I’m not asking about mistakes that necessarily changed your life (or anyone else’s). This is more about those msitakes that made you look silly but had no lasting consequences. As host of this thread, I’ll start:
My first child had just entered the world and I wanted to spend as much time as I could just looking at him. When they took him from the room to the nursery, I went down to look through the large viewing window and take pictures. There were several bassinets with newborns and one nurse tending to them. She signaled that she would bring my son to the window for a better picture and motioned for me to point him out. I did. She furrowed her brow and indicated again that I point out my son. Again, I did. More consternation on her part. She looked at me, then at the bassinet. She picked up a piece of paper and brought it to the window. She pointed to it, then to me as if to ask “Are you Mr. Xiong*”.
I am not. I am not Asian. That was not my son. I do have nice pictures of baby Xiong*, though.
Newborns - they all look alike.
*Name changed because I can’t possibly remember what it really was.
I’m an okay cook, but I’m deadly at baking - it always suprises people (in large part because I keep it under wraps). I’d made this triple-layer double-chocolate cake with a combo blueberry/raspberry filling for a friend’s going-away party and I set it on the passenger seat unsecured while I did something in the car, and forgot it there. The first time I hit the brakes, it goes into the footwell - I was pissed as hell at myself. I swung by a shop and picked up something to replace it, but everyone loved the ruined jumble I brought as well.
I was writing an automatic email-answering script at work, and somehow managed to use my normal work email Inbox as the test data :smack: So everyone who had emailed me in the past year got spammed, at the rate of one mail for every mail they’d sent me. Probably around two thousand messages.
My husband got a LOT of spam that day!
Later, after my workmates had stopped rolling round the floor, they presented me with a tin of the pink meatlike substance, in honour of the occasion.
When I was about 13 years old, I was measuring the distance for the Punt, Pass, and Kick competition. My brain decided to look at one of the passes thrown and suddenly kicked my body into “CATCH IT” mode. Caught the damn thing, and dropped it almost instantly. Talk about silly. I was so ashamed that I had done it. Major brainfart.
I got up for work one morning, and my car wouldn’t start. The engine wouldn’t turn over, make a sound, anything. I called roadside assistance and a guy came out, checked the battery, etc. Then he got in the car and looked at the gear shift and burst into laughter.
I’d left the car in Drive. I have been driving for 26 years.
I got into my office one morning, only to discover that some of my overhead lights had burned out. The level of light was too low for me to be happy with. I called builing maintenance. I waited for about an hour.
The guy showed up, ladder in hand, looked at the lights, looked that the switches…
I don’t think it’s the biggest, but it made me feel the stupidest.
Near my house, there is an old mall with a large parking lot. The mall is deserted, but they still plow a route through the parking lot (I’m assuming for emergency reasons). Many people use this route to get to the gas station instead of merging on/off of the busy road nearby. I drive through the lot and see what looks like a shorter way. There’s tracks in the snow, but it’s not plowed. About 15 feet away from the road I get stuck. Really stuck. The snow was so deep that not even all of my tires were touching pavement. I ended up calling a tow truck to pull me out. Stupidest way to spend $80 ever!
As a grad student in the mid-90’s, I had created a solid-model file for an engine part; this is a computer file that contains the information needed to create a 3-D rendering of the part, either for design/analysis purposes or for manufacturing. The file was about 10 MB - not huge by today’s standards, but back then it was pretty damn big. I emailed it to my contact at the company that was going to fabricate this part for me - and in the process, I jammed up their email gateway for the better part of a day; nobody could send email in or out of the company until they cleared this massive file out of the way. This was not some little podunk company either: they were (and are) a major engine manufacturer, i.e. they had substantial internet traffic that had been interrupted by my pipe-clogging file. I hadn’t really done anything wrong - how was I to know it would cause a problem? - and they recognized that, so the best they could do was to ask me to please not do that again.
I spent a tiring afternoon making homemade pasta. I made it just right, letting it dry awhile before cutting it, and dusting the cut pasta with semolina so it wouldn’t stick together. I cooked it up until it was perfectly al dente, and I had the cream/garlic/parmesan sauce ready to dress it.
I poured the pasta and water into a colander in the sink, lifted the colander up to shake out the water, and somehow the colander flipped over and dumped the pasta out and it all slithered en masse down into the dirty garbage disposal.
No, I did not opt to dig it out and rinse it off. I had to cook up some regular dried spaghetti out of the cupboard instead.
For some reason, I can’t think of any of the silly-stupid things I’ve done (not that the list is short…) so I will pass along a cherished one of my dad’s.
In the late 1940s he was a Jaguar/MG mechanic. He was servicing some model that held 12 quarts of oil, which he drained. He then drew 12 quarts of oil from the bulk barrel and poured it carefully into the filler. Then, very quietly so no one would notice, he put the drain plug back in the pan and added a further 12 quarts.
I like thinking of that story when I do such stupid things.
I once spent 8 hours making chicken stock. When it was done, I strained out the solids. That is, I kept the solids while I watched the stock go down the drain.
My wife had to go fly to do some work over the holidays one year at another office, which she went to all the time. When she arrived at her hotel she called me in a panic b/c she had forgotten her keys, and no one was going to be there, and she didn’t want anyone to have to come in due to her stupidity.
Since it was juuust before the cutoff for FedEx overnight I grabbed her keys and rushed to the UPS Store and managed to just get them overnighted to her. “Love you sweetie, you’re the best” - me beaming with pride.
Instead of sending them to her hotel, I sent them to her office. Where no one was there to sign for them.
Ever tried to call and hold a package at a distribution center, while it was in transit from being returned, over the holidays? I recommend against it.
A buddy and I were leaving my house one day. He asked if I wanted all the lights off. I said yes and we left by the back door. The next day I found that my cordless phone and lamp by the couch didn’t work. Checked the breakers and the wiring to the outlet. No dice. Ran an extension cord and forgot about it. Six months later, I noticed a wall switch beside the front door was in the off position. In my defense, I never used the front door at that place.
I was in New Zealand, and a friend I was staying with had lent me his car for the day. I got into town fine, then tried to drive back… but the car was just making horrible noises, and wouldn’t go at any kind of speed at all.
Halfway back to his house, his housemate came up behind me, flashed his lights, and we both pulled over- it was a bit of a beat up car, so he got out, looking unsurprised, and cheerfully asked me what was wrong with it. He got in the driving seat and… there was nothing wrong at all. I’d just been driving in first gear.
I learnt to drive in a manual car, and had driven one for years- but the last car I’d driven was an automatic, lent me by my cousin, for a few days several months earlier, and that was somehow enough for my brain to forget about gears.
Once I was doing land survey work in the jungles of Mexico. Using a machete, my assistant would whittle stakes, about four feet long, with a machete from small trees. He would leave several in a pile, and we’d move through the jungle, I with the magnetic theodolite (this is just before handheld GPS became practical and accurate), and he with the next stake.
Anyway, once to save a few seconds of his or my walking 50 meters, I threw a stake towards him. Mistake! (Ba da bing). The thing took on the essential javelin soul it always had (I was just too dumb to recognize it), and sailed through the air, hitting my poor friend in the face. Thank God, it cut his lip and somehow bounced off his teeth. A couple of stitches, and he was fine – didn’t even loosen the tooth. But a few inches higher, he would have lost an eye. A foot lower, I could have flat out killed the dude.