STUPID MISTAKES

One thing that I just can't come to terms with in life is my own 
capacity for making mistakes. I'm never going to get any sympathy 
from anyone for this because everyone else is keen to assure 
themselves of their own allowance for similar mistakes. But really 
there's a certain type of mistake, where I know exactly what to do, 
know exactly how important it is that I get it right, know exactly 
how I've stuffed it up before, and yet I'll make that mistake a 
hundred times, a thousand times, and can't do a bloody thing about 
it!

With fulfilling orders in particular, the triple checking of 
everything drives me nuts. I've worked out systems to make it as 
provable as practical that I've packaged the right thing to send to 
the right person, but still I'm capacble of eg. sending someone an 
empty box. Worst is when I discover on the last check a mistake 
that I just can't imagine making, which brings into question every 
other order I've done, and when there are ~50 orders all sealed up 
which need to be sent within a few hours... Gah!

It's the probability aspect that gets me. There is no action that I 
can conceive of doing which I can execute with 100% reliability. I 
can't be sure that I can type the next word correctly, sip from my 
drink without spilling it, or even stand up without stumbling over. 
I know that you as a fellow human like to accept these facts of 
life such that you don't even believe them to be a concern, but 
I'll tell you now they are a huge bloody failing!

I might be worse than most. But the effect whenever I make some 
dumb mistake is to propose a question that I always fail to answer 
to my own satisfaction: Why do I bother trying to achieve anything 
in life?

True it's melodramatically harsh, but I live with all these ideas, 
a few of which I try to execute, and the more things I try to do 
the more things I stuff up, and because I never stop stuffing up 
the same bloody things they all just accumulate. There's just a 
limit to the number of stuff-ups that you can cope with, and the 
more stuff one tries to achieve in life the more stuff-ups one has 
to deal with simultaniously, to the point where one just isn't 
getting anywhere at all.

So really I've lost my belief in actually achieving things I set 
out for. I still try, because there's only so long that I can sit 
on the couch doing nothing without feeling a natural need, but it's 
all a probabilities game as far as I'm concerned. For everything I 
try, I may or may not succeed, and the more things I try the more 
likely I am to fail at other things I've succeeded at before but am 
doing in conjunction.

These aren't necessarily complex things, right now I'm pissed off 
at myself for failing to buy bacon when I went shopping yesterday. 
It was crazy-busy in town on the day before Christmas eve and I was 
glad to drive away knowing I didn't have to go back until 
Wednesday. That night I discover that for the first time this year 
I've forgotten to put on the shopping list the one meat that I 
regularly buy (though in bulk, so it lasts me ~3 weeks, yes I'm 
very cheap). I refuse to go back into town with all the Christmas 
crazyness, so now I'm going to be stuck with incomplete meals for 
the next week. The one bloody week of the year that I couldn't 
allow for getting it wrong!

 - The Free Thinker.