When I was 10, I didn't know much about computers beyond what was needed to play Age of Empires and Descent. I lacked an understanding of the basic principles of the things, which led my first childhood custom-built to its unnecessary demise.

I had gone to a garage sale and found some HDDs for a few dollars each. I didn't need them. I couldn't even make up a reason why I needed them. I just fancied myself a computer person and thought it'd be cool to have different hard drives to use.

So I took them home and pulled my existing drive out. I knew enough to know which thing in there was the hard drive, at least. I popped in one of the drives I'd bought and powered on. It didn't boot. This surprised me, because I didn't know that the OS wasn't integral to the computer on the whole and that to remove the hard drive was to remove the OS from the rest of the computer.

I swapped in the other drives I'd bought, then put my own back in, but none of them would boot. If I could remember the symptoms, I would probably know what happened on that fateful day, but the memories have faded into the past with other such lost gems as the phone number of that one kid I used to play with, and why I liked Mummies Alive!

I somehow got it into my head that there was some problem with the motherboard jumpers. So I rearranged them. Not willy-nilly, mind, but methodically. One change, try to boot. Another change, try to boot. The problem was, of course, that the jumpers were fine and moving them around would never in a million years have accomplished anything.

At some point I realized I'd made a terrible mistake. I now had my jumpers all rearranged or disconnected and had no idea how they were supposed to go. Naturally, I didn't have a mobo schematic, nor did I know that was a thing. I sat around for a while longer, desperately reseating random connectors, before I gave up and …

… threw the computer away.

Yep, I threw away a perfectly good, custom-built computer because I had rearranged the mobo jumpers and didn't know how to put them back.

Yep.

Now you go.