
We did something similarly stupid a couple years ago. Planning a vacation with our grandson, we were going to fly into LA, rent a car and drive down to San Diego for a couple of days, then back to LA for a few more days including a day at Disneyland before heading home.
When making airline and hotel reservations, we were fiddling with the dates trying to get a better price on the flights. What we wound up doing was booking a flight into LA on Saturday, but made the hotel reservations in SD for Sunday/Monday instead of Saturday/Sunday. Get to the hotel in SD to check in, and the desk clerk tells us “We don’t have you arriving until tomorrow.” And they had no rooms available to let us check in early. So we wound up sitting in the lobby searching on our laptop for another hotel room somewhere. Rooms were scarce in SD that weekend for some reason, but we finally found a room at a Hampton Inn near downtown… for $300! That was one costly mistake.
Very nearly hit a car while changing lanes. I didn’t look in my mirror before moving over because I had looked in the mirrror maybe 10 seconds prior and there was no one in that lane then. Of course, I was driving on a road that has a ton of businesses alongside of it so no doubt someone pulled out into the road <10 seconds earlier. Stupid stupid.
I was out of the state at a conference, and got a call that some people had shown up for a class…well I didn’t have a class scheduled, or at least I didn’t think I did.
A little investigating found that there was indeed a class on the training schedule, but I didn’t assign a region when I created it. So, when I went back through the schedule to verify all my classes it didn’t ever show up because I sort by region.
On top of that, it was entered in error in the first place…I wouldn’t have created a class when I knew I was going to be gone.
Perfect intersection of two very unlikely events.
Unfortunately, resulted in some very unhappy people, whom my boss is returning complaint calls to today…
I usually take “…every 12 hrs.” meds at 8PM and 8AM. Picked up primo pain killers yesterday, got home at 5PM and took one because Mr. Bitchy Knee was mouthing off. Here comes 8PM, second pill goes down the hatch like clockwork–9 hours too early.
Separatory funnels have valves on the bottom. You clean the funnel with the valve open. Let it dry with the valve open. You use it with the valve closed. The first time that you add your chemicals with the valve open, the chemicals pour out onto your table. The second time that you do it, the funnel tends to get thrown across the room.
Been there.