Mea Culpa

I mess up.  WAY more than I'm comfortable with.  I guess that's part of the human condition, but I would really like to be perfect and above reproach.  But alas, it's not to be, no matter how hard I try.

I actually have a physiological response when I realize I've made an error.  This morning at work I was doing too many things at once (yes, I could solve some of this by working on being present in the moment more often), and I sent out an email about a report without actually attaching the report.  As soon as one of the recipients responded asking for the attachment my face flushed, my heart rate increased, and my breathing became more shallow.  Not because forgetting an attachment is that big of a deal (although it is annoying), but because I'd messed up.  Again.

I strongly dislike making mistakes, it probably wouldn't be too hyperbolic to say that I hate making mistakes. When I mess up I start to question my intelligence and wonder if maybe I've overrated it.  I work pretty extensively with spreadsheets and I do a great deal of formula creation in those spreadsheets.  I know that it's really easy to put a decimal in the wrong place, or to copy and paste and forget to change the cell reference.  Since I know that, I would think that it would be easier to be aware of and catch those errors.  But I still manage to insert a formula error on occasion.  I know intellectually that it's a completely normal thing to do.  An IT colleague once told me that I was essentially doing coding, and no one can audit their own coding.  But that doesn't change the emotional and physiological response that I experience.  Maybe it should though.  Maybe part of growing as a person and making better choices is choosing how I respond to external stimuli.

One choice that I do feel very good about is how I respond externally to errors.  I pretty much always do three things:

1. Admit that I made an error;
2. Apologize for said error;
3. Communicate my plan to avoid making the same error in the future.

When others don't approach errors this same way, I tend to get pretty annoyed.  I know that's not really fair; other people don't have to make the same choices that I make.  But I would be much more forgiving if everyone swallowed their pride and issued a "mea culpa."  Though maybe that goes back to my desire to be perfect.  If I were ever able to achieve perfection, I'd probably just be annoyed with everyone else all the time.  Which would mean that I wasn't perfect, because I would be responding to external stimuli and blaming my choices on other's actions.  So thank goodness perfection isn't something that I'll ever have to worry about!

In keeping with my value of admitting my errors, I want to admit that I have inadvertently deleted some of the photos I've posted on this blog and now there's just this big empty space with a minus sign where there used to be a photo.  I had some pictures of things that I wanted to show folks, but that weren't keepsake photos, so I deleted them from my Google+ pictures, not realizing that would also delete them from the blog.  So I'm sorry that I did that, and from now on I will leave the pictures alone so they won't disappear.

Stormy view of the foothills during my evening walk taken with my camera phone