What’s your vote for the longest failed shortcut?

What’s a long failed shortcut? When you try something to save time and do the opposite squared.

Start with a couple of my own as I’m the one who brought it up and I’ve a good few. Perhaps reading your posts will save me a few more.

Biggest needless waste of time ever for me was when I decided I was going to reinstall Windows without reinstalling the Linux partition.
There are and were warnings which were and I’m sure are ignored, but its true and I know due to having tried every other option imagineable and perusing every forum. Most of two days I think. Was a good while ago.
I ended up reinstalling both OSs Windows first in a couple hours. There is no shortcut.

On the forums here a few days back a guy was asking about saving his Ubu due to an upgrade meltdown (fairly common really) spending days on it when it was screaming “reinstall me”. No shortcut to it.

And I’m wishing hard it hadn’t taken maybe 16 hours to accumulate a rough idea of how to get Descent 3 to run on Linux. Get the Linux copy. ‘Course thats so rare even a torrent couldn’t be found, but I have a Dual Jewels copy and figured the Loki installer should be able to do it…..16 or so hours later, I decided to just keep an eye out for the Linux copy. So much for the shortcut.
On the up side I did find a site that made a port for the Windows copy of Descent 2 (easily found). So modified mining robots will die soon.

In each case, they coulda been over and done in a couple hours until a “shortcut” was devised.

What “shortcuts” have you tried that are better off avoided?

i think most work-related f*ck-ups fall into that category one way or another.
if only i had read the man page for dd, i wouldn't have bricked my system etc...
or, in other words: we learn from mistakes.
or, as my stepmother used to say: "Was man nicht im Kopf hat, hat man in den Beinen."

Being a penny pincher. I sometimes shoot myself in the foot with hardware purchases.

http://www.short-circuit.com/images/...dmi-vga-lg.jpg

No. That won't give you laptop to big screen TV video. Digital to analog requires more hardware in between the cable ends.

Once took a shortcut near Tail Of the Dragon in North Carolina on my motorcycle/chopper.
Come to find out. Road was a telephone pole service road over peaks of mountains and followed the ridge lines. Potholes, trailriding, loose gravel, cliffs, like a goat trail.

Multiple crashes and bruises later. I finished the shortcut to where I needed to be.
It took twice as much time and took a few days to work out the body kinks from my shortcut taken.
Plus money spent on parts for minor repairs. Resulting in a major paint job and refurbish by me when I got home to my shop.

I nicknamed that road. " The Dragons A%%Hole "

I'll go with rokytnji's second variation, which is what I thought this thread was about, travel shortcuts.

A guy I knew decided to go into a new construction site to go straight across as opposed to drive the whole 3 sides of a square. Makes 1/2 sense because both entrances were paved about 3 feet, they did the curbing and entrances, and then left dirt, but the work trucks would go in there to build the houses and utilities.

Well that road was not really "car capable", and he went down there on a night when the fog was settling in like in a movie plot. Meanwhile he was on a date, trying to impress.

So he called me from one of the neighboring houses and described the area which I sort of knew. Me and my brother went driving to go find him. We came upon the entrance to that construction site and far, far in the distance we saw the backend of a car, tilted about 30+ degree to the right with the tail sticking far up. Clear it went over a hump and smashed nose down in a hole. But we looked and all seemed dead to the world, we mulled it over and I said, "I don't think that looks like his car. ..." My brother said, "Well, if it IS him ..." Both of us smiling, "HE'S SCREWED!!!" So we laughed and continued driving, went to the other side of that site and saw nothing. Drove around some more. All before cell phones existed by the way.

Eventually we went back for another look, and that time we got out of the car and walked in a bit and lo and behold someone came peeking out of the bushes and called out to us. It was him.

Well, we gave him and his "date" a ride back to civilization and the next day he got somebody to tow him out of there.

His date for that evening eventually became my wife.

Let's just say his shortcut attempt failed miserably!

This isn't the biggest, but it's the most recent. I was working on a project in XCode using my iPhone as the phone I was pushing code to. When I notice I am running late for an appointment, I literally pull the cable out of the phone and out of the Mac, close the cover to it, shove everything into my bag, and run out the door. Forty-five minutes later I am leaving my appointment which is in a part of Kansas City with which I am unfamiliar. I pull out my phone to figure out how to get home and discover all those threads on a half built app that was left running have either completely crashed my phone or completely killed the battery.

Often it has been trying to modify an existing computer system rather than rebuilding it from scratch.

In general?

Choosing a Microsoft platform for its "support" when you could have gone with Linux

The Donner Pass.