I got nothing recent, but here are a few from the past.
I was once reading a magazine and tried to pinch-zoom a photo. I tried multiple times before I understood the depths of my stupidity.
I once took my new car into the dealer about a month after I got it for warranty work because the washer fluid wasn't working anymore. This was after I looked it over and couldn't find the cause, so I assumed it was a body control module or maybe the stalk was bad. I was pushing the stalk forward instead of pulling it backwards. The tech, service writer, and myself had a good laugh about how I had forgotten how to use the damn thing. There is a freaking icon with "pull" on the stalk. I had been using it just fine and then caught the stupid one day.
I once remarked that they should invent vizine, but for your mouth while I had cottonmouth. Before anyone steals my idea, water was invented over 12 billion years ago.
I tried to take photos of hallucinations to show others. Yes, photos, plural.
lmao similar to the pinch-zoom thing, I do a lot of digital art normally, but whenever I draw on paper, I reach for ctrl-Z first instead of flipping the pencil over. Probably doesnt help that If I do draw on paper, its in the same spot where I normally put my tablet
I often use an electronic drawing tablet, with a button on the electronic pen configured as "undo." The frequency with which I reflexively press on that bit of a real pen to undo a physical ink-based mistake does not reflect well on me.
I'm a programmer, so this is pretty much a constant thing haha. Sometimes you write the smartest shit imaginable, and sometimes you waste 4 hours on something extremely simple.
I've had many other jobs and few experiences in them have been as humbling as programming. My favorite is trying everything to fix an issue then realizing the problem is that you're pointing at the wrong database or running the wrong branch.
Added an extra shelf to my shoe rack today. After measuring, cutting, drilling, even made little notches below the shelf, barely putting the shelf in because of hinges in the way, vacuuming the mess, halfway packing up my tools and call it a successful day and... doors won't close because of the hinges on the doors hitting the shelf. Moved it 5mm lower after drilling another set of holes.
My job involves opening boxes, getting serial numbers from the contents, and resealing the boxes. I have repeatedly done the last two steps in the opposite order.
I got lost and almost stuck out on a hiking trail in the desert after dark. It was raining, I was soaked through, and so was my dog. It wasn't supposed to rain, and I'd taken this hike before. Granted, never by myself, but still.
Luckily I found my way back to the trail head just as it was getting pitch black, but I was seriously scared there for a bit. I kept apologizing to my dog for being so fucking stupid to go on a two hour hike in the late afternoon with no emergency gear and no "just in case" rain protection.
...this happened 5 hour ago, btw, I can't sleep, I think I'm still in shock a bit at how close I came to possibly dying. And for bringing my dog down with me.
This is actually a case of what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Now the only important thing is that you treat it as a learning experience. It's too easy to get hung up and blame yourself for far too long.
I was laid off this year. I'm a 25 year veteran programmer, and not to brag in the sea of tech folks we have here, but I am rather proud of my skills I have picked up over the years.
My first interview this year, they set up an online development environment and had me solve a fairly simple array sort problem, and I completely choked. Something about being watched and judged while I worked broke my brain.
I managed to ace my next interview, but they didn't bother with the programming exercise at all.
Spent weeks without pepper because I thought the grinder thing wasn’t working. Turns out I hadn’t screwed off the cap and removed the foil. I was just about to give up and buy a new pepper grinder.
Starting to do tasks that other employees wouldn't touch with a 10' pole due to complexity and now having to deal with the consequences including being assigned more complex tasks... I'm making myself essential I guess, but in a union job it's not as if I can negotiate for a better salary...
Not in my job, negotiation happens on hire only and I started with zero knowledge like most of us, my brain is just wired for the kind of tasks we do so I more do stuff people with more experience wouldn't be able to do and until I get a promotion it just means I end up working harder for the same wage as my colleagues when I could be doing the same tasks as them which I have an easier time with 🤷
For some reason, I wanted to try the new Dutchman burger that people were talking about online, and right as I took the first bit, I instantly remembered that the buns are replaced with onions and my body doesn't like that much onion all at once.
Nearly executed wrong rsync command which would have overwrote/deleted the wrong files.
I don't remember what exactly it was, I just didn't want to rewrite the whole command so I took it from history, quickly checked it and executed it. Then I've suddenly seen the output and quickly killed it. I know my heartbeat went up, "Oh no! What the fuck did I do? I do have this backed up, right?"
Thankfully, the wrong rsync command I copied had -n in it. That means dry-run - display what would be done but don't perform the actions.
I guess I should always first do the dry-run and see if I am satisfied.
This time I was just lucky.
My battery on my Samsung die during class cause i forgot to charge it, and no joke, my friend who owns an iPhone says "maybe you should get an iPhone because of that."
Plus side on lemmy is that since your comment and link points aren't saved to a total on your account you can ultimately be more free with your opinion since the only penalty is especially meaningless downvotes, unlike on the other site where if you dipped well into the red you might not be able to post in places.
This is probably a stupid question, but what's the difference between being dumb and being stupid? Is stupid just a ranking of dumb, or is dumb a quantifiable measurement and stupid is not?