Most embarrasing moment...

[pbuckne 0]

I have been wondering about this for awhile, and wanted to see who would 'fess up. 'We all do dumb things', or so goes the Geico commercial goes. I've made a couple of technology oriented blunders, and wondered what everyone else had done.

 

#1 Rookie on the job, I took down a unix box that just happened to run a stores registers, and cost them about 200,000 in sales (remember, I was a new) while it was coming back up.

#2 Used Nortons Ghost utility to format the blank drive OVER the drive with the data on it. Needless to say, the former was of greater consequence, but it was important data.

 

Guess we can see who's who of blunderville...

[DosFreak 2]

1. When first starting out on computers I would receive memory errors when trying to start a game or program. Errors stating that "You must have 580+k, 600+k, to start this program". So I would look at my HD space and say. Huh? I have 6,356,000 free out of 40,000,000 on my HD WTF!!!??? So I would delete some files and perform a defrag. Then I'd reboot my computer and immediately start up the game/application and it worked! It was some time later that I finally realized the difference between HD memory and Physical memory.

 

2. Dos 6.00 was finally released and I discovered this little program called DOUBLESPACE that would double my HD capacity! 8) 8) I immediately compressed my 40m HD on my 286-12mhz. It took all night long and I was impatiently waiting all night long. I woke up in the morning and I had TONS of free space! WHOOPPPEEEE!!! I immediately discovered that there were far less benefits than I thought there would be.

 

1. Slower HD access. Due to uncompression/recompression of files.

2. Higher fragmentation.

3. More HD management involved to change compression ratio's.

4. Harder to reinstall your OS.

 

So I was looking around one day and discovered and extra "drive". It had one HUGE file on it that was 40m in size. Well I was like. If I delete this file I can get an extra 40m!! HOLY CRAP! So I deleted it and yep I HAD 40 EXTRA MEGABYTES! YAY!. I then rebooted......and everything was gone. You see that 40meg file WAS the HD.....and my deleting it wiped everything. Obviously I was none too happy. That was my last experience with Doublespace/Drivespace. NEVER AGAIN!

 

[Brian Frank 0]

I almost always put on the floppy cable wrong anytime I assemble a system. It's pretty much a given when I put a system together. Probably will happen tomorrow when the rest of my parts come in and I put another rig together.

[sapiens74 0]

I owned 6 Via based systems

 

I must like pain.

 

 

 

I usually do my best work after a couple pints of my favorite brew, Guiness, but sometimes I don't

 

Had to reinstall an OS once 4 times in a row cause I was hammered and kept making the same mistake.

 

Fortunately my bro was too hammered to notice and was wowed by my technical prowess.

[Admiral LSD 0]

I think the dumbest thing I've done in relation to comps in recent times that I can remember was the time when I discovered the reason for the Riva patch for FFVII's not-workingness was the result of not having enough memory (physical and virtual) and so went about increasing the size of my swap file. Unfortunately I had the swap file on another partition Linux-style and to increase it I had to increase the size of the partition. So genius here proceeded to remove it and resize the first one over it. Of course in doing so I changed all the drive letters around causing the Windows 2000 install I had on another (NTFS) to have conniptions ultimately requiring its re-installation.

[one_2_three 0]

1. My cousin tells me that something screwed up on Windows 98 and he decided to reinstall, so he formats the drive, reinstalls DOS and Windows 3.11, oops, he can't access his cd-rom anymore. So I go through his disks, trying to see if he has a boot floppy or something like it. (After spending 2 hours reading the Windows Readme files, haha). Eventually, I couldn't figure it out, so I took the cd out of the drive and left it. I came back 15 minutes later, and put what looked to be the correct disk, I switch to the E: drive, only to see (CDR150 - Drive not responding) or whatever it says. I think "damn, can't be right". I spend another 2 hours trying to figure it out, until I realized "crap, I took the CD out, that was the right floppy disk all along, 2 hours ago I had it". I was so happy anyways to figure it out, haha

 

2. Had this old Commodore PCIII-20 or something like that. It was giving me trouble, so I thought "why not format the drive and start over" I did this and then went to my floppies for the DOS 5.0 disks, only to realize I had wiped them out days ago

 

3. Recently, I hooked up my internet to a new NIC and when I went to hook up my cousin's to it, it kept saying "Work Offline or Connect", I kept saying Work Offline. It took me close to 12 tries before I realized that I was doing that.

 

Dumb, believe me.

[Uykucu 0]

Quote:

I almost always put on the floppy cable wrong anytime I assemble a system. It's pretty much a given when I put a system together. Probably will happen tomorrow when the rest of my parts come in and I put another rig together.

I second That! Also i have a tendency to connect ATX power switches to reset or whatever i happen to pick that day and then keep wondering why the bloody thing does not power up! Very Smart.

And Last week, i forgot to put a customer's HDD's in after a data recovery quest before i shipped out their system. After finding out, we claimed it was damaged during the transport and we are suing the courier and fix it for free.

This is not really dumb but i have no idea how many times i have labeled UTP cables wrong and spent 2 hours in front of the switch trying to pick them apart with cable tester and good old plug and see method.

[pbuckne 0]

I have to admit that I have put the floppy on backwards more than a few times. I always look around to make sure none of my techs saw it, and quickly reverse it...

[one_2_three 0]

Quote:

I have to admit that I have put the floppy on backwards more than a few times. I always look around to make sure none of my techs saw it, and quickly reverse it...

That's nothing, I was looking in the back room of a computer store once, and saw this guy having a cigarette over top of an open computer, the ashes of his cigarette eventually fell in to the computer itself and he tried to clean it out.

Meanwhile, I said to him "I don't work here, but you probably shouldn't be smoking", as he proceeded to turn red in the face, I never bothered telling his boss