What is your biggest "wow am I dumb" moment?

[IMADreamer]

Monday night our internet went out. It was storming so I didn't think much of it. Tuesday it was still out so I thought we better call. Super nice lady says they will have a guy out on Wednesday at 1. No problem. Guy shows up, I know him, we chit chatted a bit and he says did you power cycle the router? I did, by unplugging it from the back of the router. He did it one more time for good measure and says "oh looks like the modem is dead, it's not lighting up." So as he bends down to unplug it, he realized it's been unplugged from the wall the whole time. Plugs it in and works fine. We joked that I won his stupidest service all of the month award and I'm slightly embarrassed.

[heyzeus]

One time my wife and I were installing a new ceiling fan. We got to a step where you had to insert some screws, and the screws were missing. We searched the box repeatedly, no screws. So I drove to home depot, got a manager, and complained about the missing screws. He opened a box in store and took the screws and gave it to me.

I drove home to finish the project, and when we went to install the new screws, we found that they were already there. The screws were never missing, they simply came pre-installed in the machine. Oopsie.

[Smith Corks One]

Back in my college days, I worked for Pizza Hut as a driver. One of our duties when we weren't delivering was to oil pans that the frozen dough would go into. We had these probably 1-gallon tubs with pump lids that screwed onto the top that we pumped from. When those were empty, we unscrewed the top and poured more oil in from the big 5-gallon or whatever tub that it came in. One time, the small tub I was using ran out. I was feeling too lazy to refill it from the big tub, so I noticed that there was another full small one, but it had a different sized pump on top (used for the small personal pans). I thought I was smart; instead of lifting the big 5-gallon tub to pour in the small one, I just poured this other 1-gallon one into it. I saw someone looking at me like I was a dumbass. I said, "What?" He pointed out that although the pump mechanisms on the two lids were different sizes, the lids themselves (and small tubs) were exactly the same size. All I needed to do was swap the lids. (*Note: Cannabis was most likely involved in this moment of stupidity. I figured you knew that since I already said I was working at a pizza place, but just wanted to make sure.)

[heyzeus]

Ooh I have an ever better example of my dumbassery that I just remembered. When I was like 25 and dabbling with investing for the first time, I went to buy a small stake in a gold ETF in my Schwab account. I figured it would work like a mutual fund, where on the order form you type in the dollar amount you are investing in the fund. I thought I was buying $2500 worth of the ETF, but I was actually buying 2500 SHARES of the ETF.

Unknowingly, I had just bought about $100,000 worth of gold on margin. For some reason, the default settings on my account did not prevent someone as not-rich as me to do that. I eventually found out my colossal error when Schwab notified me of the margin call. I had something like 5 business days to either come up with $50,000 in cash to fund my account -- and I did not have anything resembling $50,000 -- or I had to sell the shares.

That was a nerve wracking week. I decided to sell. Gold is a pretty volatile commodity, always up and down. If it went down, and the deadline of my margin call came, I was going to have to sell at a sizable loss. With a few days to spare, the fund went up a bit over my purchase price, and I sold it all. I would up making about $2,000, if I remember correctly. And thus my days as a commodities speculator were OVER.

[thrill]

What a rush tho! Holy [expletive]! The anxiety/adrenaline combo would flatten me. And then the sweet relief.

[GeddyWrox]

Nothing like gambling with 100G I didn't have, but as a young programmer I once wrote a custom function to make a number negative by taking the number as a parameter, doubling it and subtracting the result from the original number. Another programmer asked me what I was working on. I explained. He had this dumbfounded look on his face and said "You know you can just multiply it by -1, RIGHT?"

[SHOW]

I have a mathematics degree.

Cue sad trombone.

[thrill]

That's almost an "i'm too smart" situation. I wouldn't be smart enough to come up with the hard way (or the easy way) of doing that.

I don't have any good stories. I'm constantly doing dumb [expletive] like reminding myself to grab my house keys before I leave/lock the door and two seconds later I'm out the door, locked it, and my keys are still inside.

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

I'm too dumb to recognize the dumb things I do and/or even remember them.