Mistakes you look back and kick yourself for

[Anubis]

stupidly passing on much of the tail that was sitting there, waiting for me, begging (srs), because I was far, far too shy in hike school.

this would be my only one for HS and College. not that i was particularity shy it just that i was totally oblivious

 

[OILFIELDTRASH]

Too many mistakes to list. All I can do is go forward and continue to make the right decisions. I feel like I've been getting it right and hope to be at a really good place in life in the near future.

 

[TridenT]

this would be my only one for HS and College. not that i was particularity shy it just that i was totally oblivious

Wow, lucky bastards.

I see people say this kind of thing a lot. Then I think back on school and how much I got shot down and shut down by everyone. If I ever talk to someone who went to my high school about me in high school, they all say that I had no prospects at all.

 

[BTA]

I have an opposite one.

I DON'T regret not banging this one girl in high school (at the time I was mad at myself).

Now she's a huge monster with 2 kids from some deadbeat, and a complete wackjob to boot....I coulda ended up in THAT situation.

 

[HAL9000]

I have an opposite one.

I DON'T regret not banging this one girl in high school (at the time I was mad at myself).

Now she's a huge monster with 2 kids from some deadbeat, and a complete wackjob to boot....I coulda ended up in THAT situation.

Double negative.

So you regret banging a girl in high school then?

 

[zinfamous]

Double negative.

So you regret banging a girl in high school then?

Do you regret any of the decisions that you made c. October, 2011?

:hmm:

 

[TridenT]

Do you regret any of the decisions that you made c. October, 2011?

:hmm:

October, 2011? Do you regret making that post?

 

[HAL9000]

Do you regret any of the decisions that you made c. October, 2011?

:hmm:

I don't regret anything. With one exception. That isn't it.

 

[JEDI]

I have an opposite one.

I DON'T regret not banging this one girl in high school (at the time I was mad at myself).

Now she's a huge monster with 2 kids from some deadbeat, and a complete wackjob to boot....I coulda ended up in THAT situation.

yup. been there done that a few times.

one girl that i KNEW was trouble even grabbed my nuts and said meet me in the mens bathroom in 5 min. i paid my bar tab and left. i dont want that kind of stress/drama in my life.

 

[Miramonti]

I don't believe in looking back on mistakes...particularly when one is too busy making new ones.

 

[BTA]

Double negative.

So you regret banging a girl in high school then?

It says exactly what I mean.

Whereas one might say "I regret not banging this chick"

I in fact, do not regret not doing such.

 

[HAL9000]

It says exactly what I mean.

Whereas one might say "I regret not banging this chick"

I in fact, do not regret not doing such.

So you're glad you didn't sleep with her?

 

[brianmanahan]

i regret getting my foot amputated becuase they said otehrwise i would die, which turned out to be false

 

[dennilfloss]

In 1984, when the examiners for my M. Sc. thesis offered me a Ph. D. if I added one section redoing the sedimentology of the strata in more detail, with a newer paradigm, I foolishly said "no, I'll take the master's and still do a Ph. D. next on rocks of a very different age and setting so I can be a better professor & researcher." Another reason was that I had studied the trace fossils in Newfoundland rocks where the sedimentology had been done by another Master's student at Memorial University of Newfoundland in 1978, just 6 years earlier, and I kinda had given my word to the Memorial people that I would not revisit his interpretation.

 

[shortylickens]

Not being more aggressive with women in junior and senior high. Wouldnt matter if I scored or not, or had a good or bad reputation. I have never seen ANYBODY from high school since I left.
And the confidence probably would have helped me over the years.

Also, working hard. It rarely pays off and I've missed out on a lot of fun over the years. And am still unemployed and no one wants to look at me. I've interviews for Micron and Lockheed and about 2 dozen fast food places. I'm either too good or not good enough.

Spending so much time doing low-energy activities like video games and role-playing. Wish I had gotten into track & field instead of baseball and soccer. Wish I had learned a good appreciation for jogging when I was young and stuck with it. Harder to get into good habits now.
Or at least I shoulda been like my dad and read books all the time. Still be unhealthy but I'd be a lot smarter. But video games were just all around bad. Time wasters and nothing more. I'm not any smarter for having played them, and those skills dont really translate into high paying jobs now.

Wish I had not bothered with electronics in high school. I shoulda gone straight for the money. A know quite a few guys in their mid 20's who are investment councilors and such, they make ridiculous money. I shoulda got a bank job in my teens and moved on to an investment firm or something. In fact I even had a clue that would be good. One day when I was young my parents negotiated some favors and took me in to see an investment councilor for free. He advised me to get into a mutual fund. Later my mom said a guy like that normally gets between 500 and 1000 dollars for that advice. That should have been a bell-ringer right there.
Always follow the money. Cuz damn near any job will make you miserable so you may as well get paid and have something to show for it. And people who work with money are usually a lot smarter about not pissing it away.
Of course no one had any idea all our good tech jobs would eventually ship overseas to Korea and India.

 

[SaDiZTiKStyLeZ]

Dropping out of school.
Spending many years smoking & on drugs.
Spending all of my time and money, on partying and playing WOW, instead of focusing on school & a career.

 

[MetalMat]

Not using condoms

 

[SirStev0]

Should have stayed away from Long Distance Relationships. Everyone has come back to bite me. Ruined a good chunk of Underground.

 

[SirStev0]

In 1984, when the examiners for my M. Sc. thesis offered me a Ph. D. if I added one section redoing the sedimentology of the strata in more detail, with a newer paradigm, I foolishly said "no, I'll take the master's and still do a Ph. D. next on rocks of a very different age and setting so I can be a better professor & researcher." Another reason was that I had studied the trace fossils in Newfoundland rocks where the sedimentology had been done by another Master's student at Memorial University of Newfoundland in 1978, just 6 years earlier, and I kinda had given my word to the Memorial people that I would not revisit his interpretation.

No other *ahem* events you regrets?

 

[tfinch2]

Sold stock options too soon.

 

[Kaido]

Not switching my family over to Macs sooner. Seriously.

LogMeIn + Time Machine + Snow Leopard = win for low-maintenance family computing :awe:

 

[Kaido]

When I was 19, 20, 21, 22 years old I worked a lot of overtime, and I mean a lot of overtime. Sometimes I did not get a day off for 4 - 6 weeks,,, sometimes 8 weeks at a time. The average work week was anywhere from 70 - 80 or more hours.

With working the 12 hour shifts, I let my wife manage our money - big mistake. For some reason we were always broke, and my wife (ex-wife now) did not want to talk about where the money was going.

A couple of years later, I found out my wife had been giving a good chunk of my check to her mother. The mother-in-law had run her family into serious credit card debt, say in the $25,000 range. So my wife being the good daughter (and naive) that she was, she was giving her mom anywhere from $200 - $400 every week to help her mom pay her bills.

I regret not taking responsibility for my pay check and the bills. I should never handed over control of the family money like that.

I think it's hard to regret past mistakes because you learn so much from them. Now that you've gotten financially screwed, you know very very very well to never, ever let that happen again in your life. Sometimes we have to touch a hot stove to learn the lesson and make it stick, you know? I've made plenty of mistakes in my life, but I wouldn't be the same person I am today if I hadn't.

I got into computers by a mistake. The company my dad worked for when I was a kid gave him a take-home engineering computer to do CAD stuff while off-site. I decided to be a good boy and "boost it up" for him and make it go faster by cleaning out some "unnecessary" files (who needs all these useless ICO and DLL files anyway??) and ending up making it unbootable (Win NT4 for the record - back in the mid to late 90's) . $700 repair bill - ouch (which back then was a LOT of money). I was pretty much grounded from ever touching a computer again, which fueled my desire to learn how they worked so that I could actually fix them properly. And now I am an IT admin. Wait a minute, I think I'm still being punished...:hmm:

 

[Fritzo]

I regret working 60+ hours a week at a dead end job in my 20's, basically wasting the best part of my life. I was too naive to know better jobs were out there, and it basically ruined my college grades, I had no social life, and I got nothing out of it. It's like I just existed for an entire decade but didn't live at all.

 

[TridenT]

No other *ahem* events you regrets?

:awe:

 

[Engineer]

Do share more? I am interested in this story...

Did what I thought was very good "due diligence" and bought into a stock. Kept buying into it, though it started falling. Knew I should have been dumping it and taking the "small" loss but the emotion kept saying to hang on...going to be rich.

Well, it kept falling and I kept buying, even into $20,000 margin. Thought that I could pay the margin off and get all the benefits of the big bounceback that it just "had to do".

It didn't and I fell into a terrifying cycle of margin calls...about every two to three days. Of course, instead of dumping then, I kept saying (in a panic) that I had to make it up...it's going to make it up....it didn't.

At one point, my account went negative (because of the margin). It took a bounce and I had to unload...left me with $0.25 in my account. Had to call the broker just to ask them to not charge me margin interest meaning that I would have owed them just to get rid of the stock.

The hardest thing that I ever had to do was to go home and explain to my wife that I had just lost $59,000+ dollars. Expecting the worst, she gave me her best. The only condition for forgiveness was to promise her no more....an easy promise to make considering what I had just done.

My yearly $3,000 write off reminds me of that sad moment of my life each and every year.....for 16 more.

And what makes it even more sad is that I "KNEW" that I should dump it.....just emotion took over and lost all sense of logic. I have shed tears several times over the pain of that loss and also to the relief that my wife was far more loving and understanding that I would have give her credit for. A very painful and a true mistake that I will never forget....

:'\:'(

I tell this painful story in hopes that it will somehow prevent someone from ever doing what I did and having the pain or the displeasure of telling your loved one that you lost so very much of what you both had worked so hard for.....