The "oops I've bust it" moments in life!

I either plugged in or unplugged a GPU from a machine that was still on. It was very quickly not on and that GPU never worked again.

Then just yesterday I was on a mountain in pretty tough conditions, the clouds were in and my glasses got wet then the water froze so I couldn't see well at all. I lost my balance, fell and poked a hole in my mountaineering boot with my crampon. It's not entirely bust and I am trying to get it repaired but just a tiny mistake could ruin a £200 pair of boots due to a tiny hole.

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A few days ago we had a leg of lamb to cook in the slow cooker. But it was too big to fit in so I tried to cut it in half with a pretty hefty and sharp kitchen knife.

Couldn't get through it at all. So I used it like a machete and tried to hack through the bone.

Didn't touch the bone. Knife now has a whacking great dent in it. I was quite surprised at just how tough the bone was and the steel knife dented so easily.

It was quite an expensive set of knives owned by the missus. I'll have to try and grind a fresh edge now to get rid of this dent.

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One pump too many beyond the vinegar stroke.

Seriously, I was putting a shelf up in the closet next to the front door where the consumer unit is mounted. I didn't have a cable finder, but marked carefully all of the possible areas where the zoned cables could be and gave them a wide berth. Drilling into the wall i met some resistance with what sounded like metal. This particular wall had a metal stud so I thought **** it and pushed harder. Next thing I know I'm at the other side of the room on my back, with lots of little molten metal blobs burning through my clothes into my skin, and my wife screaming. Ears ringing, massive headache, weird feeling throughout my body. Turns out the builders didn't zone the cable from the main fuse to the consumer unit properly and ran it diagonally up the wall. The only thing that protected me was a 100 amp fuse which blew. Also took out part of the street.
The SSE engineers who came to replace the main fuse were surprised I wasn't dead. The sparks who came to replace the cable between the consumer unit and meter were also surprised I wasn't dead. I found it quite amusing but my wife still turns pale every time it comes up. Still have the burns from the little metal blobs which turned out to be molten drill bit.

Edit:
Electricians - ~£400
New drill - ~£150
Replacing LVT which was melted by debris - £150
 
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HoneyBadger said:
Loads, most recent about a year ago and cost me £6k for a new boiler. Long story short, moved into a new house that had an old boiler about the age of Jesus. Kept tripping the power so I looked at the fuse, 3amp. “Hm, that can’t be right for a boiler, surely? That’s why it keeps tripping!”

Replaced with a 13 amp, the boiler worked alright, the PCB caught fire! No spare parts, new unit complete boiler needed…to this day I never told my wife!
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I had a similar issue with the sandwich toaster in my uni halls of residence. Wouldn't work after I came back from a weekend at home, nobody about so I replaced the fuse "tsk don't these clowns know what to do when an electric device isn't working?!?". Turned it on, it's working, lovely jubbly. Few seconds later it goes BANG and a massive spark leapt out, right where I'd been touching it seconds earlier. I was in a state of shock for a period after, just sort of stood there unable to process what had happened and how close I was to (I guess?) getting elecrocuted.
 
danlightbulb said:
A few days ago we had a leg of lamb to cook in the slow cooker. But it was too big to fit in so I tried to cut it in half with a pretty hefty and sharp kitchen knife.

Couldn't get through it at all. So I used it like a machete and tried to hack through the bone.

Didn't touch the bone. Knife now has a whacking great dent in it. I was quite surprised at just how tough the bone was and the steel knife dented so easily.

It was quite an expensive set of knives owned by the missus. I'll have to try and grind a fresh edge now to get rid of this dent.

PXL-20250105-215912104.jpg
Click to expand...
This reminds me of one of my kitchen knives. One set is ancient, but still works like a dream to this day, though they are serrated (so, not sure if that makes a big difference).

Another knife, however, more akin to the one you posted, became blunt as hell in less than 6 months? :confused:

It seems most things these days are built not to last...
 
I once cleaned out my GPU waterblock, but didn't realise I hadn't done up the fasteners tightly enough until I heard a crackling noise through my headphones. Funnily enough, this noise happened at about the same frequency as you might expect from a slowly dripping water leak, which I found suspicious. When I took my headphones off, I then realised there was a periodic hissing noise coming from the computer case at about the same regularity as the crackling sound. You guessed it; the GPU was leaking coolant all over the back of my sound card and causing actual audible feedback through my headphones. Thinking about it, it was lucky I was using an internal PCIe sound card at the time and that I had caught it early enough to stop it leaking into the PSU's fan vent. The hissing noise turned out to be the coolant not just boiling on the back of the sound card, but making burn marks as it bubbled away. I was also fortunate that the scorch mark wiped away.
 
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I kicked over a 10 litre oil based paint bucket on to carpet after drinking quite a lot and feeling like a bit of DIY. Tried to scoop it up back into the bucket which then "embedded the paint into the fibres, ensuring even industrial cleaning unrealistic" if I remember the cleaner's report submitted to our insurers correctly.

Welp.
 
I was cleaning up a blob on my 3D printer over the weekend, having not really had to do this sort of task before nothing prepares you for how much goo can get into those hot ends and the only way it can be kind of cleaned is with heat and patience. I loosed the hot end to get easier access, then went to heat it up to soften the mess but pressed the wrong button which sent the now lowered hot end into the build plate, scraping a nice gouge into said plate and bending all manner of bits. I thought this was the end and I was consigned to having to buy replacements parts for this nooby **** up, but I managed to clean it up, straighten it all out and after a few test prints it's all working fine again.

Last year I knackered a pair of Beyerdynamic DT770 Pros that I'd had for about 20 years while working on the inside with a soldering iron by applying too much heat near the voice coil. That upset me, those headphones were my first proper hi-fi cans. I recovered by replacing them.... with 3 other pairs and a set of DT990 pros :o
 
I was at a repair cafe once and a fellow volunteer asked me to do his screen swap. Latest model phone, had a glass strip across the back with the camera etc in it.

I got stuck and said it needed a heat gun to remove the glass, he said go ahead - I don't mind if you can't finish it, just don't leave me without a phone to navigate myself home. Cue using a mini blow torch and cooking his phone :o
 
Dropped a Philips Intellivue and Minime in Resus a few months back. Luckily they're tougher than you'd think, but my heart stopped as it fell in slow motion and then bounced.
 
Back in the days before cloud we used to do a daily live steram at work, once it was finished we’d upload the files to a server so they were available to stream offline. The place expanded internationally so we bought some colo servers to host things closer to the users but needed a way to sync the files that were from the master server to the “CDN” servers. I installed some sync software I found to FTP the missing files so everything was available. We paid for 10Mb bandwidth at the time but it supported up to 100Mb and we paid the difference if the xth percentile was above 10Mb. Anyway the software went, “wrong” and constantly tried to upload the files over and over and over and ended up maxing out the connection for a whole weekend, which cost the company £16k in extra charges. Ouch.
 
Was doing an upgrade for my other half’s CPU cooler.

Thought I’d be nice and tie it into giving it a decent clean.



Out comes the CPU.



Gentle dusting off of the metal heatsinks on the motherboard. Dropped the microfibre cloth onto the CPU socket.




I remember just sitting there thinking “if I don’t take the cloth off, it’s both working and broken, so I think I’m gonna leave it”



When I did eventually get the courage to take the cloth off, it was as bad as one might expect.



What followed was buying a new motherboard, and dropping the CPU onto the socket as I was attempting to install it, bending the pins in the process.



I don’t think I’ve ever really been the same since.
 
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MrRockliffe said:
Was doing an upgrade for my other half’s CPU cooler.

Thought I’d be nice and tie it into giving it a decent clean.



Out comes the CPU.



Gentle dusting off of the metal heatsinks on the motherboard. Dropped the microfibre cloth onto the CPU socket.




I remember just sitting there thinking “if I don’t take the cloth off, it’s both working and broken, so I think I’m gonna leave it”



When I did eventually get the courage to take the cloth off, it was as bad as one might expect.



What followed was buying a new motherboard, and dropping the CPU onto the socket as I was attempting to install it, bending the pins in the process.



I don’t think I’ve ever really been the same since.
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:cry: :cry:
 
Guess this falls under "breaking it" but I was young and stupid and went to drill a wall for a mirror...without checking where the water pipes went. Cue massive leak, lots of damage and a very angry ex wife.
 
Wayne~ said:
Guess this falls under "breaking it" but I was young and stupid and went to drill a wall for a mirror...without checking where the water pipes went. Cue massive leak, lots of damage and a very angry ex wife.
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When we first bought our house I drove up with my father in law to start some renovation. We're on the top floor refitting a window, drilling the party walls... Partner walks in and says our neighbour saw our porch filling with water. Absolute panic as we assume we've drilled a pipe, but "luckily" it was just that the toilet fill valve had stuck after being unused so long, and the cistern overflow was in the porch.
 
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