Seeing the physical effect of my impulsive act on my dad, who didn't shout or punish me, was embarrassing and distressing. It was an excellent but costly lesson for me in unintended consequences. I had just thrown out three months worth of work.
It had taken three months of carefully fine tuning the analog thermostat to bring the bath to exactly the right temperature for an experiment. Then he asked, "When did we start?" I dug through until I found the first entry. He asked, "When was the last adjustment?" I checked and say that it had happened the day before. When he finally could reply, he pulled down the clipboard next to the knob, handed it to me, and gently said, "Here is a record of every adjustment we've made with this thermostat, up and down, to dial in the temperature of this bath within a tenth of a degree." There were several pages of signed, dated entries. His mouth repeatedly opened and closed as he attempted to speak. My dad said, "Don't touch anything without asking." Playfully, I ran over to a big heated "bath" (liquid research vessel), grabbed the knob on the front, gave it a good twirl, and said, "What does this do?" I looked over at my gentle father who stood staring, gritting his teeth, and trembling from the effort required to contain himself. There were knobs and dials EVERYWHERE and I was entranced. When I was eight my dad took me to work with him at his lab. My need to touch buttons goes back a long way. In fact, one of my consoles had 5000 controls on the front panel that I got to tweak. I listen, tweak knobs, and watch displays.
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