I've just been a monumental b**lend. Please hold my hand.

[Melsuleenia]

Need kind words. I'm such a wanker at times.

Moved into new flat in March. Just got broadband. All good. It goes offline.

Spend 30 mins on the phone to the provider. Hilarity endues as he goes through the diagnostics.

Very kind man gets me to check the socket. I'd had an EPIC row with my parents the night before. I thought I had unplugged the phone. Oh no, I'd unplugged the router and forgotten.

I'm a post grad physicist. And I can't even work out how to remove the landlines and keep the router plugged in.

I'm actually cringing writing this.

Can you share your epic fail moments so I don't feel quite as much of a tosser?

Thank you and please.

So my old house had a Rayburn in the kitchen that provided heating and hot water, so it was running 24/7.
We used to get apple juice and orange juice delivered in the glass bottles, which we stored under the stairs in the kitchen.
One day I came home from work and one of the bottles of apple juice had exploded, showering glass and sticky juice everywhere. Rang the suppliers going absolutely mad with them - my poor cats might have been hurt, woodwork had been damaged in the kitchen by the force of the explosion, etc etc.
They were horrified, sent us a crate of new juice in apology, promised a full investigation saying it must have been a fault in the sealing process.

I mean, imagine if some dimblewit had cracked the top off a bottle of apple juice, had a glass, screwed the top back on, and then put it back open near a heat source like a Rayburn and forgot about it.
That'd never happen, would it?

Years ago I parked my very old car with the front bumper facing a wall. When I came back from shopping I couldn't get it into reverse gear. Cue at least 3 middle aged blokes all trying to figure it out.
About half an hour in I remembered that you had to pull the gear stick up before pushing it into gear. Not a chance I was going to admit that.
I let them push the car out of the parking place, never admitting that I was a total idiot.

Oh god I've just remembered another one.. .. years and years ago now I called the gas board out because there was a very strong smell of gas. He came in, tested the air with his detector, went all round the boiler, went around outside and couldn't find a gas leak. He said whatever it was it wasn't gas. Just at that point I happened to look over at my gecko amd realised he looked a bit of an off colour, the poor thing had died on his heat mat (he'd been fine that morning but guess the heat speeded things up) I was devastated and embarrassed in equal measures

OMG, I did this! I asked the guy in IT not to tell my boss because I was so embarrassed. It actually took him two phone calls and about an hour to figure it out though 😆

I tried paying money into the wrong bank too, the one I wanted was 2 doors down! Reading all of mine so far I'm not coming across too well am I?!!!

Don’t worry. I just fucked up taking the easiest bloods ever. Have never seen a more glorious robust and prominent vein. “Ooooh LOVELY vein” I say, like a total wanker. Patient and carer look on in awe at my fantastic nonchalant phlebotomy skillz.
totally missed it.
no spare yellow tubes in the car.
retreat in shame and will have to prostrate myself in front of the actual phleb who will laugh at my fuckwittery
HOW DID YOU MISS THAT? She will say.

I swear this isn’t my story but I’d be embarrassed if it was. DH used to work at a solicitor firm and one of the other paralegals came in saying that her ‘indicators’ were both flashing and wouldn’t stop. He volunteered to go and have a look as she was quite upset. He asked her to show him what she’d done when she got in the car to make the lights flash. She heaved her giant handbag onto the dashboard where it promptly hit the button for the hazard flashers 🙄 DH just showed her how to turn them off 😆

I had 2 YEARS of my hot water timer not working. Had to remember to do it manually.
Called in 2 different plumbers and changed my Nest thermostat. Must have cost me over £400.
Then I rang Nest. Apparently there is a setting that turns off hot water control. Three clicks and it was sorted. 🫣

I bought new wicker garden furniture last summer and was very cross when it arrived minus all of the cushions. When I rang the supplier the lady sighed and said have you turned them upside down? All the cushions were packed neatly underneath. Apparently she has many similar calls a week so I didn’t feel too bad!

Called the RAC out because I couldn’t find my keys. I had torn the house apart (spare keys kept in glove box in the car. Like that was a great idea)

Friendly RAC man arrives (he knew me well as I was a regular and I coincidentally found his lost dog who was running in the road when I was doing the school run)

I am telling him about how I had turned my house upside down looking for the keys.

He asked me to check my pockets before he started.
I immediately felt the back pockets of my jeans. He said try the front. And there they were the key chain was hanging out of my front pocket.

Definitely a “Doh” moment

Took some faulty work boots back to Screwfix for my husband in our town centre. Assistant couldnt find my name, address or reference number on the system. Stood for about 10 mins searching for any info. I scrolled up on my confirmation email and the assistant said 'this is Toolstation, not screwfix!'
Screwfix was in the next town!
Cringe!

I used to be a nurse. As a student nurse, I used to have to take patients to the loo, if they needed help. You wheeled them there in a wheelchair, helped them onto the loo, and left them, saying you'd come back in a moment, to help them off the loo and back to bed.

On more than one occasion, I went back onto the ward and got called to do something else, and completely forgot about the poor soul stranded on the loo, and had to apologise profusely when I remembered and went back for them. Without exception, they were all lovely about it - "I know how busy you are love - don't worry!"

Monday morning arrived and I couldn’t find my laptop charger. House turned upside down. I had worked from home all day Friday off my laptop so charger must have been there. DH says to ask children’s party entertainer whether he may have grabbed it when he hosted DD’s party over the weekend as his sound system was on the desk where I work. Nope, he replied. Cue mini breakdown as I really need to work. I had to head into the office (one hour commute) to get a new charger ahead of transport strikes the next day. Get new charger from IT before heading into open plan office with hot desks. Walk past the desk I used on Thursday where another employee is sitting. Notice she has two chargers. Ask her about them. She says one of them was already plugged in when she got there. I managed to leave charger in the office all day Friday and over the weekend. Not told DH. Just told him I had bagged a spare charger to keep one at home. He muttered that I have a wasteful organisation.

As a 21 year old student, I took my car to the garage for new tyres. All good. Next morning, one of them was completely flat, so I took it back (very carefuly, but thankfully it wasn't very far) whereupon they resealed it for me. All good.
Then, I got to Uni, and while reversing in to a parking space the most horrific noise came from the same wheel. Absolutely livid, I went back to the garage, made a lot of noise in front of all the waiting customers about how they'd done something terrible to my car and I wanted it sorted NOW. They pulled 3 men off the jobs they were doing to go and sort it out. Turns out the mudflap had slipped, and was rubbing on the tyre when reversing. I never went back.

Another nursing story - this time not my fuck-up - but you finding random biscuits in the dogfood reminded me.

Once qualified, I worked in Operating Theatres. One day I was the runner in the Orthopaedic theatre, where they were doing hip replacements. The sterile instruments arrive on a series of trays, all wrapped up, and the trays are used in sequence, as the op goes on. One section had finished, so I removed the tray of used instruments, and put out the new set, opening the outer wrappings so the scrub nurse could unwrap the sterile ones - and when she did so, there, in the corner of the tray, was a spectacles case complete with glasses!!

The trays were made up, wrapped and sterilised in our centralised sterile supplies unit, and I can only imagine that whoever was assembling that tray had been called away just before wrapping it up, and had absentmindedly put their glasses, in the case, in the corner of the tray, and someone else had wrapped it up without noticing. Having been through the autoclave (high temperature steam at high pressure) the glasses had almost melted, and the case had exuded some glue-y substance.

Luckily we had a spare tray, so I wrapped up the rogue tray and sent it back with a note. No-one ever owned up to owning the glasses!

Another one, from the other side - I used to upgrade hard drives in tills when I was a student. I got a call one Friday because a new shop was due to open the next (Saturday) morning, but their tills weren't working. So I had to be on site for 7am (Saturday morning, I was a student...) to see if I could sort it out before they were due to open at 9. On arrival, I asked what the problem was and they said that none of the lights were on, the power wasn't working and it was all dead. OK says I, where is your fuse box? Blank looks. Found fuse box, reset the trip, and all was working perfectly. Easiest £40 I ever made - the kettle hadn't even finished boiling for the cup of tea they were making for me!

I went to the same hairdressers for ages - at least a year. Booked an appointment, turned up. No problem. Until one day they were all booked up and I was cross. I believe I said something about "what is the point of making an appointment then?" At which point they told me that I had NEVER made an appointment. Turned out I had been making my appointments with a different hairdresser a few doors down who must have been sick of me never turning up....

My DH works in IT and has loads of similar stories. There's a forum on Reddit for them and some are quite funny.

www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/

His personal favorite was a call he had years ago. The user, who was in another office 1000 miles away, complained that his computer terminal was down. DH asked him to look under the desk to make sure he hadn't accidentally kicked out the power cord. The user replied that he could not see under the desk. DH asked why not and was told "The power went out 20 minutes ago and the lights are off, so it's too dark to see under the desk.".

I got British Gas to come check my heating as it wasn't coming on. I had the thermostat at zero.

Years ago when IT things were quite an excitement.. Playing around with background colour and font colour. Managed to turn them both to white. For the whole system.

My computer got taken away by the techs because no-one had yet worked out how to sort those kind of issues.

Then having not learnt, a couple of months later I experimented with turning my script to Japanese. Yes, that worked. For the whole of my system. I was the Director of IT

Op, I did practically the same thing. My laptop (which was indeed indeed pile of HP crap) had to go back to be repaired 3 times. As a result they extended they warranty. It then wouldn't charge
Again. So I rang them. They initially denied the warranty extension, wouldn't repair it for the same fault etc, etc, shitty service for a shitty laptop. I argued it all and won each point against them but was really tough on them and how outrageous as a company they were. Eventually they said I could return it to them but as we were talking I was fiddling with the power cord, and I saw some delightful little hamster teeth marks all the way through the rubber to the wire. Oops. 🤫

I don't, however, regret telling them their company was a pile of poo, and their laptop was too. And if I'd known then what I know now, I'd have told them their printers were poo too.

When I lived in the US, I lived in a smart managed apartment complex. One day I heard a really annoying bleeping noise, a bit like the sound you get when a smoke alarm is running low on batteries. It only happened every five minutes or so. I got the maintenance guy out, and helped by a security guy, they investigated my smoke alarm (ceilings too high to check myself) but couldn't find anything. The noise persisted and that night we stuffed loads of pillows etc up against the bedroom door to block it out.

The following day I discovered what it was - my cheap $9 payg phone was bleeping because I had a voicemail! Felt a right idiot that I had had people out to check the smoke alarm! I had to tell them too, as they were planning to come back to do further checks.

I called Virgin media, circa 2007, to say my tv box wasn't working. Was there a little red dot on the box the call handler asks me? Yes there was, it was on standby.

We once had to go a whole weekend without hot water or heating, when the engineer arrived he informed me that I'd turned the gas meter off, oops.