My Mom got a DVD burner for Christmas and asked me if I could install it for her. I said it should be fairly easy to do.
So, I crawl under her desk, unplug the wires, and start trying to figure out how to get the case off. I sat there for at least ten minutes trying to get the damn thing off. There were no screws, retaining clips, sliding parts, nothing. I sat there stumped and just kind of stared at the front of it.
I came back into the living room with the burner in hand and handed it to my Mom. She asked if I had trouble installing it, and I said “Kind of, but you don’t need it anyways.” She said “But I want to make my own DVDs!” I said “You can. Just use the DVD burner that’s already installed.”
The combination of low light under her desk, the completely black face of the burner against the black casing, and my failure to check for one first :smack: led to the confusion.
She said that she never noticed that she had one, to which I replied “Well they did a damn good job camouflaging it!”
At my old office, I had a window AC which inexplicably stopped cooling. I called Physical Plant and they sent a guy out–who turned the knob from “Heat” to “Cool.” :smack:
Back in 1993, I bought a new Toyota pickup, still have it to this day in fact. The day after I bought it I was driving through the parking lot of a shopping center and it quit running. I tried for half an hour to get it to start. As I was walking to a pay phone at a gas station, I looked up at the Chevron sign and suddenly I had a thought of pure genius. I went back to the truck, turned the key on and looked at the gas gauge. Yep, buried on empty. 45 miles on the odometer and it was out of gas. I haven’t run out of gas since that fateful day.
And it’s even worse in my case. I have one of the drain plugs that you have to reach down and pull up the circular stopped-thing, and then twist to keep it up. And so, the water, or the drain cleaner, or the conbination of them caused the stopper to rust(?) shut. There’s enough clearance that the water drained out, though.
And now, I use the other shower, until I can work up the nerve to admit to someone who can fix it what I did.
Everyone else’s stories reminded me of one of my own absent-minded things recently.
A couple of times in the last week (once while driving) I’ve gone to put my sunglasses on top of my head as I went inside (or into the parking garage), only to discover that I wasn’t wearng my sunglasses, because I was wearing my prescription glasses.
As I noted here this is a very bad idea while I’m driving.
Anyway, it’s nice to know that I’m not alone in my boneheadedness. Thanks, guys.
My mother was having stomach problems-bad diaarhea and what not for a few weeks. She couldn’t figure it out, and was planning on making a doctor’s appointment. Only that morning, she pulled out the can of cream she used for her coffee, and cut the top off, so she could recycle it.
I was getting ready to go flying an R-22 with an instructor (who now owns the company). I started the preflight, but was interrupted. I don’t remember what it was. The instructor had to excuse himself and go back to the office or something. Finished the preflight and got into the cockpit. The instructor came back and distracted me again. I tried to start the engine and it wouldn’t go. I tried starting several times. The instructor tried starting several times. He finally got out to check the engine. That’s when I re-started the engine starting checklist. The mixture was at idle cut-off. :smack:
Okay, I was a student. And the instructor didn’t catch it either. It did illustrate the importance of not being distracted. My instructor said we shouldn’t mention the episode to anybody.
Anyway there was a get-together for someone that afternoon who had just passed his commercial checkride, finished turbine transition, or something. Talk turned to the Bell JetRanger. One of the other instructors said turbines are great, once you get them started. My instructor and I just looked at each other sheepishly and started busting up. (The R-22 has a piston engine, BTW.)
Ever do the one where you search frantically, (and pissed off-edly) for your keys…which are in your hand? Or look for your glasses (“oh my GOD I CAN’T GO ANYWHERE WITHOUT MY GLASSES!!!1111111111111”) and miss your bus before you realize that you ARE WEARING THEM??? I would think that I would have noticed that I could…uh…see.
I catch the bus pretty much right in front of my building. On more than one morning, I had to wave the driver on because I realized that I wasn’t wearing shoes. It’s fun to explain my tardiness on those days.
Unfortunately, owing to my reputation, nobody who knows me even bats an eye when I regale them with these tales.
I did the garage door opener thing once too, except I went as far as buying a whole new one, and having a friend come by to help install it. Before we started, he noticed that someone had taken the batteries out of the remote.
Last week my Dad was helping replace our dryer. We discovered scary code violations regarding the gas line and called in the Dad Guru. Kind of humiliating to still need Daddy to explain house stuff, but way less humiliating than blowing ourselves up.
Much sweating, swearing and visiting of the hardware store later, the gas line is correct, the new dryer is installed and laundry is merrily thumping away. The hot water tank is next to the washer and dryer and the pilot light wound up getting blown out in all the general hubbub.
Quickly, my boyfriend and I leap into action, anxious to demonstrate we can at least fix this wee thing all by ourselves. Like a well-oiled machine, one of us holding the flashlight, reading the step-by-step instructions aloud, the other writhing about on the floor doing the actual relighting. We think we hear the “whump” of ignition and huzzah merrily, grinning like drunken baboons as we put away the tools and close everything up.
Fifteen minutes later my boyfriend emerges from a very quick shower and says
“Brrr, the tank must not have gotten heated through yet, that shower was cold!” Do we check the tank? Of course not, secure in our pilot-lighting expertise.
An hour later, Dad washes his hands and the water is still cold. Grumbling about our idiocy, he wriggles into the four allotted inches between the tank and washer and is about to re-light the pilot light when he notices it’s already lit.
I’m panicking, thinking about mysterious dip tubes and repair costs when Dad re-reads the very same lighting instructions that we did, except he goes all the way to the end. Where it reminds you to turn the temp knob back to “hot.”
Not much good relighting the pilot if you don’t actually let the tank know you want the water hot. :smack:
This one was only 50/50 my fault. I rented an apartment with a standard type bathroom tub and shower. Standard knob. Pull the knob out for water pressure and turn toward the right for cold water and left for hot. Well, I never could get a hot shower, no matter how far I turned the knob to the left. By all rights I should have been scalding myself, but the water always came out ice cold and freezing. I told the apartment manager about this, he came and checked it out. Well, it turned out the pipes ran into the valve incorrectly. The hot water ran to what should be the cold side and the cold water ran to what should have been the hot side. I never realized that all I had to do to get a hot shower was to turn the knob to the right.
I had a New Year’s Eve party at my house a few years back. A lot of people were going to be drinking so a lot of them planned to crash there for the night.
It got really cold that night and people were waking up freezing and asking where there were more blankets. Everyone was really cold and was looking for ways to keep warmer.
Problem was nobody ever thought to check the thermostat. During the party it must have been too hot in there for someone so they just cranked it down the other way to 50 degrees.
I don’t think I can win the thread, but here goes. I spent a whole week without a stove (or oven) waiting for the technician to come and fix it (it didn’t work at all). It was just the GFCI outlet that had tripped and left it without power.
Afew months ago there was a partial power outage in my apartment. During the interval before it became a total power outage, I had gone to the breaker box and tried flipping the circuit breakers for where the power had gone out. When the power was restored, the power was still out in one room. Since this was over the weekend, I sent an e-mail to the building management company asking them to send someone out on Monday (since they don’t consider that an “emergency”) to find out what the problem was.
Then an hour later I sent a second e-mail cancelling the request for service, having gone to the breaker box and flipped the breaker for that room back to the on position.
I currently feel dumb because I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve never seen a shower drain with anything resembling a lever. I can’t even picture how that might work.
