Stupid and costly things you've done

[Helanna]

. . . well, I feel a helluva lot better about the $11 I spent on a ticket to a movie tonight that I then decided not to see (I realized driving in an unfamiliar part of the city in the dark was a TERRIBLE idea.)

I feel slightly worse in that it was my last chance to go to an event in the Deaf community, which I needed to do for my sign language class. I've emailed the teacher, I'm hoping she'll extend the deadline a couple of days so I can go to a play, but since I've had nearly 8 weeks to choose an event, my hopes aren't high. So I might end up joining those who failed a course. Which I've done plenty of in my first two years at college, so I guess I'm already a member of that little group.

[Serpentine]

Oh, I thought of a silly one. Back in high school, I had a birthday party. As you do. For whatever reason we started looking up terribly naughty sites on the interwebs. Most of us got bored and wandered off but a couple of guys kept looking at dirtier and dirtier sites.
Fast-forward a few weeks. Phone bill arrives. It's several hundred dollars higher than it should be.
Guess what the extra charges were for.

[Karoht]

Building a failed Webcomic and art studio.
No wait, hear me out.

Okay, so I was friends with an artist, I knew she wanted to do a webcomic, she liked my stories, she liked my character designs, she seemed to like my initial comic page ideas. So I decided to go for it.

I spent two years of my life writing 3000 pages of comic material, storyboarding, everything. Sent her draft after draft, all of which was getting the thumbs up. She sent me some character designs and some draft pages, admittedly, very awesome.

So everything was looking good to go. I was just about to buy webspace and get this thing launched.
I made a bad deal with another website. Actually, it wasn't bad, it just really wasn't great. But it was taking off a boatload of costs on my end.

Well, my artist friend didn't like it. Mostly for semantical reasons and some aesthetic reasons, which I understood at the time. The deal was only for a year, and we figured we would just work through that year, use the time to promote ourselves and find a better home.

During that time I learned a few things about art and friendships and business.
First off, was deadlines. We now had deadlines. And that's about the time she comes clean with me that the pages she had already done had taken her about 4 times as long to complete than she initially told me. Well, we worked though that, kind of. We scaled back, we involved some other friends to help out with some of the basic stuff, and we were rolling forward pretty good, but neither of us was happy with the finished product as a result. Somehow this was my fault though. /shrug

So my artist attatched her name to basically all of the creative content. When the year was up, and I started shopping around for a better place for us to put our work, and started promoting it, she drops the bombshell on me that she doesn't want to continue. And she claims copyright of pretty much everything. Meaning that I couldn't just hand it off to another artist without her say so, and she refused to give me the say so.

So we dropped it, didn't really talk to each other much over the next few years. We salvaged the frienship, pretty much by never bringing it up again. She lied about her interest in the project and the pace at which she could comfortably produce at which lead to problems and stress for both of us that ultimately tore it all apart. But, I screwed up by finding us a bad home which made her more resentful of the whole thing and placed demands and deadlines and commitments on everything where before it was casual and no pressure. I also had very little idea of what I was doing and was learning as I went along, and while I learned quickly, this just caused more resentment for both of us.

I let the project die after the split. Which was hard. It was the first major effort of writing I had ever completed, and I had to just let it die. I still can't show it to an editor or anything without her consent, and I just don't want to bother asking her anymore. It's an ugly part of both of our pasts and we moved past it, it's no longer worth it to me to bring it up or try to resurrect the project, I can't even look at my own copies of our old material without a feeling of disgust.

I lost a few thousand bucks in the process. I lost control of my content (which I'm sure plenty of writers go through), I lost any enjoyment I got out of working on it or any desire to pick it back up again. I almost lost my oldest friend (seriously, since we were 4 years old), it put loads of stress on the relationship with my fiance, and I'm sure there were other impacts that I'm forgetting.

Hell. I feel 10 years older just remembering all this junk.

[Abies]

Telling my best friend I loved her.

That is all.

[MageOfCakes]

Telling my best friend I loved her.

That is all.

Ouch >_<

As for me, when I was 19 I thought it would be a wonderful idea to walk to the store in a strange neighborhood while completely intoxicated. I got to sleep in my own privet jail cell that night and eat wonderful prison food the next day. The truly fun part though was paying over $500 in fines. Ah, good times, good times...

[Anarion]

This is actually a very uplifting thread, in a misery loves company kind of way.

My worst one is shaping up to be changing my major from physics to history. At the time, I thought it wouldn't matter, but now it's possible that I might want to take the patent bar (a special test for being able to write patents) and I might have to do an extra two years of schooling to qualify for it that wouldn't be required if I had kept my major. I'm not sure yet, but if I go for it, that's two years of tuition wherever I end up, plus two years not working and finding an apartment, etc.

@Abies: I'm sorry. I kinda ruined a friendship that way too, though it didn't get as far as yours sounds like it did. It sucks.

[noparlpf]

Not a huge cost, but today I forgot how much money was in my debit account and accidentally had an overdraft for the first time, and they charged $12.50 for it.

[thorgrim29]

I've bought a lot of things on impulse that I never used, re-did 2 courses I had gotten terrible grades in in order to qualify for my MBA (so roughly 600 bucks), and more recently I took a 2 month vacation, basically just being a slacker, before starting to look for a job, and now it's mid-november and most of my friends have jobs while for me the job market is pretty small. I've also picked up on clues from girls way after the fact and too late to do anything about it. Other then that.... back when I LARPed, a friends and me built ourselves a smallish cabin in the woods where we played, ended up spending a few hundred dollars and dozens of hours on it, only to stop attending the place 4 months later. Kind of a waste of time and money but we had a lot of fun doing it so what the hell.

[Sturmcrow]

No... he gave a syllabus thing at the beginning. It was 100% my fault.

I'm just going to let it go. It's just money, and I agree that deadlines are deadlines. I'm pissed it happened, but I don't think it was unfair.

Could you ask him to give you an incomplete instead of failing you. Explain that it was entirely your error for not staying current but because of your illness and work you were trying to focus on life priorities. Try to go for the sympathetic angle in that incompletes look less bad than Fs. I think.

[noparlpf]

Could you ask him to give you an incomplete instead of failing you. Explain that it was entirely your error for not staying current but because of your illness and work you were trying to focus on life priorities. Try to go for the sympathetic angle in that incompletes look less bad than Fs. I think.

An incomplete becomes an F if you don't then complete the missing work during the summer/winter. And some professors do not offer make-up exams without advance notice, or even with advance notice. So an incomplete may not be possible.

[Dallas-Dakota]

Went out tonight....

[ForzaFiori]

I'm not sure it really counts as stupid, but the most costly thing was buying a house (or rather, a flat).

What, exactly, is a flat? It seems to be some weird, British house that I only ever hear mentioned on the BBCA...

As for my stupid and costly mistakes:

I totaled 2 cars in one year, worth a combined $23,000 dollars. thankfully, my insurance paid me $24,000 for them, but I'll never have Geico insurance again. My mom also doesn't let me drive new cars any more...

I blew off pretty much all my homework and schoolwork for the first half of high school. Never failed anything, but did enough damage that despite my best efforts Junior and Senior year, my GPA was .04 below the cutoff for a scholarship that would have finished paying off my college for me. Cost me probably $20,000 total, assuming I only take 4 years in college.

[Jack Squat]

What, exactly, is a flat? It seems to be some weird, British house that I only ever hear mentioned on the BBCA...

It's just an apartment. Here in the US, it seems to be more the type that takes up an entire floor of a building rather than your standard divided floors.

[nedz]

Yes, an apartment on one floor; though that's not always true.

[LaughingGnoll]

Though its not on the monetary scale of other posts in this thread, everytime I forget my keys to my apartment (has only happened twice so far in less than a year) it ends up costing me 150 Euros (~190 Dollars) to pay a locksmith to open my apartment.

Looks like its back to two meals a day for the next month or two.

[noparlpf]

Though its not on the monetary scale of other posts in this thread, everytime I forget my keys to my apartment (has only happened twice so far in less than a year) it ends up costing me 150 Euros (~190 Dollars) to pay a locksmith to open my apartment.

Looks like its back to two meals a day for the next month or two.

My old school charged USD 50 if you accidentally locked yourself out and didn't have a roommate to let you back in. Luckily I left it until this year at a school that lets you in for free to lock myself out for the first time; although I and then my roommate were the first students at that school to ever break off a key in a lock. Luckily they didn't charge us for that...