Ask Lemmy

Dropped two kilograms of flour.

I once was preparing to have a calm wine night with my friend but somehow managed to break the neck of the bottle when trying to take the cork out. Blood went everywhere, and I started to get dizzy. My friend was shocked, amused, and amazed by my strength all at the same time. I believe she mentioned The Hulk at some point. We didn't get a single drop of wine. I was given orange juice and asked to rest. All of this happened when I was completely sober by the way. I have never gotten close to repeating that again and, to this day, still don't fully understand how it happened in the first place

Changed clutch plates on my motorcycle, but I assembled it wrong. And the clutch wouldn't disengage.

I was thinking surely it's just stuck together ...let me slam it in gear and pull the throttle.

Lucky that i put the front wheel was against a wall, the bike did a burnout pulling all of the linoleum off the floor on to a big pile.

I worked at a TCBY right after I graduated from h.s. I insisted on wearing checkered vans even though they had no support and no traction. People tried to warn me not to but I didn't listen. One night I was working by myself and the store got absolutely slammed after a football game ended.

I was running all over the place and at one point had to refill one of the yogurt machines. Before it freezes it's just a really thick liquid, and as I was speed walking back to the front clutching a giant bag of liquid yogurt in my arms, my vans slipped. I squeezed the yogurt bag in a hug as I went down, and a sea of yogurt spread out across the floor like an oil leak. Then I ended up slipping in the yogurt, screaming in surprise, twisting my knee and finally landing on my ass.

I started crying mainly bc my knee hurt so bad, but also because it was embarrassing as fuck. I slowly got up and limped to the back to get a mop covered in goo, and when I came back out everybody started clapping for me. Not even in a mean sarcastic way, just bc they felt bad for me. It was so sad and pathetic lol. I did get a lot more tips than usual though.

Similar incident ~10 years later. I was working in a lab and somebody asked me to refill this giant 20 gallon carboy full of 95% ethanol. I should have asked for help to move it off of the cart it was on, but it was the last thing I needed to do for the day and I was in a rush to leave.

I started to lift it, but of course I dropped it and the spigot broke off. The ethanol started pouring out and flooding the room while I struggled unsuccessfully to plug the hole. I ended up soaked, and the mess was so bad it flooded the floor, went under the door, and formed a giant puddle of ethanol in the hallway outside.

I could hear people outside the door saying things like "Oh my God, what happened?!" I was trying to clean up the mess inside the room and hoping they would just go away so I could eventually clean up the hall. Instead they just started alerting more people to come and see the mess.

The door was locked, but eventually somebody got one of the custodians to come unlock it. When it opened I was just standing there, soaked in ethanol in the flooded room and surrounded by stacks and stacks of completely saturated paper towels that I had thrown all over the floor, but weren't nearly enough.

Both involving One of these

First time my manager was micromanaging me what buttons to press, so I did a malicious compliance and let him make me spill around 150kg of honey on the floor.

Second time I tried teaching a new lad how to work it, and he insisted that I shut up and leave him to it because he knows how to do it because hes not thick and it was pretty insulting that I thought he was that thick. Just stood back and casually watched him spill 2 tons of beef and blood all over the floor.

Neither one was properly my fault, but I deliberately did nothing to stop either one and laughed inside the whole way.

I was trying to move a job site, well seasoned porta-potty with a Bobcat. I should have strapped it to the forks……….

Accidentally wrote a 2GB 'nohup.out' file when I forgot I had a script running as nohup in the background without redirecting STDOUT and STDERR to /dev/null.

Basically, I forgot to prevent saving the output of my program to a file, and it created a massive file because of it.

2GB might not seem like much, but this was on a server with ~5GB free space left. Could have been worse had I not caught it sooner.

As a young child I got up early and decided that I would cut my own hair as a gift to my parents.

The big problem was the small mirror in the kitchen was too high so I was jumping, snip, jump, snip, etc.

When complete I went up to wake them to show them their "gift".

I still remember the look on my mother's face. I couldn't understand why she was horrified hahaha.

Edit: I just remembered another little detail.... She took me to the hairdresser's as soon as possible and when the lady asked if I'd cut my own hair I was like "how did you know????" Lol

I married a bipolar woman. Those were 3 interesting years.

I flooded a dormitory once, but I blame building maintenance for tricking me into it.

I wake up and head to the bathroom. Turn on the shower, nothing happens. Try the sink, still no water. No advance notice to the residents, but the water must have been shut off for some reason. I have a class to go to, so I turn everything "off", get dressed, and leave. I'd forgotten that one of the sink knobs was threaded the opposite way from the standard convention, so that one was full on when the water was restored. Came back to the dorm after lunch and realized exactly what I'd done as soon as I entered the hallway and saw the maintenance man running his shop-vac outside my room. It overflowed the sink drain, and the bathroom floor drain, flowed through the dorm room, and was in the process of flooding the hallway.

I didn't make it, but I let it happen to teach a stupid company a lesson.

Worked as a Change Manager for a manufacturing company. They built stuff destined for landfills and you probably have one of their appliances in your home.

To set the stage, my job prior to this was as a Problem Manager/ Major Incident Manager for a large insurance company. On major incident I worked was the when a Pure Storage technician came in to replace a failed drive. A bug in the Storage O/S allowed an active drive to be shown as deactivated and safe for replacement. This did not happen all the time, only during a certain set of circumstances. I don't remember the details of that though.

My fellow IT professionals know full well what that means. That array supported a Tier 1 app and the whole thing went down hard. Not just hard, but it corrupted the database that required a multi-hour restore to fix. I also ran the Problem record on that one and knew everything about the who, what, and why of that outage.

Fast forward a year and I accepted the contract to be the Change Manager for this manufacturer. In comes a change request to replace a failed drive in a Pure Storage Array, except this time instead of paying for a service contract, this company cheaped out and did all the service in house. Which I didn't know Pure Storage allowed you to do, this was 6 years ago, but this company somehow managed it. The storage guy was a bit of prick and hated the whole Change process. Which I get to be honest, but if you want to play in an enterprise environment you need to follow procedures. So he submitted his change with little to no detail and only one director on the CAB had any familiarity with storage systems. So I started asking technical questions, which generally is inappropriate of a Change Manager as that's not the job. When I asked what the O/S version was, I got heavy push back that it wasn't relevant. When I attempted to state WHY I was asking, I was told the change was approved and to move on. As replacing a failed drive in such a large array is generally regarded as low risk. My boss actually reprimanded me for taking so much time and extending CAB longer than it should have been.

I asked her (my boss) who was on call for Major Incidents the time of the change and... It was HER. LOL

So if you've guessed that the Storage team of this company were idiots and the O/S version their Pure Storage Array was running on still had the bug, you are a winner winner chicken dinner. They also had the fantastic luck to run into the circumstances as well.

Cue another Major Incident that my boss had to manage. It took over a day to resolve and all the while several production lines were sitting silent. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of loss in production. If not millions.

When someone with almost 30 years (at that time, I'm over 30 years now) tells you that something can happen, because they've seen it before... FUCKING LISTEN TO THEM.

I didn't have anything to do with the Problem Process at that company, but I did sit in on it and you're damn straight if I didn't deliver the biggest I fucking told you so in the history of that company. The company also bought a support contract from Pure, I made sure that was a task on the Problem Record.

As to the biggest mess I made personally... I was 2 or 3 and had the bright idea of smothering myself in an entire jar of peanut butter. My oldest brother was baby sitting me at the time and our mother made him clean me up. Apparently the smell of peanut butter and water was so bad that my brother, even 53 years later, cannot stand peanut butter at all.

I need to set the scene first: Me, about 12-13 years ago, on the surface looking like a respectable career and family man, pillar of the community…Behind the scenes slowly falling apart, trapped in an abusive marriage, a job I hated more and more each day, and told that I had to keep the happy face on for the sake of everyone else.

And one day I just fucking imploded. Left for work one morning like normal, halfway there I threw my phone out the window and decided I was done. I remember driving and driving, stopping a few times for food or just to get out of the car and meander…but I had no real direction, started to panic about the possibility of going back to hell or staying lost out here. I blacked out.

Apparently my car ran out of gas and I ditched it. I was told when they (they being the cops) found me I was several states away, couldn’t remember my name, was talking nonsense, and was covered in my own filth. I was involuntarily committed and when my wife tried to visit me I tried to attack her, told her I wanted her dead, that she better never come near me again. That was the last I ever saw of her or our kids. My dad had no idea how to handle this so he just decided to treat me like I was dead and sold off most of what I owned, and at the time I was too inside out to care. I was in and out of psych wards for the better part of three years.

So yeah, destroyed a family, a home, my career and reputation, and caused a ruckus in a sleepy little rural shit town. I did get better…much better, and I’m happier and more together than I’ve ever been, but that’s the boring part of the story.

Was working at a kitchen as a dish washer. Had this little cart to pick up plates etc. from the restaurant side. Was just returning the cart, fully loaded into the kitchen, to the dish spot and bumped the wheel into something, or it jammed. Tons of plates and food scraps on the floor...

I drained an entire airplane's fuel tank onto the hangar floor once. Wasn't really ready to mop up 26 gallons of avgas.

We did Work Experience at my school and I managed to get a place at a local radio station. Now, what's the worst thing a work experience kid could do at a radio station specifically? If you answered "take the entire station off the air" then you'd be right.

I accidentally set a model home on fire when I was 12 while trying to burn bugs with a magnifying glass. Not a toy model, but like the house they show buyers to get a sense of the layout of the house they would have built.

I went to a private university 20 years ago

factory I worked at, I snapped a bearing rod on an injection machine.

it was made of steel, about 16 inches in diameter, about 18ft long, and cost around $1.5 million to replace.

complete accident, required a mandatory one week off (no pay) while they investigated if it was due to negligence or just routine wear and tear.

it took them six months to get a new one and cost the company close to $100 million on lost revenue on top of the cost of the part.

Managed to topple a big oil drum of waste oil in my dad's garage. I was 5 or so, and I was wearing a brand new winter outfit. It was light blue.

My dad was doing something, and was talking to someone who had stopped by. And this being on a moderately large farm, I always found something to do. 99.9% of the time, this was not a problem, as there wasn't much that could physically maim me other than stuff my parents obviously watched out for.

However, I've never managed to reach any higher levels of cimedic timing in my life, and I doubt anyone else could either. The visitor asked my dad where I was at, knowing I was usually in the immediatevicinity. Upon hearing "around here somewhere", they were concerned that I was kind of unsupervised. "There's not a whole lot of bad stuff he can do" my dad said, just around the time when they heard the sound of something large falling over, combined with my excited cheer. I was a crafty little shit, and I somehow understood the concept of leverage.

That was 38ish years ago. I still remember the smell. My brand new winter clothes weren't blue after that.

Mine is probably the same both physically and metaphorically!

Almost cut my finger off with my dad's table saw when I was four. Ran through the house screaming and spurting blood everywhere.

I still remember my thought process: I was trying to see how close I could get my finger to the spinning blade without touching it. I don't know what success was supposed to look like here.

I put my leg through the ceiling of a General's office. He wasn't the commander of the base mind you, he was the commander over several bases.

Someone had asked my team to repair one of his lights, and his office was in a WWII era building that had had a facelift. So most everything you could see was newer looking, but that did not apply to the base structure of the building, which included the area above the ceiling. Took a bad step and CRASH, huge mess.

Lucky on two points: He wasn't in his office, and I was able to grab support so as to not fall all the way through.

His secretary heard the commotion and yelled, "oh gosh, are you ok?" Bless her, she was concerned for me. Friends/coworkers laughing their asses off in the ceiling with me.

"Not sure. I think I probably need CPR!" Couldn't resist saying this. Friends still howling.

"Oh jeez, I'll call the Fire Department".

"No, not necessary. I'm fine now, thank you."

I never did see the General, and they didn't want me in his office to clean the mess.

So this was my biggest mess in a figurative sense due the circumstances. Which would have been orders of magnitude worse had the General been at his desk.

Once I spilled my trader Joe's chicken Tikka masala all over my pants and while it wasn't really a big mess in the long run it was still very disappointing in the moment

Ever interfered with mobile carrier in a state capital city? Yea.... We did. I'll grab the link to the story.

https://lemmy.world/post/19338754