This was posted many times before but I want to hear some more stories.

The mess up I had just 20 minutes ago gave me the idea to start a topic on hearing people's worst mess ups on vatsim. I had a bunch of great mess ups but this one probably tops all:

The one I had just tonight was on a simple 15 minute ride from upper to lower Connecticut in the Milviz C310. But it was night time and I forgot to pull up any charts on my arrival airport. When I got near the arrival airport I was then told to enter a left downwind for the runway but I didn't see it because you have 2 other airports of the same size right near it (now thinking, I could have just gone on the right runway heading) but I was so busy looking for something to tell me how to get to the approach that I found myself in a vfr flight in an overcast cloud. I started getting so far from the airport that I had to ask for ifr clearance to it (again, now thinking I could have gone to a lower altitude) and the confusion in the ifr flight doubled my whole flight time. He asked me if I wanted the rnav approach and for some terrible reason I said yes well knowing this aircraft was not very equipped for easy rnav navigation. Luckily he gave me intersections and I navigated with the respective VORs so that was not so bad, what was bad was I had to make a 180 to get to this intersection then turn about 300 degrees back to the left to get to the next one on the approach. I felt this could not possibly be true, that I could just join the approach from there and get normal heading vectors. But I did something to mess something up and spent a good 5 minutes before I finally got my bearings (haha) after juggling charts, bad turbulence, and a yoke that was about ready to fall off my desk. I finally made it down, apologized and disconnected before I got to my ramp because I missed my turn and was not going to go through the same thing but with taxiing.

But thankfully that very, very bad mess up did teach me a few things about being prepared and aeronautical decision making.

Thanks for reading. If you want, you can share your own vatsim mess up stories.

Next time just ask for an IFR Clearance and vectors to final for the visual if they aren't very busy. Nothing states you have to shoot an full IAP while on a IFR clearance. Truth be told most of the time flying GA aircraft and Part 135 operations ended with a visual approach instead of some navigational procedure.  Unless the overcast layer was real low.  But plenty of times I've gotten in visually in a 2000' overcast so long as they can provide safe vectors that low.

Glad you had a good learning experience though!

That sounds like the best way to learn what not to do (in a safe environment).  Intense.