I have a lot of choice words to accurately describe myself, some of which I made up on the fly. Alas, none of these words in any combination can be used appropriately on a public forum such as this one.
For reasons I am still yet to fathom out, I plugged the red lead into the black jack and the black lead into the red jack on my multimeter. Not much harm can come to the multimeter this way, but in my case I was testing the polarity of a jack plug and I thought it was correct.
I now have a £300 personal bill for a new Intel motherboard, i3 CPU (3rd Gen), 8GB memory, 64GB mSATA SSD, 128GB SSD and DVD writer.
I just can't understand why I plugged them in the wrong way, we all make mistakes sure, but WTF! I have never done this before, why should I start doing it now? I am familiar with the particular meter I was using, I've had it for 20 years. Despite the age of the meter, the terminals are still clearly marked and colour coded.
I was not under the influence of anything other than my own naturally occurring stupidity.
Making mistakes is acceptable as a process of learning and it can even be fun at times.
However, I learned how to wire up a multimeter when I was six years old, how on this earth did I manage to stuff this basic procedure up? It's simple, red to red and black to black, as far as I can remember, assuming I still have a brain between my ears, it has been that way. Two year olds have grasped this basic colour co-ordination concept.
I just wish I had the ability to effectively kick my own arse.
Anyway, I guess what I'm trying to say is, don't do it ever! It's not worth it. Most digital multimeters can cope with it by displaying a - sign, but when you need to perform polarity checks you can end up in a bad way.