This might not be a "I did something stoopid" situation but I think it fits in this thread...

Over the summer, I worked at my high school with the computer deparptment. Re-imaging, cleaning out dust (some cases hadn't been opened in 5+ years), fixing, stuff like that. Windows simply refused to install on one computer, so long story short I got a new desktop/server. Core 2 Duo, 3GB RAM. Came with a 350GB SATA HDD, my dad got two 250GBs from his work's IT guys. Linux plays very nicely with it. The only problem is that the graphics card fan is broken, so it's just running fanless (there's no mobo graphics).

As I'm writing my research paper this evening/night/morning, I naturally have a terminal open and am procrastinating. I took a look at 'sensors' and actually looked past the first 3 lines and found this:
It still works perfectly fine, but it's gonna burn out one of these days. Fortunately I don't do games on it. Now that I think about it, the overheating GPU might have caused the Windows installation failures... If I'm right, the fan's been broken for less than a year. The teachers usually leave the computers on 24/7, so I'm reasonably sure that it can stand the 24/7 power that I'm doing now. It seems to have survived the past few months OK...

Anyway, it's late and I've got another 2 pages of research paper to write. So my practical side tells me to close Iceweasel and get back to LibreOffice. Maybe I should set up a cron for root that runs 'pkill iceweasel' every minute...

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That's the moral of my story: do not assume anything no matter what skills the person supposedly have. Honestly, the dude being a supposed admin, I figured I'd get a "I dont think so," and we'd share a laugh. I never would have expected it to go the way it did (although in retrospect, the dude projecting system sensitive tasks onto a large meeting room screen should have been a clue).

I was trying to clean out some superfluous .part files on my backup drive when I ran,
Except that /media/backup/ is actually one of my active working data drives and full of needed .part files!

Fortunately, I did have a backup of most of the files I lost!

multiple times forgot i was sshed into a remote machine and rebooted or powered off the remote machine instead of the local machine, fortunately it was my own machine i powered off instead of a production unit of some sort.

LOL, I recently did the same thing in reverse. I intended to reboot a remote machine, but was accidentally on a terminal that was on the local machine. I typed "reboot" and hit enter, expecting to get the typical "Connection to server closed" or whatever it normally prints, and instead my entire monitor went black and started the reboot process. That was fun.

My solution to avoiding that is to set my power button to shut down my local machine. So there is little need to do so from the command line! :P
Of course, this only works once Xorg is running.

Encrypted a whole bunch of important sensitive emails with PGP...

Did not know that one has to save the keys, not just know the passphrase....

Backed up the files, sometime later ended up reinstalling/upgrading the OS, reinstalled PGP...

Well, the data is still very, very secure.

I valued my idiots moments as a learning experience. Makes me more focus the next time I repeat the task at hand.

done that too

I had a 4GB external drive and it developed an error, and the message was that, it was NTFS, it needed to be connected to a Windows installation for repair. I was (was) dual booting with Windows 7, so I set it to the repair program. It would take a couple of hours, so I left it running to go do something else. I came back to a display manager asking for login. Windows had, while the drive was bring repaired, downloaded an update, and, since I wasn't there to tell it no, why, the little bastard of an OS rebooted itself, with no regard for a running task, and I had to reformat the drive to EXT4, losing a lot of data (most of which I've been able to redownload).

One of the several hundred things I love about Linux is that you decide when to reboot, and, if a task is running during an update, it is stopped, updated, and then started again. Two things (among many, many others) about Windows that made me (after certain Windows-only games became available in native versions on Steam) deleted the Windows partition and got all that storage.

amen, imagine it doing that to an ATM machine customer while the machine is processing a transaction. oops we debited your account but we'renot to dispense the cash because windows needs to update itself.

The scary part being that Windows is often the system of choice for ATM's! :P

I've had an ATM blue screen on me. Luckily it was during a balance inquiry and not a withdrawal. It wasn't that long ago, and it was still running XP.