I was watching a movie in the darkened living room the other day, and was annoyed by the brightness of the PC screen on the end table next to me. Normally, it switches to slideshow mode after a few minutes and shows photos from our digital phot archive. That's fine under normal room lighting, but when the lights are low, the screen is sorta bright and distracting. It occurred to me that i could write a simple program so that I could click an icon on the PC desktop and turn the screen to black. Moving the mouse or pressing a key would bring the screen back. As I pondered the best programming language to use to write the software and how it would be most intuitive if I made the desktop icon look like an on/off switch . . . I noticed . . . that there was already an on/off switch on the monitor that pretty much does exactly what I needed. There's one on your monitor, too, right there under the screen. Push it and the monitor goes dark. Push it again and it comes back on. Duh.
The point is, this is one of those moments when I embarrass myself with my own stupidity. But not nearly the worst. The dumbest thing I ever remember doing was when I bit myself in a french-fry feeding frenzy. You know how you can get into a rhythm while eating fries? Pick one up, chomp, chomp chomp . . . pick up another, chomp, chomp, chomp. Apparently, my hand and teeth got out of sync, or one of the fries was too short, because one of those those third chomps landed squarely on my finger. And it hurt. It hurt bad. Now, I can understand getting bit while feeding french fries to a dog or an emu. But I think biting yourself by accident while eating is one of those things that Mother Nature thought she had weeded out of the gene pool by now.
So, that was a humbling experience that I try to remember whenever I sense that I'm getting too big for my britches. Now it's your turn. Click the "Comments" link below and tell us about the dumbest thing you've ever done. Go ahead . . . it'll be cathartic. And we'll all enjoy it.
Monday, June 25, 2007
What's the dumbest thing YOU'VE ever done?
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One Minnesota winter, snowing and 40 below wind chill,in my little thin white nurse uniform, hurrying to lock the car so I wouldn.t become a giant icicle, I was pushing down the lock button on my little Chevette and shutting the door at the same time. Not too smart, as my head was still in the way.Blackened my eye and put a huge goose egg on my cheek bone and head. THAT really did hurt,AND MY PRIDE AS WELL!!!!
ReplyDeleteOur Dumbest Thing -- o.k., it isn't THE Dumbest Thing, & not nearly the ONLY Dumb Thing, it's just one of the more recent ones --was when we sent an e-mail to a friend & forgot that hitting the tab a couple of times would send the e-mail. All she got was:
ReplyDelete"Sarah -- "
So we sent another note. And did the same thing. This time, at least, we were partway through the note by the time we sent it off. But still. Twice in one sitting.
But NOT twice. Three times. Yep, we did it AGAIN. To the SAME PERSON. In THE SAME SITTING.
(O.k., there were no bodily injuries, but it was still kinda dumb, wasn't it?)