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How have you embarrassed yourself recently?
Perhaps this is a bit of an odd conversation topic, but I just humiliated myself by dropping a bottle of red wine (for no reason whatsoever, I just cant hold thigs apparently) that I'd just paid for as I left the store.
The loud gasp from a nearby woman and the man singing 'red red wine' were both objectively funny, but I couldn't help but feel humiliated as I scrambled to clean it up. I'd also like to give a special shout-out to the man who came to help me clean it up.
I'm coming to you Tildes in an effort to feel less shame. What have you done recently, by accident or on purpose that has embarrassed you?
The other day I was stuck behind a giant SUV making a right turn at a red light. The light turned green and it just sat there, I tapped the horn, thinking they were on their phone or something. Didn't work, they kept sitting there not going on green. So I laid on the horn just blasting it, only to then see an old lady slowly crossing the crosswalk from the other side that I couldn't see because of the huge vehicle. Felt pretty stupid at getting mad at someone for letting an old lady cross the road.
I forget where I got this from. But at some point I picked up advice that went along like, if you’re ever in a situation where someone cuts you off while driving (or a similar situation) try to think of the other party as having the worst day ever; like, maybe they have a family member who’s very ill and they have to rush to the hospital. Since you don’t know the other person, it’s not that much of a stretch to imagine such a situation (plus you’d never know either way). I find that changing the perspective / narrative puts ME at ease and lets me get on with the day. At least I’M not having the worst day of my life, I hope they make it to the hospital ok.
DFW uses that scenario to make a point about how our "default settings" hardly ever account for viewpoints that uncenter one from the (their) Universe.
In this vein, I've been considering getting a t-shirt and bumper-sticker that say "I am not an NPC." But then again, I hate bumper-stickers and shirts with slogans.
“Not an NPC, huh. I don’t think a protagonist would ever need to wear a shirt like that, ergo you are an NPC after all!”
Thanks for sharing that, I don’t recall ever hearing it but it certainly strikes the same cord as the sentiment I was trying to express.
Last week I was on a job site halfway across America, and part of my job involved setting up a touch screen PC to act as a sort of middleman between my machine and the warehouse. There was no mounting hardware, and I was being pressured, so against my gut I let it just sit on a table "for now".
Of course I eventually got manic, tripped over the ethernet cable, and yanked the entire PC onto the hard concrete. Everyone saw it happen, and I was on the phone with the guy who sent me the PC and all he could hear was me saying "FUCK! FUUUUUUCK!"
Nobody gave me a hard time about it except for myself, but I still cringe thinking about it. I should definitely be past tripping over cables at this point in my life.
Edit - Since I wasn't clear, it was definitely broken and we had to wait for a replacement to show up before we could continue. Lost two days.
That's the Cosmo Kramer clumsy moment that we all have and all fear. Quality story
A couple of months ago I was sitting next to my son's bed comforting him from a nightmare, and once he fell asleep I got up to leave and put my full weight on my right foot. Unbeknownst to me, my right leg had in fact fallen asleep, and I lost my balance and did a full Chris Farley dive into my son's bedside table, causing a huge noise and startling him back awake. We had a good laugh about it, and I was fine, but now I get to live knowing that's one of his new core memories. Lol
Ah! How could I have missed such an opportunity to continue the legend of shittymorph on Tildes??? Now I am embarrassed two-fold.
Ahhh the tradition continues!
The best thing about that line is that when it begins, my mind channel surfs from the story that's being told to being 17 and watching the recap on RAW that week.
I always wondered how it felt to fall on those small Sony studio CRTs next to JR.
Got a new guy shadowing me for the past couple of weeks (HVAC).
Yesterday we were at a 3 system AC check (rooftop package units with a 30 ft ladder to get up).
We were on the last unit, numbered 1. Thermostats were off. Jumped out R & Y (AC terminals) and the compressor and outdoor fan started, but not the blower. Pretty normal, realize there is no blower terminal to jump though.
Go back inside, turn the two units we're done with back to their original settings, and set the thermostat for unit #1 to AC.
Except that isn't what happened. At some point I forgot the Unit # I was working on. So I set the #1 thermostat back to what it was. Blower on, system off. I turned #3 onto AC full bore.
Go back up, turn power back on to #1, and the blower starts but no AC. After 30 minutes of pulling my hair out trying to figure out where the hell I lost my AC signal, and the new guy following me around, I finally walked past #1's thermostat and then it fucking hit me.
At least he was having a giggling fit the rest of the day.
You may not have done this intentionally, but if the guy shadowing you ever has a case of impostor syndrome then I'm sure this story would be great for him to remember. Knowing that someone who is very experienced makes relatively easy mistakes like this is very comforting when you're less experienced and worried you're going to screw up.
I stress to any guy I train that you're gonna fuck up, both complex and simple things. Especially in HVAC when mistakes can cost homeowners hundreds if not thousands of dollars.
Fuck, we got a guy that like 10 years ago, accidentally set off the sprinklers in a high rise condo. Literally 100s of thousands of dollars in damages.
He still has a job lol. That's what insurance is for.
I had a technician fix my external heat exchanger unit last month. One of the boards were fried (unit was less than 2 winters old!) and he swapped in a new one. The last step of which is to move a little blue jumper connector from the old board to new (hardware folks: why?). I asked if he ever closed everything up and then realised he had forgotten this step, and he said oh yeah definitely.
You shared the story and pictures in another post I was active in, and I was already interested how that would work out. You mentioned the warranty only covered the part, but not the costly install. Did you manage to get the manufacturer to eat some of that cost?
I'm in the market for a car and I wanted to get my first manual transmission car. Had my eyes on some GTIs and went to go test drive one. I've driven friends' manuals before and only stalled once or twice but the test drives were a mess. I stalled multiple times and just wanted to crawl into a hole. Thankfully the salesman was kind about it and understood that I was just learning.
When I was in college, I bought a used bmw with manual transmission and I barely knew how to drive it. It was too intimidating to drive that it sat in the garage for a few days until I got a buddy of time to teach me to drive it in a parking lot. Eventually loved driving it (except for stop and go traffic). We’ve all been there!
Yeah, it's always rough the first time in front of someone. I learned in my friend's Honda Element and did pretty well, then tested a WRX... AWD means the drivetrain jerks when you don't give it enough, AWD means the drivetrain jerks when you give it too much, the low power sucks because EJ, the power band gets wonky with too much on the turbo, and the pedals are leg day. Stalled the test drive like three times in five minutes, I just pulled over and the guy showed me the rest of the way. Went with another one - I stalled it six times on the way home! Twice in one intersection. This one also might've had a wonky fuel map with mods. Joy. I almost cried I was so drained when I got back. Took a deep breath, went back out in the car to the parking lot I learned with a nice gentle hill, and woodshedded manual until I got it down to one stall every commute.
I still stall every now and then - don't worry about it! You'll be fine. GTIs in particular are pretty forgiving once you get the basics down.
Fun cars, but find a cheap mechanic if you don't find a Mk7... My last one swore me off VWs. (For the second time.)
Just to empathize with you a bit here, it took me like two years to really "get" driving a manual trans. I learned in a 2002 Acura RSX-S I bought, and that first year I owned it I definitely did not drive it effectively. I was waaayyyyy too focused on trying to rev match every shift at the near-perfect RPM, being afraid I would wear the clutch out if I didn't. It had the effect of me being more of a distracted driver than I should have been, and I would get nervous when someone rode in the car with me because they might notice I'm not shifting well lol. It took me a long time to realize being 500 or 1000RPM off on the shift is just fine if you operate the clutch accordingly and smoothly.
Nowadays I know that all that came from being taught by a perfectionist dad, who expected way too much when you're just learning. Don't worry about those stalls too much, everyone who's driven a manual understands :)
[Nerd fail warning]
Last fall, I was onsite for beta-testing an IoT device deployment. We had a hundred plus widgets to connect to a dedicated IoT wireless network, and discovered at the last minute that we needed to fulfil an authenticated whitelisting requirement. I rushed to prep a spreadsheet with all the MAC addresses and credentials, uploaded it, and proceeded on my merry way.
But we started having intermittent connectivity problems - the devices would stay online anywhere from 5 - 10 minutes, then drop connections. We'd unplug and replug, same thing. Two hours of product (yes, some of the MACs we received were wrong) and network engineering calls later, with my boss anxiously watching over my shoulder, I discovered that the spreadsheet I uploaded had incremented the last digit in the wireless password field... 🤦.
*shakes fist at excel
Yeah I've also had mysterious behavior from over zealous spread sheet features before.
But yikes to have it discovered with that many eyeballs watching....
It's extra humiliating to make that mistake after 20+ years of experience, though. I'd like to think it was disrupted sleep from travel, high pressure to make a public beta look good for a potentially very lucrative new customer (I call it a "beta", but it was a saleable product because Agile), barely enough onsite time to get everything done due to budget constraints, lots of tweaking and fixing for other unplanned issues...
Let this be a lesson, pay extra attention to the things you can control.
idk that does not sound like your fault to me, excel is such an asshole about this kind of thing.
I should have noticed that the password wasn't the same after dragging down the column (and expanded it so I could see the whole field), and double-checked the list before uploading it. There's evidence that two groups of people are prone to catastrophic mistakes - n00bs who don't know better, and overconfident old farts who've done the same thing a million times...
aka people :) we're really bad at paying attention while doing repetitive tasks, when your environment changes slightly it's normal to not notice. I'd say if anything the mistake is on whoever (possibly also you) made the password be a number in the first place, knowing that it would be put into an excel sheet at some point.
My fat thumbs continuously press all of the buttons on my smartphone keyboard and my fat head continuously presses send before proofreading posts, texts and emails. It doesn't help that I work in communications and can't seem to break the habit to be speedy over thoughtful.
So yeah, embarassing.
So I've been titrating up on a medication that needs to be taken with food to prevent nausea. Currently I'm on the highest dose yet. Well lo and behold I'm on vacation in another country, dining at a fancy white tablecloth restaurant. I start feeling SO queasy after taking my medication, to the point where I had to excuse myself and go throw up in the bathroom. Then of course the sink plumbing wasn't great (stupid me), I couldn't fix it, and ended up telling a staff member when I exited. My waiter was probably confused though because I didn't eat much. Probably thought I didn't like the food or have an eating disorder. So now there's another cringey memory for me to dwell on lol. Embarrassing!