I feel the need to anonymously confess something egregiously stupid I have just discovered that I have done Perhaps if you post on this thread, you will feel shriven and amuse the more sensible members to boot. Well. There was this mysterious ticking in the kitchen. It was in the region of the induction hob. Mr Google reckons they do that and recommends things to do to solve the problem. ( I believe they're called hacks in some quarters). They mostly involved switching the cooker off and on again - there's a surprise. Well nothing worked and I was eventually going to get around to contacting the manufacturer before the warranty expired. Well, today I decided to tidy behind the air fryer. What should be magnetically attatched to the fridge? A digital timer ticking away its life by the second. I sort of miss the tick.
Oh, if I had a tenner for every situation I have found myself in where I've ended up feeling like an eejit, I'd be a fairly well off eejit.... My most recent one was also kitchen related... so a year or so ago, our microwave kept dying because it was blowing the internal fuse, so much so I became a dab-hand at getting the covers off it and replacing the fuse. I am not a stranger to things electrical/electronic, and did some trouble shooting with my trusty meter and could never pin down what the issue was. In the end, it died and I decided to not even bother unplugging it and lifting it down off the wall brackets (it is a heavy old beast) so I chose to flick the main breaker off and simply change the fuse from a set of steps, saving me the lifting... no dice this time, it refused to come back to life, so I bought a new one and sent it to the scrapyard. Some months later, our air fryer, which sits on the surface below the microwave and is plugged into the other side of the same double socket, cut out mid-use. I unplugged it, had a look around it, plugged it back in and it was working again. Over the ensuing weeks, it did this a few times and on the final occasion, I turned it around and saw that the casing looked a bit blistered as though it had been overly hot. I had a proper rant at the other folks in the house, blaming them for using the air fryer with stuff sat on top of it and suffocating it... and then ditched it on safety grounds and bought a brand new one. All good.. we had a safe, working air fryer again. Two weeks later, we were in the kitchen cooking - I had the air fryer going and I was cooking something on the hob with Mrs C stood next to me chatting away.. then all of a sudden, the air fryer just stopped. We looked at each other with those faces that only say "WTF?"... I unplugged the air fryer, plugged it back in and off it went just fine. I decided at that point that I was going to replace the socket on the wall, and did so a couple of days later. Since then, many months on now, neither the microwave or the air fryer have given any trouble at all. Hundreds of pounds of appliances binned and in effect it was probably only a duff £12 wall socket.
I've told this before but for Calvin's credit, I'll tell it again I had a laptop trade up at work, that dreaded event that throws everything into a fan for weeks and weeks. Now, we were lucky to have the best ever IT support on site, he was so good that it became a saying "oh don't worry, I have Calvin on my speed dial" After the first days of Calving sorting out the various things that inevitably go wrong, both in person and remotely on my home working days, I noticed my camera doesn't turn on. I'm somewhat competent with computers to the level that I can first google things before allowing the full blown panic to set in (ok, I admit that running around, pulling hair and shouting "I'm doomed! It's all gone!" etc is quite fun ) So I checked all Teams and computer settings, switched it on and off between every trial, got savvy about drivers and even fancier terminology... Nothing worked. So Calvin it was, this time remotely. I (just a tad proudly) explained what I had already tried. Calvin asked me to raise my arm and see if I can touch the top of the laptop lid. Yes, I can do that. Then he calmly asked me to move the hand touching the lid to the left. That opened the mechanical camera lens cover.
Not an example of my own stupidity, it would be hard to narrow an example down sometimes, but something that made me smile. My mum's elderly friend needed some lino put down in their bathroom and I was volunteered for the job. When I got there her neighbour had heard about it and wanted to do it instead. I don't know the chap well but he is one of those people who have to be the smartest person in the room and just doesn't listen to others. It was no skin off my nose to let him takeover. Long story short he was fathing about with templates, around the toilet, sink etc when I just added that as the old lino fitted perfectly why didn't he just use that as a template. I left and then got a phone call later from my mother who had been round to see how it looked. He had used the old as a template but had put the tops back to back, rather than right way up stacked, and created a perfect mirror image of what he needed. He had still tried to bodge it and had misaligned pieces that randomly covered the holes. I then had to get a new piece and redo the whole thing.
My current work laptop has that lens cover that slides across, just where you hold the top edge of the screen to open/close it. I've accidentally moved it more times than I care to admit to, so now that it's the first thing I check if my camera "isn't working".
OK, here's a very recent one, and with gardening theme too so I should get double empathy points. Reading through the lovely Chiltern's seed catalogue I had wonderful time planning my raised veg bed next to the patio, dedicated for everyday use veg and ornamental curios. I spotted a Cicer arietinum, which promised to be an attractive plant in itself, and producing fresh Chickpeas all summer long. I'm sold! So I ordered some seeds. On receiving the shipment I was a tad surprised on how big the Cicer arietinum seeds were, took a peek and realised I had just paid £2.95 for five chickpeas. Surprisingly enough, chickpea plant seeds are in fact, chickpeas, commonly sold in supermarkets in 500g bags for about a £1.
@Selleri just curious, do you grow mangelwurzel to eat or as a livestock feed? Our allotment neighbour grows it for her animals but I didn't think it was particularly tasty.
Another one, this time about me. We have a huge climbing hydrangea on the front of our house and occasionally it grows a little to high and needs a trim. I hate trimming it because the ladder is kept in the garage and has lots of stuff in front of it, so it's a pain to get out. Anyway I'm up there pruning, lobbing the pieces down onto the drive, thinking what a nice job I've done. I put the ladder away and then discover the secateurs are missing. I look everywhere and can't find them only for me to remember that I put them in the gutter on the roof line when pulling bits of hydrangea out. I go back to the garage, once again dig the ladder out and proceed to check the gutter, only to find no sign of them. I put the ladder back puzzled as to where the secateurs could be and clean up the pile of clippings, finding the secateurs at the bottom of the pile.
@Thevictorian , Mangelwurzel is in category "that looks fun, I want to try it". No more specific plans than that
