Your Worst WAF Incident


OK Gents, fess up –

What has been your worst transgression of the mysterious WAF code? I'll begin, throwing myself on the mercy of the court:

Three days ago was the Thanksgiving Holiday. My wife prepared a beautiful, traditional meal including fresh roasted turkey, stuffing, gravy, etc. It took hours and we could have fed an army. After the meal, the fridge was packed with delicious leftovers which we enjoy for days afterwards. It's our favorite holiday and we really stretch it out nicely.

On holidays, I like to listen to my music and of course, this entails temporarily converting the living room into a Man-cave and doing whatever I can for the best sound – you know, moving the speakers away from the wall, moving the comfy chair into the sweetspot, using pillows to diffuse and dampen reflections, etc.

So, about 24 hours after the feast, I went to the fridge to get the ingredients for my famous turkey sandwich... but something didn't smell good in there. That's right, can you say "Man-cave dismantling checklist?"

Someone forgot to turn the noisy fridge back on. My wife worked for hours preparing the meal and organizing the leftovers, and Mr. Audiophile here ruins days worth of great food and effort with the flip of a switch... or should I say, lack thereof.

I watched uncomfortably as she emptied the contents of a warm fridge into the trash. Ouch.

OK, is your violation of the WAF code as bad? Please share your worst transgression – don't leave me alone out here!
Ag insider logo xs@2xalonski
Liz, ... imagine a cold snowy night.... SUDDENLY, an axe crashes a small hole in your door... THEN, a crazed face peers through.. and say's ... "It's DONiiieeeeeee" HA!!
Alonski, this may not be as bad as yours or Davehrab's, but I'll contribute. One night my wife had a terrible headache and was nauseated and just all around felt like crap. After attending to her for a while and finally getting her settled in to bed, I wanted to relax and put on a record or two. Since my listening room is adjacent to the bedroom (although separated by a full bath), I decided to hook up my headphone amp to the preamp for some personal rocking out. I plugged the left and right outputs from the preamp into the headphone amp and cranked the left and right channel input levels as well as the master volume on the preamp to get a solid listening level. I queued up a record, sat down, and when the music started through the headphones suddenly I felt an enormous rumble in my chest and through the floor. It turns out that this moron forgot to unplug the secondary outputs on the preamp which feed into the subwoofer. It was by far the loudest that the sub has ever been pushed. Needless to say there was a total WAF failure at hand.
OMG, Jarobertson... you just stirred an embarrassing memory: I did exactly the same thing a few years ago! I must have blocked it out. My wife loves her sleep, especially during a certain, ahem, time of the... well, you know. When someone is already crabby from rogue hormone surges, it seems that being launched out of bed by a 95dB blast of rock and roll does not help the situation at all, despite the fact that my system produced that 95dB SPL without distortion or loss of musicality and PRAT. Go figure.
Wanting to place my CDP (tubed) and preamp (tubed) in the monstrous TV cabinet prompted me to perform some cabinet modifications for better air flow on the sly ...
While my wife was away for a few days I went into deconstruction mode:
1. I removed the glass which was in the door where the gear would be placed for front air flow. Glass vs. no glass = no big deal I was sure.
2. There were already large slots in the back of the cabinet but I enlarged them for better rear air flow – who’d notice, right?
3. Then I drilled four rows of a dozen holes each (1/2” bit), staggered, in the top of the cabinet, again for air flow. With the large front trim you could barely notice them so I painstakingly painted the inside walls of each hole with black paint and a Q-tip. Now they were virtually undetected to casual observers.
When she returned she asked about the missing glass but was unconcerned.
She never sticks her head inside the cabinet so did not notice the (somewhat sloppily) enlarged slots in the back.
I think it was about six months later when I heard a scream from the living room. “Argh! What the hell did you do!? Drilled holes in our cabinet!? You ****ing drilled ****ing holes in our ****ing three thousand dollar cabinet!? What the **** is wrong with you!?”
It took several days of explanation before she calmed down. I don’t think she forgave me, even to this day. I think she finally just wanted me to stop talking about audio and shut the hell up.