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Posted: |
Jun 11, 2019 - 11:35 AM
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By: |
Jehannum
(Member)
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This thread is inspired by a story on Reddit that made me laugh: a guy spent 3 hours (including a trip to Home Depot to buy a screwdriver) trying to eject a game disc from his Playstation 4, only to realise that he'd downloaded the game rather than buying it on disc: https://www.reddit.com/r/PS4/comments/bwzfc3/i_am_the_biggest_dumbass_in_the_history_of_ps4/
After the laughter subsided, I realised this easily could have been me, and it made me go through my own memories of being similarly stupid. Here goes:
I bought an automatic car after having learned to drive a manual (aka "stick shift" or something in the US).
The first day was fine. But for some reason, on the second day, something went wrong with the brakes. Instead of coming smoothly to a halt, it was as if the brakes were being slammed on, throwing me and my wife forwards with only our seatbelts stopping us cracking our heads on the windscreen. I barely made it out of my own street and had to turn back and get a taxi to work. The car was towed away the next day.
The repair company found nothing wrong. I got another garage to tow the car and they also found nothing. The garage owner took me for a test drive (him driving at first, then we swapped over).
He said, "you weren't using your left foot for the brake were you? I've known some manual drivers do that when switching to automatic."
Me: "Er, no." But then realisation dawned slowly. That's exactly what I'd been doing.
And no, I didn't admit it.
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I thought you were going to say that you when to shift and were pulling up the emergency brake.
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Posted: |
Jun 11, 2019 - 4:00 PM
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By: |
Graham Watt
(Member)
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Ha! Good ones!
In the second part of the 1980s I was sort of at a loose end, living in London and feeling a bit lost. My brother, knowing I liked photography but not having the money to buy a half-decent camera, came down from Scotland on my birthday and presented me with a good (second-hand - he wasn't rich either) SLR camera. I spent about six months experimenting with exposure and depth of field, only taking the photos which I knew "might" turn out okay. We tend to forget that in the olden days you had to get the roll of film in the camera developed, and that you paid for your rubbish shots too. So, according to the meter on the back, this was a 36 exposure film (which was the maximum capacity). That's why it took me six months to get "good" photos - I was used to 24 exposure film. Then, after winding the roll of film back to the starting point in order to be able to open the back of the camera safely without the light getting in, I noticed a certain lack of resistence in the winding mechanism. Had I actually broken the roll of film? If I attempted to open the camera now, all my six months worth of 36 great photos would have been in vain.
So I took it to the camera shop in South Ealing and explained the situation. The young gent behind the counter understood completely, and said that I'd been wise not to attempt to open the camera. He put the camera on the counter and completely enveloped it and himself in swathes of black velvet, thus allowing not the slightest amount of light to enter.
After about half a minute, his head shook itself free of the confining darkness, he looked at me, and exclaimed, "There's no film in this thing".
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Reheating coffee - in a glass container- on the stove.
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I saw this dumb thing on a video on FB2Mate, so I decided to try: Put a foil gum wrapper into an electrical outlet in the middle of a college class.
Full story - this was during a graduate business school class. I was sitting in the back row bored out of my mind. I had a foil gum wrapper that I rolled into a horseshoe design. I then looked at the electrical outlet, and it was like my hand automatically started to move towards it. I remember in my head, I was saying, "Don't do it - you know what will happen!", but I couldn't stop. Once both ends of the foil wrapper were in two of the holes for the electrical outlet, there was a pop, a spark, and then some smoke. The guy next to me was so startled, he flew back in his chair against the wall. I shorted the whole row of outlets that everyone had their laptops connected to. The professor started walking up to my area to see what happened, so I pulled the wrapper out of the outlet and tried to play it off. He only came up part way and made some comment about "sticky fingers". Later on, I was voted by my peers to be "most likely to burn down the business school". So, I have that going for me.
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As Nightingale said, too many for me to list.
But here's one that still makes me smite my head many years later:
I was 18, my first year in college, and one of my classes was Choir.
We held a couple of concerts along with the other music groups a couple of times that quarter. It required us dudes in the choir to be spiffily dressed in jacket and tie.
After one of these concerts, I bussed from the college, which lay in the north part of the city, to Seattle Center from where I could transfer to a bus headed to my neighborhood.
While walking through the Center, I felt the need to pee and so I ducked into the "Center House," a large building containing little restaurants surrounding a big space on the main floor.
After using the gents', I walked across the main space to a side door to head out to my bus stop.
I actually had to walk around the sides as there was an event taking place there that evening: a big ballroom dance thing; men and women all dolled up, song standards being played by a live band.
Just as I came close to the doors, a young woman spotted me and asked if I would like to dance with her (because I was still in my nice choir duds, I was dressed similarly to the other men there.)
She was very pretty and close to my age. A nice opportunity to meet a nice girl, right?
Yeah, it would be for any other guy, but my first instinct was to feel embarrassed - I wasn't part of this ballroom group, so it would have been wrong for me to have accepted her offer, so I politely declined and left the building.
Damn, Mark, couldn't you at least have struck up a conversation with her? Say that you had come from a different event, but you were intrigued by the one being held here? Would she have been mortified to learn you were not one of the ballroom people? Highly unlikely!
But, no, I "had to get going."
Brilliant, Mark, just brilliant.
(Excuse me while I bang my head against my desk once again.)
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But, no, I "had to get going."
Brilliant, Mark, just brilliant.
(Excuse me while I bang my head against my desk once again.)
What a shame!
Missed romantic opportunities could be another thread. I certainly have a few examples, mainly caused by the chronic embarrassment / shyness I used to suffer from when I was younger.
I've got a million of those, lol.
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