Huh or Duh or Der, but not Aha. The Aha moment is reserved for that moment of discovery and understanding. The Der moment is when you realize you’ve done something quite silly!
My recent one was during my final weekend with my book files, the weekend of July 4th. Friday was the Independence Day holiday, so I hung out with my husband while the kids were at day care, we saw Transformers, and then I spent about four hours with my book. I took my son to swimming lessons, where they have wifi (this is Austin, baby!) and continued final proofing and so on, getting it ready to send to the designer for his final touch.
When we got back from swimming lessons, I uploaded the zip file so the designer could get to it. Saturday morning, I had a mild heart attack when I thought I had lost all my changes I worked on Friday, when the zip file was returned from the designer with none of my text changes or two index additions. Yikes! I had to wake my system admin husband up and everything. 🙂 He found the files – my searches came up with nada, nothing.
Come to find out, I had stupidly been working in a “Downloads” folder instead of in my usual work area, after downloading the file from the designer in a previous handoff. And neither Microsoft’s Desktop search nor Google’s Desktop search was configured to find files in the Downloads folder, because it was marked “hidden,” isn’t that annoying? (Here’s more info from Google on how to fix that problem.) But my hero husband came to the rescue, whew.
What’s your biggest “der” moment lately? On Twitter, @dmnguys say “Too many of those moments to list…” 🙂 How about you?