Well today, it was a stupid capacitor! I can't believe one capacitor marked "241" which is clearly 240pF turned out to be 1nF....stupid stupid manufacturer....wasted 9 hours of my life debugging the circuit...

 

Instead of complaining about wasting 9 hours focus on what you learned. If you let that kind of thing bother you so much electronics may not be for you. There is so much to learn in electronics and I think you might have learned that component values might be important and there are many things that can go wrong. And you might have learned that capacitors (and other components) are stupid. They can't talk and tell you what is wrong. You have to in a reasoned educated way design, construct, test, troubleshoot etc because you are not stupid like that capacitor. But that capacitor does what it does because of what it is and was designed to do, not because of what someone labeled it or thought it was. Keep plugging!

 

A lesson I have learned then it comes to electronics. Never think or assume. Be 100% sure. a lesson learned the hard way. You was thinking the cap was 240pF. But you did not know for sure. Hence your problems

 

Well I wasn't going to freaking measure 20 capacitors or so that I have on my circuit...I mean you buy these things thinking what it says on the label should be correct lol...you don't just buy 240pF capacitors and get 1nF's. That's just stupid. How would I know that without measuring every single passive component on my circuit...

 

As they say, stuff happens. Every day some of us have to cope with worse, from something like having a wallet stolen, to minor injuries or illnesses to ourselves or those we care for, through to a car smash, losing a job, a home, or even the really hard stuff like dealing with serious illness, bereavement, or learning of our own imminent demise.

If the worst thing that hits you in a day is an incorrect value capacitor, it's not so bad as all that, and certainly not worth getting worked up about.

 

Every electronics manufacturing company has an incoming inspection department. They all strive to do more then just "kind and count" (check the part number is correct and we got all we ordered). It is unusual to check every single device, but a random sample of a few percent of the parts will be pulled and tested.

 

Maybe the manufacturer is using a base numbering system other than base10. It looks fine if its a base21.383029 number system. Perhaps they are made in another galaxy far far away ...