Mistakes

Photo Source: nkzs

There are things going on that we don't like to think about. One of these things is that at least 12 babies are given to the incorrect parents every day. These kids sometimes never find out the truth, but sometimes they do and this leads to even further complications as some of them try to get reunited with their natural parents after many years.

Thousands of people are given the wrong medical diagnosis every year in this country. If we multiply that by the amount of wrong diagnosis being given out all over the world we can see that this is a big problem. It is bad enough to get the wrong diagnosis, but then getting treated for it can kill you. Prescribing the wrong medicine is another problem. Wrong prescriptions are written every day. I remember one that my druggist caught. It was for an eye medication and the druggist said to me, "I hope this is not for your eyes". I said it was and he said the company made two medications with similar names, one for the eyes and one that would really cause problems if put in your eyes as it was for something else. I dumped that doctor.

Photo Source: MorgueFile

What do we think of when we think about NASA? Many of us think of an agency that employees some of the smartest people in the world. Some of these smart people have made some terrible mistakes. We know that they ordered a shuttle to launch when the company that made the boosters stated it was too cold for the seals and the shuttle blew up killing all aboard, but did you know that they have installed equipment backwards, lost probes and sent a telescope into space without completely testing it and the mirror had to be changed by an astronaut? In 2005 USA Today wrote an article that quoted a past NASA chief, Michael Griffin as saying that the space shuttle and International Space Station were both mistakes. Wow and this is what we have been spending almost all of NASA's budget on for decades.

Sometimes you just have to wonder what makes most criminals so dumb? A guy decided to rob his employer at night. He was on foot. He robbed the safe and went home unseen. He only lived a few blocks away. What he should have taken into consideration was the fact that it had snowed. The police followed the footprints right to his door. Another criminal decided to hold up a supermarket with a gun. There was only one problem, he somehow forget that the gun was not only not real, but it had a long wire hanging from the handle that plugged into a game machine. Not too slick my friend.

Photo Source: MorgueFile

A lot of mistakes seem to be made everyday in the criminal courtrooms of this country. We have been finding this out in the last few years, because of genetic matching. Even when people have been found innocent of a crime because their DNA didn't match, they are not always let out of jail right away. There are even cases where the release is being resisted by prosecutors. It seems that it is more important to some prosecutors to have winning numbers than to worry about innocent people who were convicted.

Humans are mistake prone, we all make them and we have to hope that the ones that we make do not do any harm and do not make us look too foolish. Douglas Corrigan was a famous American pilot. Corrigan became known as “Wrong Way” when instead of flying to Long Beach, California, he flew to Ireland. Now that is what I call a mistake. We keep trying to make computers work more like human brains, will they also become mistake prone in the future?

There always seems to be a politician who has made a dumb mistake. Some of these mistakes are in what they said afterward. David Dinkins former Mayor of New York City stated, “I haven’t committed a crime. What I did was fail to comply with the law.” Richard Allen, former National Security Adviser to President Reagan, when asked to explain gifts he was given for arranging a visit with Nancy Reagan by Japanese journalists stated, “I didn't accept it, I received it”. Richard Nixon said, “I was under medication when I made the decision not to burn the tapes.”

Celebrities have also made mistakes in what they have said. Sometimes it is just plain funny. Brooke Shields stated the following during a federal anti-smoking campaign, “Smoking kills. If you’re killed, you’ve lost a very important part of your life.” One basketball player stated, “I’ve never had major knee surgery on any other part of my body.” After being hit on the head by a baseball Dizzy Dean stated, “The doctors X-rayed my head and found nothing.”

When students take the SATs they rely on the fact that they will be marked correctly. What else can they do? An article published on NewsInferno states that one College Board admitted that hundreds of grading errors were made one year and they might not be able to repair the damage. Are mistakes being made on grading these and other tests? One school district provided incorrect graduation dates for some seniors, which stopped them from getting their college financial aid packages. We are talking about as many as 1,500 students.

Then there are all the mistakes by the military. Unfortunately some of these mistakes cost lives, such as ordering artillery fire, or bombing on a position that is manned by our own military. Hundreds, or maybe thousands of our own troops have been killed by friendly fire in every war. One soldIer was about to fire his automatic vehicle mounted weapon and when he did, the barrel fell off. It seems that it was not assembled correctly after maintenance. I have mentioned bombing one's own military, but in places like Iraq and Afghanistan we have bombed homes of civilians that have nothing to do with terrorism, they were mistakes.

As you can see mistakes happen in every field and every walk of life. About all we can hope for is that when they happen they are not too harmful to others.