Here's another, not directly my stupid mistake but a reminder to stay across work and projects around you when part of a team under the same employer.
ON this day everyone was really busy with their current tasks at the bench. It was the 1990s and urgency was a Broadcast TV News Camera (shoulder job) that had finally had so many pixel failures on all its 3 sensors it produced pictures more akin the Milky Way. The firm decided they'd spring the almost $20,000 for a new optical block which consists of a bayonet lens mount, dichroic red, green and blue prism, filter wheel, timing PCB and 2/3" CCD sensors and amplifiers bonded to the prism such that the red and blue channel devices are half a pixel offset to the green, ( latter done to reduce aliasing in the video).
The part arrived in the country and that morning there was only one person in the team of techs who'd a spare moment to swap the block out.
OK, so he was the new guy who'd come to work with us recently. We all assumed he'd be familiar with the basics of a 3-sensor camera so. He was asked to just pull the old optical block and put the new one in.
About an hour passed when one of the other guys asked if the camera was done because the department that used it needed it by noon. New guy said nothing so a quick look see over a shoulder was made...
That's when a bit of fright set in.... there was a carefully denuded of its CCD sensors prism sitting in its shipping container and the same kind of thing in the camera!
It was impossible to remount the CCD sensors for registration and the half pixel offset without the special alignment jig used in the factory in Japan and to make sure there was zero dust. The best would be a 3 image red, green, blue noisy picture.
Normally it would have been unplug a few cables and unscrew a few front screws, pull the front casting and swap over!
So in short we had a $20,000 paperweight and a dead camera...
The firm must have done some excellent bean-counting to buy another spare but there was that long shipping delay that could not be sped up. CCDs for cameras could fail if sent by air and so had to travel by sea....
We learned a lot that day how important it was to communicate with a fellow worker and perhaps to have a chat about how to knock a repair off including the proper procedure and how to check their experience or ever done it before!