I turned down a job.

It was 2003. I had been working as a programmer in legacy language on an ancient AS/400 system for a year and a half. I had interviewed with another company, working in VB6 which wasn't great but at least it had some growth. But the pay was only slightly above what I was already making, and I wasn't keen on VB6 when the web was taking off. I thought I could do better. Fast forward to the bust of 2004, and I'm being laid off from that legacy programming job.

I spend a year applying to every development job I can find, but it's difficult with a glut of programmers all looking for work. I finally take a tech support job just to get by as I continue looking for a dev job. Little did I know that dev job would never come. I bounced from a few different jobs after that, most being some form of tech support and usually ending in layoffs. I spent 16 years trying to get another dev job before I finally gave up and left IT work altogether. I had to eventually face the fact that my development career died in 2004, all because I turned down a job.