So I spent the better part of Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday trying to figure out what was wrong with the USB part of my computer. I uninstalled/reinstalled drivers, root hubs, restored system-restore points, swapped ports, etc… to no avail.
Finally, after reading a comment on about the thousandth page I googled, it occurred to me that it could be the cable. Duh. Replaced the cable, and it worked fine. I should know better; I’ve been in IT for 15 years, and actually did PC building and support for 3 of those. I should never have assumed my cable was good!
Anyway, what are your recent face-palm moments? I can’t be the only person who’s wasted a lot of time or done something dumb that we know better than to do?
I used to work in software tech support, so I’m pretty well versed in troubleshooting to determine where a particular issue is based (hardware, software, operating system, document, fonts, etc.)
I couldn’t open an MS Publisher (don’t laugh) document yesterday because it kept asking for a product key in order to validate the installation – I own MS Publisher legally and have used Publisher on that PC many times in the past year and a half, but whatever.
However, I’ve lost the product key. In order to retrieve my product key or get a new one generated, I tried MS tech support via online chat as well as speaking with two different technicians – a total of one hour later (a lot of which was attributable to my inability to understand the two technicians), we found that I could open MS Publisher by launching directly from the program icon – for some reason, it was only happening when I attempted to open the program by double-clicking on a document.
This procedure – determining through a process of elimination what is causing a problem – was something that I learned in the first day of training in tech support, and it was a procedure that I used nearly every day for three years. I wasted an hour of my life (and, let me tell you, it was an aggravating hour) because I’d briefly forgotten that procedure.
A proposal my company was working on a couple of weeks ago required input from several people. I did some of mine and then had to leave early for the day, e-mailing a copy to myself so I could do a little more that night. My boss, meanwhile, got other people to contribute their parts. When I got back the next morning I thought of a few other things I should add, so I pulled up the document attached to my e-mail, wrote a little more, and saved the revised version to our proposal folder. Of course I got the message telling me that such a file already existed (the one of the same name, which had everyone else’s text in it) and asking me if I wanted to replace that file. “Well, I’ve got all my change up to date in it,” I thought, “so, sure.” I hit “Yes.”
I was helping a jr programmer solve a problem she was having with reading a csv file. She was receiving a data conversion error on the 26th column of data so I decided to load the csv file into Excel and have a look at the data. I started counting columns, and actually made it to the 23rd or 24th column before it dawned on me that the 26th column of data would be Column Z in Excel. :smack:
I have two trash cans in my house that I empty regularly on each pick-up day.
One is in the kitchen and the other is downstairs next to my cats’ litter containers.
For the past YEAR, I have been taking the much more full “kitchen” bag and taking it downstairs to then try and stuff the much emptier “litter box” bag into it.
Only recently did I decide that I was being an idiot and should be putting the kitchen bag into the litter bag.
Massive facepalm occurred. I didn’t even THINK about it for so long.
Mine has some similarities to the OP’s, but is even more face-palmy:
I recently purchased an eSata adaptor so that I could move a USB 2.0-attached drive from USB to eSata. The drive is attached to our household server, which had been recently replaced with a newly retired desktop. When I installed the new server, I had simply moved the drive to one of its USB 2.0 ports. At the time, I was happy just to have upgraded to 2.0, as the previous server had only USB 1.0 ports. I figured I might later want to move it to SATA, but left it for another day, which had now arrived.
I’m not sure I’ve made that clear, but in any case, months later I bought the necessary adapter and opened up the server to install it. While doing so, I unplugged from the motherboard an annoying SATA cable that was running through the case in the way of installing the new one. Hey, wait a minute, where does that cable go…? Oh, to the eSata port that’s been there all along. :smack:
In my defense, the existing port was installed in the bottommost expansion slot, and the actual connector was half-covered by the edge of the case. Countering my defence – I had built the box from scratch and should have remembered that it was there.