First grade. Show and Tell is tomorrow, and I want something cool to bring. My mom has a bright blue robin’s egg that’s had a hole poked in one end and its contents removed, leaving an intact shell. She gives it to me, and says, “Be careful, it’s very fragile.”
I distinctly remember thinking, “I wonder how fragile it is?” and then squeezing it to find out. It shattered, and I immediately bursting into tears, because I’d broken this very pretty thing, and I didn’t have anything for Show and Tell now.
Anyway, ~ forty years later, I still feel dumb about it. Even though it’s clearly my mom who was the idiot, for trusting a first grader with something that delicate.
In 1998, in my newly-minted role as a FileMaker developer, I got my hands on a Micropolis 4 GB external SCSI hard drive. That was a veritable ocean of storage space back then, and this was a small shop that wasn’t prone to buying toys and trinkets for the people on staff. Well, it was one device on a multiple-device SCSI chain (remember SCSI chains?), all stacked on top of each other. The day came when I had to change the little set wheel of one of the other external drives (probably an external CDROM drive or something), to change the SCSI ID to some other number in order to attach an external Zip drive to the chain — because the cheapie little Zip was set up to use only one or two SCSI IDs instead of having the whole range to choose from. Anyway, to get to the stupid CDROM drive, I simply lifted the other devices up and then laid them on their backsides until I’d worked my way down to the CDROM device.
Yeah, didn’t bother shutting the damn computer down first. Glanced up at the computer screen to see a read-error message about the Micropolis volume. Oh please be okay, please be okay… nope. External hard drives didn’t auto-park or have motion sensors, and it had been spinning at 7200 RPM when I’d lifted it and flopped it over onto its backside.
Back to using an old used 250 MB drive for my extra storage.
Although I have through poor judgement or hastiness broken my fair share of inanimate objects, the ones I remember are (or were) alive. Plants I forgot to water, or transplant, or weed. Pets that died because I didn’t know how to care for them. Those haunt me.
I kinda did the same thing with the storm glass and the Galileo thermometer that I keep atop my desk’s hutch. I was moving some things around the them so I set them down lower in an effort to keep them from being knocked off. The storm glass survived.
The thermometer’s temperature range wasn’t high enough for this place, anyway.
I didn’t pay anywhere near $225 for mine. Nor was it my favorite poster, but it did do an excellent job of covering that wall.
One day, I was hunting a fly and swatted it right next to the poster. Unfortunately, years of being up and (sometimes) in the sun had made the paper extremely brittle. The force of my swat shredded the whole thing in a second, right before my startled (and sad) eyes!
If only I hadn’t taken that swat – or just waited a few more seconds for the fly to clear the poster - I might still own it. Thereafter, that wall remained uncovered as a reminder…
I had a cool homemade mask at the beginning of Covid and thought a good way to sanitize it would be put it in the microwave (with a cup of water, of course). After it caught fire, google informed me that elastic will catch fire in a microwave.
While getting down Christmas stuff, tipped over my Suzuki onto the perfect Kawasaki. Dented the tank.
While replacing a tire, left the perfect Honda on a stinking lift that leaked out the pressure, allowing the bike to fall over. Dented the tank.
Afraid to get too close to the last perfect bike I have…
Cracked the glass in my new room addition by putting the woodstove too close. Cracked my Fiat windshied and one of the BMW’s with stupid accidents. Blew up too many amps to recall by cranking them up to 11 and well beyond. A few speakers, too.
A couple other things I can’t even talk about anymore…
I was working on my Saturn and had the front end up on a hydraulic jack. I placed some safety jacks under it in case the hydraulic jack failed. I positioned two safety jacks under some frame rails, and without thinking I placed a third safety jack under the oil pan. After finishing the work, I removed the two safety jacks under the frame rails and released the pressure on the floor jack. I had forgotten to remove the safety jack under the oil pan, resulting in a nice, big hole in the oil pan (and a mess of oil). Why in the hell did I put a safety jack under the oil pan? To this day I can’t believe how stupid I was.
Even stupider:
I replaced the front brake pads on my BMW Z4 last year. I’ve done a zillion brake jobs over the past 35 years, and this was a job like any other. Afterwards I heard a grinding noise from the front driver-side brakes. Figured the new pads were settling in. Next day, grinding continued. Next day, same thing. Finally, after a week, I shone a flashlight through the front driver-side wheel. The rotor had deep grooves in it. WTF?? I pulled off the wheel and inspected it. I discovered the problem… when I installed the new outer pad, I installed it backwards: the steel backing plate was making contact with the rotor. I think I am the only person on Earth who has installed a brake pad backwards.
When I was 22 years old, I had beautiful butt-length hair I had been growing out for years. I decided to get it cut off and get a curly perm. When I got home (a house I shared with two roommates), I kept looking at it in the mirror and hating it more each time. I thought it just looked horrible and kept getting madder and madder at myself for doing it. No one else was home and for some stupid reason, I opened the front door and then kicked it shut. The top half of the door was a window which, of course, shattered. There is a long and involved story about the aftermath of this which involves Jack Daniels, French bread and Greenland but that’s for another time. To this day, 45 years later, the story is a legend and my friends bring it up from time to time to laugh at me. And I can laugh, too, at how ridiculously stupid it all was.
About 20 years ago I had a top of the line PC that I was proud of because I built it from the ground up.
At some point it started over-heating because of too much dust accumulating, so what did I do? I opened the side up and blew the dust out using a portable vacuum cleaner nozzle at full blast! It cleaned the PC perfectly all right but then refused to start when I hooked it back in! Fried a $700 Motherboard and CPU combo due to static electricity caused by using a conventional blower and not compressed air. At least the rest of the parts worked afterwards but it also meant I had to format my primary drive too to install the new motherboard.
I was downloading a program to an industrial computer (PLC) that was setting on the floor in my office. I was in fact downloading to the factory computer 500 miles away. It caused problems.
I broke a pallet of marble counter tops once, trying to deliver them to a construction site.
Nah, that little bit of lifting pressure on the pallet jack is just to keep the jack from rolling around while I move the truck so this car can get out. It’ll be fine, I’m just going to put it in gear and ease off the brakes a little, not even going to put my foot on the gas pedal.
That was a very expensive lesson early on in my career on what not to do when making deliveries to construction sites.
Well, the answer to the question is “my hip” I broke it last year when I was at the hairdresser’s. I went to sit on the chair and didn’t move back far enough, letting me slip off of the corner. As I fell I grabbed to try and hold myself up, but all that did was turn me around and present my right hip to the hard tiled floor. M, the hairdresser, lived right across from a fire station, so when she helped prop me up she ran over there for the EMT’s. It was my own carelessness, and M is a nice lady, so I’d never dream of trying to use her insurance, as I had good insurance of my own.
I belong to a very active page on FB for vintage stereo equipment. You would be shocked at how much people are willing to pay for 1970s stereos made by Scott, Pioneer, Sansui, McIntosh, Marantz etc. Even Realistic goes for big money.
The first house I ever owned had trees that the builder had never cleared, getting me a deal on the price. I spent two years felling trees. I’d gotten every tree I thought I could handle, leaving four for the pros. A kid across the street asked why I hadn’t taken down the big pine and I told him I wasn’t comfortable getting it to fall where it had to fall. He told me his truck could help pull it over.
So, I secured one end of a rope to the tree, as high as I could get it. He tied the other end of the rope to his truck’s bumper. I made my cuts, and when the tree began falling, he pulled it with his truck. The tree lifted his rear wheel drive truck’s rear end off the ground, then took off the bumper (held in place largely by rust).
Luckily the only damage was to my neighbor’s electrical service, which was fixed before the neighbor got home that night. But it could have been way worse.
I once gave away a desktop PC. I happen to dislike all of the pre-set folders Windows gives you and encourages you to use, such as My Music, My Videos, My Pictures, and so forth. My habit for years has been to create my own folders and organize them as I see fit, so I know that the standard pre-set Windows folders will not contain anything of interest to me. Before re-formatting the hard drive, I moved out all my music, videos, pictures etc. from my nice set of custom folders I’d always used.
What I forgot was that when you rip a CD, the system wants you to use My Music very badly, and makes it some trouble (for me at least) to permanently change the destination of ripped files. At some point I’d given up, and allowed CDs to rip into the My Music folder. Hundreds of them.
Since I never, ever use the My Music folder, I didn’t even check it, and when I wiped the machine it was all deleted along with everything else. This is why, decades later, I have several hundred CDs on the shelves and in boxes. I’ve never had the time or the heart to rip them again.
I used my microwave oven as a ‘proofing’ drawer for raising dough, it’s an above the range model, and the surface light underneath it generates heat to the chamber. When the light’s on, it’s a nice warm box.
I was being clever, like the contestants on British Baking Show, and put my fancy instant read digital thermometer in there with the dough, so I could keep an eye on the temperature. Set the timer for 30 minutes… oops I hit Start instead of Timer.
I immediately stop the microwave and remove my now dead thermometer. Killed by 1 second of microwave radiation.
WTF?? I pulled off the wheel and inspected it. I discovered the problem… when I installed the new outer pad, I installed it backwards: the steel backing plate was making contact with the rotor. 
