What's your biggest mistake? (Child appropriate)

[Cyprus]

Everybody makes mistakes. It's a fact of life.
Some mistakes are minor with the harm only lasting a few seconds. Others are catastrophic mistakes with serious consequences.
Regardless of scale all mistakes hurt and they suck in the moment. If you're like me, you spend a fair deal of time replaying them and regretting a lot.

What is the biggest, worst, or most regrettable mistake that you have made and are comfortable sharing?
Keep your replies child appropriate.

 

[Redhead Rae]

Most of my mistakes have to do with being too trusting of people. The one that stuck with me the most was when I was a lonely, gawky 8 year old I trusted an older man who was kind to me. None of the authorities believed me. Fortunately, my parents did.

 

[drumstick diva]

Had that happen when I was about 5, my parents didn't believe me. But another girl had the same and her mother believed her. Back in the days early '50's- the police told the guy he had to get out of town. Always wondered how many towns he got thrown out of during the rest of his life.- how many childhoods he ruined.

 

[azurbanclucker]

I'm in tech professionally. One of my previous jobs I was coordinating an on-site visit with a vendor to replace some faulty hardware on a computer system that was basically a bunch of computers hooked together to make one larger machine, with massive amounts of disk. One of the machines in this cluster served as the master and told all the others what to do.

Bad hardware was on one of the subordinate nodes, so the standard procedure was to issue a shutdown command from the master to the subordinate node in question, have the vendor pull the hardware and replace, and then start it back up. Minimal fuss and no operational down time.

Unless you aren't paying attention and shut down the master instead. This halts the entire cluster. All 50 nodes. A full restart of that system was a 2 hour ordeal. At 11 million dollars and hour of lost run time (this cluster was running stock market analytics for a very large financial institution).

Yeah. I caused a 22 million dollar outage because I typed the shutdown command in the wrong window on my machine. The kicker? I didn't get fired. Somehow, I got away with a formal reprimand and I had to write a utility for that system that forced you to confirm a shutdown command before it would actually shut down.

Nothing I've done since has ever seemed as bad or catastrophic, even the time we had a physical fire in our datacenter melt our entire production environment and we were down for a week (different job).

So, next time you really mess the bed up badly, always remember, it wasn't 11 million an hour bad.

 

[Conan]

I got married!
It's true! It was the biggest regret of my life. Not because it was terrible, but because I've never believed in marriage as a legal institution. He did, so I said yes.
I knew immediately that it was not right and I hated that it was now a legal situation. I thought, well, maybe it's just a phase. It wasn't.
Two years passed and I pulled back emotionally and physically over that span. It was my fault and I didn't know how to bring it up. How do you break the heart of the nicest guy in the world? I managed. It went as well as it could have, but I felt rotten. I felt like I had taken years of his life from him that I couldn't give back.
Easiest divorce in the world, but I truly regret hurting someone like that. The other lesson I learned is to never stay with someone that loves you more than you love them. It's just not fair.

 

[oldrooster]

other than being born, listening to my no account family. I am being kind calling them that, this is a family site after all......

 

[Jase The Butcher]

I got married!
It's true! It was the biggest regret of my life. Not because it was terrible, but because I've never believed in marriage as a legal institution. He did, so I said yes.
I knew immediately that it was not right and I hated that it was now a legal situation. I thought, well, maybe it's just a phase. It wasn't.
Two years passed and I pulled back emotionally and physically over that span. It was my fault and I didn't know how to bring it up. How do you break the heart of the nicest guy in the world? I managed. It went as well as it could have, but I felt rotten. I felt like I had taken years of his life from him that I couldn't give back.
Easiest divorce in the world, but I truly regret hurting someone like that. The other lesson I learned is to never stay with someone that loves you more than you love them. It's just not fair.

I was reading through this thread...I am very curious...why do you call him the nicest guy in the world if you were pressing to dump him off...

 

[Conan]

I was reading through this thread...I am very curious...why do you call him the nicest guy in the world if you were pressing to dump him off...

Being nice isn't a mutually exclusive quality. One can be nice... and lazy. Nice and lack any ambition. Nice and have no backbone. There's a limitless number of ands here. I'm not suggesting these these terms apply to my situation, but every person is different. What every person wants from life is different and that includes what they want in a partner. For me, "nice" wasn't enough.