Expensive mistakes you've made because of stupidity

SexyGreyFox

SexyGreyFox

SexyGreyFox

Man of Honour
Joined
29 Mar 2003
Posts
57,396
Location
Stoke on Trent
I have a 3k PA rig for when I'm gigging and on Friday one of my speakers wouldn't turn on. An LED would flash but then no lights. I tried a microphone through it with no luck so to get through the gig we put one of my stage monitors on top of the bass stack and it did a surprisingly good job.
The following day I looked at getting it fixed but knew from experience Mackie only deal with certain repair centres and none are near me so I decided to look for second hand goods.
Amazingly I found a bloke selling a working one for £225 and a faulty one for £125 (speaker had blown) so I offered £300 and traveled 40 miles to get them on Sunday. I then removed the working PCB board out of his faulty one and put it in mine and ended up with a spare :)
Tonight I decided to look at the PCB board, so carefully plugged it in and started to tap gently on the back with a screwdriver to see if it was a dry joint and then hit something that made the LED come on :eek:
I looked down at the little button above the on/off switch and it was a Timer button :(
I got the instructions out that I hadn't read for 7 years and the button puts the speaker in Timer mode but needs a signal for around 10 seconds to wake it up.
Bugger, £300 wasted that I hadn't really got but the good side is that I can replace the woofer for £58 and add another 900 watt to my PA.

So come on Overclockers, because of your stupidity have you lost money? (getting married or engaged doesn't count)
 
Does rushing to buy a 4K panel instead of waiting to see what the reviews said first count? in hindsight I wouldn't have bought one.
 
Dimple said:
I have a 3k PA rig for when I'm gigging and on Friday one of my speakers wouldn't turn on.
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After the first line, it was obvious that you'd managed not to switch it on correctly hah! Nicely done :D

Dropped some brand new £50 headphones the other day on my way to the car...last ones were lost when I took something out of my pocket and didn't notice the bag they were in fall to the ground. I've also lost a few £10s when I put change in my back pocket, and unknowingly missed the actual pocket :mad:
 
Trying to put a plastic connector over the faston crimp on the end of a cable was way to stiff an not going on, should have just reported it but i thoguht i could do it pushed harder and ended up tearing the heatshrink with my thumb nail.

£800 call out and about 2 k in consesion costs.

oops :p

oh and i nce destroyed a £400 bracket by forgetting to tighten the clamp in the jig so it bent as the drill went though and made a lovely oval hole.
 
I drove my wife's Citroen C2 through a flood I could have sworn was shallow enough at a speed I was sure was slow enough. Anyway, a large amount of water unexpectedly entered the engine and the car went to the great scrapyard in the sky :o It cost several pounds to replace.
 
Brand new laptop left on top of my car. £1600 fell off going over a speed bump. Only about 5mph so although screen was knackard the rest still worked. Another £170 to replace :(.
 
I bought a PS4 this weekend with a load of games, think I've spent 10 minutes playing on it, still no idea why I bought it, but then I needed something to keep the XBoxOne comfy as that's only had 5 mins of game time.
 
Around year 2000, before I knew much about hardware, I attempted to install a CD burner into a PC that already had 2 hard drives and a CD-ROM. I did however know enough that a PC could take up to 4 IDE devices and that the CD burner being the 4th device would be ok. PC wouldn't boot, so I guess I buggered up on the master and slave jumpers. I took it to a PC shop so that it could be configured properly.

The bill? £123!

Their engineer's report? "Configured master and slave settings, and cleaned out interior of case. 2 hours labour, £105+VAT".

Not a huge amount of money in the grand scheme of things (and vs other responses in this topic), but I was still gutted back then. Wised up soon after that and discovered OcUK :-)
 
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Spilled coffee all over my work laptop(£750) just last week.
It didn't help that I have shouted at others for spilling things on their desktop key boards.
 
Had a fairly decent (for the time but in hindsight was crap) LG smartphone back in 2009 and I was trying to call my provider and got so frustrated with their robotic answering system and being put on hold I slammed the phone down on my cushioned workbench in anger. Only, I hit the corner of the bench and obliterated the screen.

I spent a further £40 buying a new screen off eBay which I tried to fit myself but ended up with a non-functional device. Had to resort to my old Nokia 'dumbphone' for the next 6 months until I could get a new phone on contract.
 
Probably something in the region of £10k for a work related oopsie. Can't really think of much not work related
 
Didn't get a contract signed quick enough and the parent company took over. Had to lay 18 drivers off and lost about £100k profit

Does that count.
 
Recently bought a 50" TV on special at Amazon only to find it wouldn't fit in the corner of my living room. Measure up next time :(
 
There's a Poster here who loves to brag about how much money he has, how smart he is and is pretty well known for his one-upmanship. He must be tying himself up in knots at this Thread! I wonder if they'll post :D:cool:

I've done far too many stupid things that have cost me money, as long as you learn from them and don't repeat them it's all good.:p
 
I've never been put in charge of anything expensive enough to cause any major headaches. Though, I must have missed at least three flights back in 2008/09 through having too much fun/oversleeping/forgetting how to get to the airport/being convinced to finish a bottle of scotch before I left. Certainly some headaches from that.
 
doofer said:
There's a Poster here who loves to brag about how much money he has, how smart he is and is pretty well known for his one-upmanship. He must be tying himself up in knots at this Thread! I wonder if they'll post :D:cool:
Click to expand...

Who could that possibly be?! :D

One that springs to mind is £60 I spent on this ludicrous mega-super hyper concentrated protein from a well known provider (usually a great website). I knew this stuff would mix less well than the usual powder, but I wanted the fractional better protein/carb ratio (pretty much a moot point). Well, it turned out this stuff didn't mix.... at all! So I basically just had to throw it away. I really should have made a complaint in hindsight.... so perhaps that was my mistake :D
 
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