Narrative:

I blew it this morning. Literally and figuratively. Day 5; early show without coffee; broken up trip because of irop (irregular operations); was looking forward to last day of flying that would finally go as planned with an awesome first officer (first officer) and then going home. Got the paperwork ready; stowed my bags and started cockpit preflight and first flight of the day tests. For some totally unexplainable reason; I was rushing and not paying attention to what I was doing. I wanted to get the noisy tests done before the passengers started boarding. Did the stall test as I was doing the brake and gear bay overheat tests. In the back of my head; I wondered why the yoke pusher wasn't vibrating; but thought I'd come back to that. Before I knew what I was doing then; I had pushed the green button in front of me on the glare shield; which blew the bottle in the number 1 engine. Could not believe what I had done. No excuse for it. I armed the guarded fire push switch instead of the guarded stall test switch. Instead of realizing what I had done and correcting it; I then pushed the illuminated green switch to discharge the bottle. Talked with the mechanic and wrote up my mistake that they then had to fix. Luckily; they had another plane that they brought over pretty quickly from the hanger; the rampers reloaded; the fuelers refueled; the caterer re-catered. We were an hour late and everyone had to work twice as hard because of my totally avoidable; stupid mistake.slow down! There was no rush. Do the flow systematically in the normal order! Absolutely no reason to jump around with the preflight. If there's an inkling of something not being right; stop whatever else I'm doing and address that with full focus. Absolutely no excuse for what I did; but this has happened before apparently. The fire push and stall guarded switches are identical and close to one another. Some red sharpie around the fire push guard would certainly help it stand out as special. Again: not an excuse; just a suggestion

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Original NASA ASRS Text

Title: CRJ-900 Captain reported a rushed preflight resulted in the inadvertent discharge of an engine fire bottle.

Narrative: I blew it this morning. Literally and figuratively. Day 5; early show without coffee; broken up trip because of IROP (Irregular Operations); was looking forward to last day of flying that would finally go as planned with an awesome First Officer (FO) and then going home. Got the paperwork ready; stowed my bags and started cockpit preflight and first flight of the day tests. For some totally unexplainable reason; I was rushing and not paying attention to what I was doing. I wanted to get the noisy tests done before the passengers started boarding. Did the stall test as I was doing the brake and gear bay overheat tests. In the back of my head; I wondered why the yoke pusher wasn't vibrating; but thought I'd come back to that. Before I knew what I was doing then; I had pushed the green button in front of me on the glare shield; which blew the bottle in the Number 1 engine. Could not believe what I had done. No excuse for it. I armed the guarded fire push switch instead of the guarded stall test switch. Instead of realizing what I had done and correcting it; I then pushed the illuminated green switch to discharge the bottle. Talked with the mechanic and wrote up my mistake that they then had to fix. Luckily; they had another plane that they brought over pretty quickly from the hanger; the rampers reloaded; the fuelers refueled; the caterer re-catered. We were an hour late and everyone had to work twice as hard because of my totally avoidable; stupid mistake.Slow down! There was no rush. Do the flow systematically in the normal order! Absolutely no reason to jump around with the preflight. If there's an inkling of something not being right; stop whatever else I'm doing and address that with full focus. Absolutely no excuse for what I did; but this has happened before apparently. The fire push and stall guarded switches are identical and close to one another. Some red sharpie around the fire push guard would certainly help it stand out as special. Again: not an excuse; just a suggestion

Data retrieved from NASA's ASRS site and automatically converted to unabbreviated mixed upper/lowercase text. This report is for informational purposes with no guarantee of accuracy. See NASA's ASRS site for official report.