I’ve so many; I’ll just start with a relatively innocuous one.
When I park my car, I grab the keys, open the door, lock and exit, all in one thought or motion. But one day I was having second thoughts about my errand, so sat in the car after turning off the ignition. When I finally got out of the car, I was no longer in the single thought-motion mode, so naturally left the keys locked inside the car.
I called a lockpicker, paying extra since it was weekend. When I got back in the car, I drove a couple blocks aimlessly and parked again, now really having second (third?) thoughts about my errand. When I finally got out of the car the second time, I … … I was too embarrassed to call the lockpicker a second time and just checked into a motel. :smack:
I worked as a groundskeeper one summer at my college dorm. I had gotten pretty good at using the tractor, for a city gal. One day, I saw a raised manhole cover (maybe 6 inches high) and thought, “I can clear that no problem!” Cue the most horrible grinding noise, and our facilities manager (a 60-year old guy not known to move quickly) came *sprinting *over. I had hit the cover and dragged it about 5 feet, stripping off the top layer of grass in the process. Beneath the cover was a hole, god knows HOW many feet deep. It took three people to manhandle the cover back on, and the grass strip flipped neatly back into place. Thankfully no lasting damage!
I felt like a huge idiot, although the experience left me with a great story for job interviews when asked about how I coped with making a big mistake.
This one has a happy ending, but at the time could have had me unemployed.
This goes back quite a few years, but: I’m head of a team of about 15 people. Behind my partition is some planning or admin team of about 4-5 people; we don’t have any direct contact, no reporting lines, etc. I am semi-aware that the planning team got a new team head a few weeks ago, but even though he sits directly on the otherside of the partition, I don’t know him, and we never really had any opportunity to even say hi or anything.
One morning my assistant calls me over with a quizzical look on her face and points to her screen. She got an email that is from some guy requesting a meeting to ‘discuss the team and her role within the department’, I don’t recognize the name of the guy. As we’re looking at this email, other team members come over to say they’ve received the same email.
So I go back to my email and in an indignant huff, tell the sender in so many words, ‘I don’t know who the heck you are, but you gotta lot of nerve - if you want to talk to my team members about something, you talk to me first’.
Turns out the guy sending it was the guy on the otherside of the partition.
Turns out the guy was also a) on the board of directors and b) was going to take over as the entire department head (i.e., was replacing my boss at the time).
So yeah, in my first ever email to one of the most senior guys in the organization that I’d be directly reporting to, I insulted him and then rubbed his face in it.
Note to self - might want to double check who you’re sending emails to before hitting ‘send’…
(It worked out ok in the end - the guy in question is still my boss and we get along great)
Always a good idea to double check the “To:” box on an email.
A few years back husband and I were in the midst of making the arrangements to emigrate to Canada. There was a lovely woman at his future place of work that was handling this for us and husband was in correspondence with her. I’d had some mundane question for her and when it finally arrived, he forwarded her email to me.
For some reason I was in a silly mood and replied to him something like this:
Hit ‘send’ and thought nothing of it until a got a very polite response a few hours later from the lovely woman* and realized what I’d done.
I swear I could hear the giggling all the way across the ocean and I still tell her that I love her bunches whenever I see her.
*the ‘rude bitch’ referenced above was a realtor friend of the lovely woman’s :eek:
I used to travel consulting a good bit, usually to the same destination for months at a time. Once an airline changed the routine departure gate but still took my ticket and let me board at the old gate, only headed for Dallas instead of New Orleans. I even showed the stewardess my boarding pass, saying someone was in my seat.
What sucked was as we were taxiing to the runway the pilot came on and said thanks for choosing Continental in your Dallas plans today. I turned to the guy next to me and chuckled that the pilot had said “Dallas.” He looked at me funny and said “Yeah…” That’s when the sickening realization hit.
I made a backup of my home directory and saved that backup in my home directory. I neglected to change the name of the backup copy. When I decided I didn’t need it anymore, I typed in
rm -rf [name of home directory]
without checking my current directory. I realized just after hitting enter that I was in /home and was irrevokably deleting both my home directory and the backup.
You mean like the time I was an intern at the psychological clinic, and they asked me to put the ad in the newspaper “anyone who lost a relative through suicide and would like to join a self help group, please call this number at the clinic?”
On my way back to the base after testifying at a very distressing Summary trial (sex assault where I was a victim) I arrived back to my car to find it locked and no keys in my pocket. The base I work at is on the other end of the city from where DH works, and our house is, so I got to phone him to leave work early, pick up our daughter and drive all the way to the base. In the meantime, some firefighter and a friend tried to use a Slimjim to break in, did it wrong and got this piece of metal stuck in my door.
Hubby arrives, is not angry (he knew what a day I’d had) and proceeded to start breaking into my car. I am wandering around, near tears when I notice something shiny in the grass, just as they get the door open (alarm going off).
When I was ten, one day after school I decided I didnt want to walk by some older junior high kids, and so to avoid walking out that entrance and by the older kids, I climbed a very tall wire fence. I was wearing a sweatsrt around my waist and once i got to the top and was perched on the very top, I was too scared to jump down, so I turned around so i was facing the fence and proceeded to scale down, and a very hard sharp wire sticking out jabbed into the inner part of my upperarm. Unknown to me my jacket had looped around the top part of the fence and so i tried to wiggle free but all that happened was I slid downward as the wire cut into my inner arm. I ran holding my arm, crying and a lady saw me and drove me to my house, not knowing how serious it was, as I was tightly holding my arm and she could not see the inner part of my arm. At home, I told my mom I cut my arm, she sat me down to put a bandaid on my arm,lifted my arm to put the bandaid on, thinking it was just a playground mishap. Well, lets say it wasnt something that could be helped by some bactine and a bandaid, it took a trip to the ER and 26 stitches.
I have a wireless keyboard and mouse combo. One day as I am working the mouse stops responding. Since I just put in new batteries, I know they are good.
I check the connections, they look fine. I move the mouse - still nothing. Unplug and reconnect, move the mouse - nada. I shut down and reboot using the touch pad on the laptop.
Then I go to move the mouse again, only to notice that my cell phone is on the mouse pad and I have been moving it instead of the actual mouse.
:smack:
Even worse, I have done this more than once.
:smack::smack:
I am getting better and now check to make sure I am moving the mouse before rebooting.
Well, when I was in Nursing school I had to give a medication to a patient. It was a daily med, meaning as long as it was given at some point in the day it was okay.
We still tried to follow a schedule though. When my time to deliver the medication came up, I looked around and noticed I didn’t have it, and I panicked. I told my instructor I didn’t have it. She told the other people on the floor. I had to search every patients room and med cart. The whole floor was frantically searching for the medication because for it to just go “missing” is actually a big deal
After about an hour, it was inside the folder I had been carrying around the whole time. God, was that embarrassing.
I was supposed to watch my girlfriend-at-the-time’s young son Ted, who was maybe four or so at the time, due to start kindergarten the next year. So I watched him play in the yard; I watched a school bus pull up to him and open its door; and I watched Ted get on the bus which then drove away. It only took the few seconds I was paralyzed by confusion and indecision.
I go into the house. “Er, Jane… was- Ted supposed to get on a schoolbus?”
[ugly scene with lots of screaming deleted]No.
Long story short, we tracked down which bus was driving past her street at the time and which kindergarten it went to. The teachers at the kindergarten were highly amused at Ted’s enthusiasm to go to school.
Well, you certainly failed the proof of eligibility test.
This just happened to me.
I need to pull some hardware items from the logistics storage. We have a test to support, expected to run this week to meet delivery schedule. I sent a polite request email late Tuesday to inform them the paperwork is coming and ID the hardware I need, so they can get started early on the request. The paperwork was delivered Wed afternoon.
I’m expecting to pick the stuff up this afternoon, so I called to check on it and they weren’t working it, so I check my email. I was going to reply to the email to check status that way. I find it in my outbox. With no names in the To field. :smack: That’s right, I sent myself an email message. (Fortunately, forwarded the message to the folks with an explanation that I had made a mistake, and they’re going to try to get it worked for me.)
This one happened to my now brother-in-law.
The year: 1999. He was a DJ. It was rapidly approaching New Years Eve. He was hosting a big party out in the boonies, ~30 min from town. He shows off his big plan for the countdown by pulling out a little boom box to play Prince’s 1999. Yehaw.
Night of party rolls around. We drive out to the farm, set up for the party, things are going fine. Midnight approaches. Midnight is looming. I look at my watch, it rolls past 12:00, some random song is still playing. WTF? Finally we do the countdown, only the song he plays is U2’s New Year’s Day. Um, what?
That’s right, he brought the empty CD case. The CD was still sitting in the boom box at his house.
Back when I was working in a prison. We’re pretty primitive so we still use fax machines. I was sending a copy of some report to some other office in our department and I had to use a fax machine I wasn’t familiar with. But there was an instruction sheet taped to the wall above the machine: you just lay the sheet down on the glass and hit the red button.
I thought it was strange that it didn’t ask for a phone number but I figured the red button must start up some program that would walk you though the procedure and tell you when to type in the number you were sending it to.
This was not correct. The red button was not for regular faxes. It was for use during an escape. You were supposed to put the escaped prisoner’s warrant card (which has his photo and identifying information) and hit the red button - which was pre-set to send the faxed document to police agencies throughout New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.
We got the first phone call from a police department asking why we had faxed them this report within twenty minutes and they came in all night. There were still a few tricking in two weeks later.
