I Make Mistakes. I Make Corrections.
Yesterday afternoon I heard from a customer who let me know that I’d shipped his package to the wrong address. As soon as I saw his email, I stopped what I was doing and looked into it. Sure enough, I made the mistake, and he had missed out on two bottles of Jungle Juice.
I make a lot of mistakes, actually, more than my family, friends, clients, and past co-workers realized. I’ve always told people that I’ve learned more from my mistakes than from the anything I do right. You can’t learn anything from being perfect all the time. Yes, I was one of those irritating people who made all A’s except for two B’s in college. That’s another story.
Then I joined the workforce all those years ago, and I found that “real life” was a lot more complex than the classroom. And I learned to welcome every mistake, however painful, admiting them immediately and then making corrections. Or even better, I learned to tell my boss, “Look, I made this mistake and I corrected it, and now the program is better than it was…” I got a reputation as a problem-solver and fix-it man, but all of that came with the knowledge that finding a solution sometimes meant trying ten different solutions — all of them wrong — and then trying the one that worked.
Fast forward years later, and now I work by myself, for myself, in my own home-office. And I’d made a mistake, and this customer didn’t get what he should have had.
Once I had a chance to figure out what happened, I contacted the customer, apologized, and told him I would send him replace product in the morning. He doesn’t know it yet, but I’ve sent him a little something extra in his package to emphasize how sorry I am and to make up for his trouble.
So all’s well that ends well. Until next time.