When I was a wee nipper (and when BBC micros were in vogue
) I proceeded to hit the power button on a series of daisy chained extension blocks powering a number of these BBC micro computers. Oops.
Twice I've nearly trashed a few hundred quids worth of TFT screen and computer. On the first occasion I tripped over some of the monitor cables. Result, two monitors came flying off the desk and hung by their wires and swayed a bit as a deafening silence ensued around the room whilst the teacher glared at me.
On the second occasion, a friend of mine was sitting towards the middle of an ordinary office style desk with two computers on and I decided to lean on the desk next to him whilst he sat there. A few seconds later, there was a huge crack as the weak welding at the back of the desk gave way - he fell to the ground as I caught the desk in time and tried to stop the computers from sliding off and crashing to the ground. I was lucky in some respects as the wires saved the day again and stopped the computers from coming off completely.
Luckily I was saved by some people nearby who helped who lifted the computers and placed them on a desk next to the now broken one. I just wanted to die at that moment. I was soooo embarassed, and so was he. Again, there were many sharp intakes of breath and a stunned silence began not soon after the event. I made a pretty quick exit after I was relieved of my computer bearing duties.
Other minor computer cock-ups include opening the original photos transferred off my digital camera, resizing them for web use and saving them. Except I forgot I was working on the originals and not copies - the result; some tiny compressed JPEG images. Whoops.
In the days when I was new to computers and had a Packard Bell PC running Windows 98 the only way to reinstall anything was to use the recovery CDs. The problem - the recovery CD didn't work as per manual on a number of occasions and wiped my HD without prompting. I lost all of my personal files on the HD. On other occasions where I've had to use the CDs they didn't work; and at one point the whole recovery program (an unstable beast that it is) stopped working as it couldn't detect the "tattoo" on the PC and so left me with a useless machine stuck at the c:\> prompt. Needless to say I persevered and the damn thing finally worked and vowed never to buy an off the shelf PC with any sort of recovery solution ever again.
I've also broken my CD drive by not bothering to close it. Opened it to take a CD out and couldn't be bothered to shut it straight away. As sod's law would dictate, I knocked an object off the desk and as the tower with open CD drive was beneath, the tray snapped off as the object clipped the tray on its descent.