What one question or incident of ‘Brainfart’ exclusively ended up costing you the most money, or chance at money?
500 dollars cash would have been mine, if only I remembered that Chris Columbus was 1492, not 1482. :smack:
My University has trivia. I do pretty well. In fact, in terms of actual questions answered correctly, I got the most answers correct. However, I had to requalify for the finals in a second general round. (The questions were answered correctly, but were not given at the right time in the structure of the game.)
I had my a/v receiver just repaired for over 350 Euros and was hooking it back up.
I forgot to unplug everything and accidentally touched the cable going to my subwoofer to the connector for composite video immediately destroying the video board in the amplifier.
So I had a choice of repairing it again, which would have cost another few hundred Euros or binning my 1500 Euro amplifier.
I did the latter and bought a new one (a much better one thankfully).
I’ve got two. I lost $400 out of my pants pocket on my motorcycle. I should have known not to put cash in the front pocket of my loose fitting jeans while on the bike. The wind rattled the cash loose and by the time I’d noticed it gone it was dark and there was no hope of finding it.
The other was when I blew the motor on my 73 AMX. There was a loud tick sound coming from the heads but I was not able to eliminate the sound out by adjusting the valves. I should have just pulled the head in question and taken a close look (about a $100 job, mostly gaskets). Instead I just kept driving it and ended up dropping a valve and blowing the thing up. $2,800 rebuild. :smack:
I once signed up for a summer class at college and then completely forgot about it until about 3/4’s of the way through. I got some of my money back, but it wasn’t a lot.
In my defense, I sign up for summer classes, oh, about NEVER.
I cleverly waded out into the Atlantic with my eyeglasses on. Figured I wasn’t going to go in over my head, just in far enough to cool off, and I was worried something would happen to them if I left them on the beach. Comber came up behind me as I was wading back, couldn’t get my hands up through the surf fast enough and the water flicked them off and they were gone.
I had a stack of external SCSI devices attached to my computer, one of which was a (then-huge) 4 GB Macropolis HD, under which was sitting a SyQuest (remember those?). I wanted to remove the SyQuest from the chain, hadn’t used it in a long time. Did I shut down the computer and power everything off? Of course not. I unmounted the Macropolis but did I spin it down before physically flipping it over on its back to get it out of the way so I could unplug the SyQuest? No, didn’t do that either. One of the heads of the drive promptly did an audible face plant into the platter and it ceased to be a drive.
We leased a car that we didn’t need and that sucked gas like crazy. Thousands down the drain, anxiety about mileage, and nothing to show for it at the end. A much less expensive used car would have done us just fine, but we wanted the new car smell or something. Never again.
I’ve lost contact lens in a pool. Twice. Was sure I would just keep my head out of the water, no problem, then got splashed.
Twice I turned down offers to trim the charming old pecan tree by the driveway for free when my neighbor was having his trees trimmed. And twice, the following windy season, a branch broke off and dented my car.
Dropping my cell phone in the parking lot of our rented beach condo…where it got run over the next morning. No insurance, and not time to upgrade phones yet, either. :mad:
I missed the “same as cash” deadline on a drum kit I bought “18 months same as cash,” which meant that all the (21.99%) interest accrued instantly. 18 months worth of 21.99% APR interest…on a $2,000 item. It cost me about $700. And the brainfart part of it is that I had the money to pay it off, but had the due date wrong.
Late to school, preoccupied with said lateness, turned onto curvy 2-lane high-traffic street, scraped a protruding storm drain and blew 2 tires. Cost: towing $100, new tires $450. :smack:
Over Labor Day weekend my wife and I took the grandkids to the amusement park. The first time we went on the rollercoaster with the kids, I took my ball cap off and had it in my lap so it wouldn’t blow off my head. Unfortunately, right after we went down the first hill and hit the first turn, my glasses went flying off my face. (Same deal - I just couldn’t get my hand up to my face fast enough.) Luckily, about halfway through the ride I noticed they were on the floor of the car and I managed to bend down and retrieve them before they could escape. Whew! However, about ten minutes after we got off the ride, I realized that my custom-fitted clip-on sunglasses were gone.
So yeah, securing a ten dollar cap which I could easily replace if it blew away, rather than a couple-hundred-dollar pair of glasses and clip-on shades.
I’ve got a couple, one that was just boneheaded and another that’s turning out to be a bit more serious.
For the first one, there’s a fantastic little shop at the Foothills Mall in Tucson that will give you a massive bag of kettle corn for $6. I was heading out that way and decided to stop by the ATM so I’d have enough money. After I got the $20, I realized I had $6 in my wallet already. No worries, good to have some cash on hand. But when I paid for the corn, I inadvertantly handed the lady the 5 and the 20 instead of the 5 and the 1. :smack: Didn’t even notice for several more hours.
The second one is more a case of me not reading a contract closely enough. I signed up with a gym’s personal training program a few months back. Expensive rate, but no big, I figured, when I was done with it I’d drop it. About a month ago I realized I didn’t want to be in the program any longer, preferring to work on my own, and that’s when I discovered I’d locked myself into a yearly contract instead of a monthly, like I’d originally thought it was. In my defense, the salesperson was going on about month-to-month rates and I thought there was no more than that. I can either continue the program for the full year or buy it out at 50% the remaining rate. Either way, I’m out a grand or two.
Working on a live production network, accidently bringing-up an interface that should not have been up and bringing the whole network down for 30 minutes.
Doesn’t sound too bad, but 30 minutes of downtime equates to ~$50,000!!
Luckily I have a good boss and I did have permission to do what I was doing, just I should have brought up a different interface not the one I brought-up.
Oh god, this is my reoccurring nightmare. No joke. Over the last 3 or 4 years I have had this dream dozens of times.
The most expensive brainfart I can think of at the moment is when I missed the rebate window by one day on a $200 laptop rebate. (Throughout my life I think I could safely say that rebate related brainfarts have cost me somewhere around $700)
