Avie Poll: What Was Your Funniest Mistake in SL? – Glossom Resident Reporting…

“”Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes”,

-Oscar Wilde

Although Second Life is a place for socialization, experiences and new beginnings, it is also a place for mistakes. The description of mistake is very clear: errors in action. Everyday thousands of people login to SL, and when doing so they are prone to error.  The human propensity to blunder combined with an atmosphere where certain permissions or certain platform tools make it hard not to make a mess, result in embarrassing and funny stories that make Second Life a place to laugh.

Either newbies or the most experienced SL users no one is expected to be mistake-free. Remember those moments when that very intimate message was sent to a group chat; or when you muted a friend and kept talking to the walls; or even when you abandoned your land by mistake; or destroyed your rented house when dropping a texture on the floor thinking it was a furniture piece…Sentences like “Ooops”, “Oh no”, “Wrong window”, “what did I do?” are common.

The stories are endless but we wanted to share some of them with the SLE readers. Therefore, we asked some residents on the SL forum and inworld to tell us about their funniest mistakes in Second life. We would like to thank each and everyone for participating.

Gollum Arabello: In the beginning of my SL I was desperately trying to get lindens and I didn’t know how to. A friend helped  me to search for places where there were contests going on with money prizes so I arrived at this club, it was packed up but the prize was very high  so  I thought I would stand a chance. It was a pretty great place and everybody was having fun. I joined the contest and everything was great until the vote opened when out of the blue the contest board disappears. I got a weird feeling that I had messed up but wasn't quite sure of it. The same fun people got suddenly all mad and complaining with the host and manager, everybody asking where is the board? Everybody was confused but I started to panic when I realized that I had moved the board high in the sky (now I know that the manager must have set it movable for everyone, but at that time I didn’t realize). The worst part was to admit to the club owner that I had messed up big time. I got the courage to do it and very soon peace was restored and the contest went on. Apologies were exchanged and everybody got happy again. As to me I still laugh when I remember that episode but every time I hit a contest board I am very careful just in case it won't happen again.

Phil Deakins: In my very early business life in SL, I rented out skyboxes and I wrote a system whereby tenants could change the décor from menus. The skyboxes I made and rented had two low walls and, in the décor system, I included the ability to remove each wall. The walls didn't actually get removed. They were made totally transparent and phantom. One day I got an IM from a tenant, saying that he'd just fallen through skybox floor and ended up on the ground. I checked the décor system and found that, for some unknown reason, I'd included a button to make the floor phantom. I still laugh when I think of the tenants playing with the décor system and thinking, "I wonder what this button does". The other thing that still makes me laugh when I remember it was also when I rented out skyboxes. I'd rented one out to a guy and, a minute later, I needed to fly up to another skybox above that one. For speed, I put on my carbon rod, which moves to so quickly that you can actually go through a thin solid wall before the wall has a chance to stop you. So I flew up and I inadvertently came up under the skybox I'd just rented out a minute earlier. In fact, I wasn't wholly under it. I only came to a stop when my head and shoulders were up through the floor - in the bedroom - at the foot of the bed, and facing it. In the space of the minute since I'd rented the skybox out, the new tenant was on the bed and giving his girlfriend a good seeing to - both stark naked. Fortunately, they only had eyes for each other, and they never saw me before I hurriedly got out of there. What makes me laugh, though, is imagining being on the bed, in action with my girlfriend, and seeing a strange head and shoulders come up through the floor and look at us.

Aislin Ceawlin: Something similar to Phil's second story happened to me. I was fairly new to SL, and still learning how to use everything. I was playing with the local map, putting my cursor over the dots and looking at the Avie names when I accidentally "clicked" and found myself standing in the bedroom of a couple who were, well, busy! I was absolutely mortified! I made my apologies and teleported out of there as quickly as possible! Thank goodness they were understanding, laughed, and actually ended up becoming good friends! We still joke about how we have met.

Studio09: My first mistake was when I was teleported to a starting sim when I first got my account.  I followed directions to step off the TP point so I wouldn't block others but since I really didn't know how to walk very well I ended up blocked by a tree.  I couldn't figure out how to move around the tree so ended up clicking on the home button which took me to a nice lodge. I eventually found my way to another beginner location and read up on how to walk, fly and touch things. Another incident involved my sister, who I had talked into trying SL.  I had shown her some of the free shops where she had gotten a pair of shoes that made a clip-clop sound when she walked.  Problem was they continued to clip-clop even when she was standing still.  It was so irritating she removed them but decided to go shoe shopping.  She somehow ended up in a dance club and sent me the TP. We had fun there for a while, until we tried to stop dancing and couldn't figure out how.  We had clicked on the floor to start dancing but when we tried to walk out we just kept dancing.  I tried to stop the animation but no luck.  We finally dance-walked our way out the door hoping we could stop once we were outside.  We probably looked really weird but out in the plaza we were still dancing.  Finally we gave up on shoe shopping and just teleported back to my house where the stop animation worked.

Anonymous builder: I once shared a garage with two friends where we were building cars together. To make things easier, we all gave edit permission to each other. This usually worked pretty well until one day I was alone and I saw a half-finished car in our building place so I worked on it for a while, copied prims, etc. What I didn’t know back then (we were all not highly experienced builders at the time, just very ambitioned ones), some of the prims I copied had scripts inside that weren’t set full perm, so by copying it I ruined the whole objects permissions; and by mixing my objects with the ones my partner had built. But while building I didn’t notice anything, only when initial creator was on later and tried to link the car (and failed because not all objects were his) we noticed that all day’s work was for nothing and everything had to be redone. Well, it was a valid training session after all! Oh and another thing we all had a talent for was to copy size numbers in the coordinate boxes of the building window… which had the funny result that under water at our sim close to the 0-0-0 coordinates there was quite the collection of car doors or steering wheels that we had to fetch on a regular basis.

Remember that, as you read this article, hundreds of people are searching for the viewer’s undo button or saying “Oooops, what did I do?”.

 Do share your funniest mistake(s) with us by posting a comment on this article.

Glossom Resident