Yesterday I managed a proper ‘oops’. What is your ‘oops’?

For 25 years I have been able to tie good knots as sailor, paddler and climber. Yesterday lunch one of my knots came undone – holding the two canoes to the shore. 😯
Cue some panicking, followed by a break as the wind died and swung bringing them back towards shore a bit, and a rather fast swim from me… 🙄

[url=https://flic.kr/p/W6iyo7]Loch Ard for Ben's 12th[/url] by Matt Robinson, on Flickr

😀

Forgot to tie in properly when climbing…..

Reversed a very long way it seemed quite calmly apparently. It’s the golden rule of climbing

I put my shopping on the wrong side of the self checkout and had to call over an assistant when it wouldn’t stop shouting at me

As I posted in my other thread, not the worst, but most recent.

[video]https://youtu.be/U1unvxNuPqc[/video]

I had arranged to make myself redundant from end July (would have left office today on paid leave) and then have the summer hols off with my daughter.

Accepted a new job in the business. Now super busy. Thoughts of summer spent making dens and cooking sausages on the beach have evaporated….

Idiot.

Downhill, on a road heading into the bottom of a valley (steep sides, no pavements), on the roadbike, on a road I know well and have ridden tens of times, doing 60kph, thinking of my entry to the sharp, blind left hander in order to maximise speed/minimise loss. I achieved this with superlative skill. Sadly I came to an abrupt halt 5m past the apex of the corner when I came into contact with the rear window/RHS quarter of the Audi estate car which was stationary on the carriageway due to some idiot trying to bring a trailer up a road which was clearly only just passable for two cars.

Shattered front tooth, broken ribs, broken finger, severe bruising and a concussion… 😥

Bike was fine, which let’s face it, is the main thing.

Be able to stop in the distance you can see, kids!

Once I swam butterfly headfirst into an oncoming boat. That is the last fail that I clearly remember.

Too many.

This week – decided to reassemble the utility bike at 6am and before a caffeine. Night-ride planned later on

35 mins later it’s all looking good. And the dynohub/lights are even working after a year of sub-par storage!

Make coffee to celebrate.

Realise on inspection that I’d failed to locate the reaction arm for the roller-brakes.

So dropped front wheel back out. Forgot to unclip the frigging dynamo hub-connector and so stretched, mangled and tore the lighting-wiring. Including the parallel wiring for the B+M USB-Werk charger. Fark

Spend ages trimming back the wiring sheaths and neatly re-wiring only to find that now all of the wires are too short.

Throw a fairly major paddy, inversely-proportional. The straw, etc. 👿

Stopped my Series 2a on a hill, went to start off again and the handbrake was stuck.
Put it in gear ( Oh, yes, I very nearly did ) then took out the passenger side seat, transmission cover and leaning in on the passenger side started issuing a bit of percussive learning to the handbrake drum with a hammer.

*ping*

Then the vehicle starts rolling faster and faster down hill, I jump out, mate tries to hold on to the wheel on the back door to stop it.

Off it went down the hill, over the road, and smack into a tree. Which saved it from a 30 foot drop into a stream.

Told a man in drag at a fancy dress party what an ugly woman he made only to realise at that precise moment she was in fact a proper lady.
You can’t talk yourself out of that one so I turned around and walked off.
If a lady from Byron Bay is reading this , I’m sorry.

most of my life for the last 12 years has been a fail lol

Told a man in drag at a fancy dress party what an ugly woman he made only to realise at that precise moment she was in fact a proper lady.
You can’t talk yourself out of that one so I turned around and walked off.
If a lady from Byron Bay is reading this , I’m sorry.

Someone at an event once went out of their way to help me with something that was really my own stupidity. “Thank you, you’re a gentleman,” I gushed. “No, I’m not,” she replied.

Life.

Matt_Outandabout is a Mermaid!

Once joked to a mate of mine from work to “hurry up and get that baby out” because I was sick of doing all the work in our little team.

She’d had a miscarriage.

Still haunts me now, 20+ years later.

Matt_Outandabout is a Mermaid!

For the record, matt_oab is wearing white shorts…not skinny dipping.

A few years back…

Went to a automatic car wash with newish V6 4Motion Golf with Thule roof bars and bike carriers on top. Read sign saying “Do not enter with roof rack on car”, thought “Yeah, what’s the worst that can happen…”

Two minutes later, one of the up and over brushes got caught under the ends of the bike carriers, initially lifted the back of the car off the ground then proceeded to crush the roof rack into the roof, at which point I started the car and forced my way out mid cycle….

I was left with four large dents on the roof where the footpacks were recessed neatly into the roof panel!

Thule bars were fine though……

Managed to stick 60000 ft lbs on an xt38 connection …. Max torque was 22400ft lbs.

Belled muchly. Didn’t even have to walk over could see it was banjoed from 10ft away.

Not my finest hour. Cost 5 figures to repair

Quite a few years ago…Plant manager for a large pharma company… during a steam shutdown, whilst trying to get steam back into the plant on a hot day ( nothing was calling for heat and it was taking forever) decided to open a few valves onto our heating rigs for the vessels… This had no effect at all so closed them and thought no more about it…
2 days later…. dreadful smell from our day tanks of Marlotherm heating fluid , it was unmistakable, it appears my 4 storey plant has lost pretty much all of its heating fluid through a burst heat exchanger on that heating rig I had opened and contaminated all of the drains and from one side of site to the other!!! Cue lots of people dressed in disposable overalls with masks on and lots of swearing…. The only saving grace was we didn’t discharge the day tanks to the local sewage farm !!!!
Cost— er lots
Plant shut down for — er 3 months
Me — kept gob shut.

A number of years ago in Canada, I had switched over my Volvo from my winter tyres to my summers before going on a long road trip.

About 100kms into the trip, I could hear a disconcerting bump-bump-bump from the front end, so pulled into a garage in a nearby town to have it looked at quickly.

After two minutes, the mechanic came out and asked me if the tyres had recently been changed, to which I said ‘yes’. He then told me I should make a complaint against the garage that did it, as they had failed to turn the lug nuts on the front end. Apparently, they were only on by a thread on each side.

I didn’t admit that the ‘garage’ that did it was me. 😯

Also quite a few years ago I was working long hours (18 or so hours a day working, 6 days a week for 3 weeks) trying to finalise a software release. Software was tested, installer built, installer tested. At 5am I copied the whole thing onto a CD for burning, gave it to the guy who was supposed to run it to the CD replicators and went home had a beer and planned several days of sitting in the pub with my colleagues, enjoying a well earned rest.

The phone rang at 10am and I was told to get my arse back to work. When I arrived my boss not very calmly asked whether I’d tested the actual CD I’d made for replication. I had… surely I wouldn’t… no… ****. 50,000 CDs and their packaging into landfill.

In rather embarrassing fashion I managed to write off a pair of lightweight Carbon wheels that were being lent to me to time trial on . The front one the first time I used it I somehow managed to have the QR lever go too far into the spokes so that when I wheeled it down the road it broke a spoke , which on those wheels is not repairable . I used the rear disc for the rest of the season but when I had a close look at the wheel it had sat on the bike rack a bit too close to the exhaust pipe and had gone all brittle and deformed . The owner , fortunately is a very wealthy man and wasn’t too upset that I’d destroyed about £3000 of wheels although I was shitting myself that he would ask me to replace them but he didn’t .

My middle finger nail is just about to fall off, because I put that finger in an electric tube-cutting machine and pressed the button. There’s a big warning sticker right where I put my finger, and I deliberately did it anyway because the tube was jammed and I thought I could push it out while the machine was running slowly.

I bought a Citroen….

bencooper – Member
My middle finger nail is just about to fall off, because I put that finger in an electric tube-cutting machine and pressed the button. There’s a big warning sticker right where I put my finger, and I deliberately did it anyway because the tube was jammed and I thought I could push it out while the machine was running slowly.

Bravo, Sir!

Managed to stick 60000 ft lbs on

4 big blokes hanging on a 60ft long lever?

Managed to stick 60000 ft lbs on an xt38 connection …. Max torque was 22400ft lbs.

Belled muchly. Didn’t even have to walk over could see it was banjoed from 10ft away.

Not my finest hour. Cost 5 figures to repair

Meh.

Programmed a configuration plug from a Boeing ECU wrongly on the nightshift. This told the ECU not to supply cooling air to the clearance control valves, and wiped out a whole set of turbine shrouds and 2 stages of turbine blades.

Cost was just shy of half a million.

Edit – dollars, admittedly…

“I wonder how much my forks compress when I land a jump?”

On my first week as a motor vehicle apprentice back in 1998 i drove a 6 month old Rover 827 Sterling off the end of a car ramp, not a problem as such but unfortunately the car was 7ft up in the air at the time.

Not entirely my fault though, i was told to turn over the engine up on the ramp as the exhaust was blowing and the mechanic underneath wanted to pinpoint where the fault was, i checked it was out of gear first but it also had a gear sector fault which i wasn’t aware of so as soon as i turned the key it shot forward and dropped off the end to a humongous crash, no such thing as airbags back then so i suffered 2 broken ribs and smacked my face off the steering wheel and bust my nose and broke two teeth. 😀

OOOH, NOF . Did it heal properly?

Joined the company I am currently working at…20yrs later I still regret it .

Was showing Tuskaloosa of this parish around Chatsworth recently. Descending towards Bakewell I flew off a little lip only to notice mid air that my landing strip had eroded into a jagged foot deep rut. Popped both tyres and a chainring as well as some body damage…

Managed to stick 60000 ft lbs on

4 big blokes hanging on a 60ft long lever?

big ass torque wrench.

Not checking my alu seatpost in my steel frame for a couple of years…

Just packing my bike into a cardboard box just now for a flight tomorrow for my first ever euro bike tour to find the seatpost stuck fast, lbs had a go at it with the blowtorch and a few other methods but it ain’t moving. Nightmare…

Just gonna have to leave the saddle and seatpost popping out the carboard box and worry about it when I get back.

I was just reading this thread this morning too.

Fast forward to this afternoon, and I’m changing a set of tyres on the landy.

‘This tyre paste seems kinda weird…’

‘Oh. crap.’

From now on, the tyre paste lives in a different drawer to the cutting compound.

in the early noughties…offering to help my now ex-wife with a massive cool box up that there huge hill out of Glastonbury to the campervan field… with hindsight should of shoved her in it and rolled it down the hill… on fire

OOOH, NOF . Did it heal properly?

yeah, pretty well. Had to have the bolts taken out again after a couple of years as they were sticking out too much and I kept banging them on table edges and stuff which was quite uncomfortable.

Sent an entire 16m3 skip of Tanalised timber to the local tip.
Driver “Is that skip done with mate?”
Me “yeah, it’s full, take it and deliver the next one”
Later “What happened to the skip of hazardous Chrome Copper Arsnic treated wood”
Me “er… :oops:”
(it was a long time ago, but wherever it’s buried, it’ll still be there!)

kenneththecurtain – Member

From now on, the tyre paste lives in a different drawer to the cutting compound.

OK so this isn’t my biggest but your post reminded me… I’ve got a duff leg so I used to drag my foot over the back of hte motorbike most times when I got on, it soon picked up a lovely set of scratches in the paint. So out in the garage one day and I thought, I’ll do something about that. Reached for the aerosol can of halfords fine rubbing compound (great stuff btw), sprayed it on, discovered that actually it was an aerosol can of halfords gloss black paint.